The Night of the Living Dead: A Zombie Horror Lesson Plan
In these strange, apocalyptic times, I have decided to supplement our explorations of post-classical Hollywood cinema with an equally apocalyptic lesson plan. By looking at 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, I hope to historicize the popular zombie horror film genre. As a document of the first zombie horror film with a mass following, Night of the Living Dead laid the groundwork for genres and subcultures soon to find their niches within post-classical cinema: namely, midnight movies and blaxploitation cinema. A bona-fide midnight movie experience, Night of the Living Dead epitomizes the popular success of low-budget productions holding countercultural, transgressive themes. Within the post-classical period, Night of the Living Dead maps out both an anti-racist and anti-establishment ethos of the counterculture, as well as the new exhibition and distribution techniques of the midnight movie and inner-city exhibition.
My selection of primary and secondary sources elucidate the film’s thematic content, distribution history, and critical reception. I hope to explore the film’s original inner-city distribution plan as a pre-history to the blaxploitation cinema of the 1970s. Additionally, I will explore the film’s afterlife in the midnight movie circuit, noting the thirst for transgression in the underground and low-budget films that held a midnight movie popularity. Finally, I hope to show how the film’s main appeal in inner-city and underground networks—its transgressive violence and anti-racist cultural address—were either causes of critique, or indifference within the film’s initial critical reception.
Secondary Source #1: Hoberman, J. and Rosenbaum, Jonathan. Midnight Movies. 1st ed., Harper & Row, 1983.
Midnight Movies, as the title implies, historicizes the subculture of midnight movie screenings, from which Night of the Living Dead garnered much of its popularity. While the book focuses on multiple films in its narrative, George Romero’s film occupies the fifth chapter of the book, where it receives a central focus. In this chapter, Hoberman and Rosenbaum break down the film’s influences, George Romero’s history, the film’s critical reception, and its afterlife in the midnight movie circuit.
Because the midnight movie ethos is crucial to understanding the success of Night of the Living Dead, I have selected this book to place the film within the historiography of the midnight movie. Students should hopefully note the influences of the film as a general prehistory to transgressive midnight movies—Romero’s film responds to those of Herschell Gordon Lewis, who also comes under the influence of Russ Meyer. These filmmakers created equally sensationalist depictions of gore and sex, yet, Hoberman and Rosenbaum note a greater production quality and a “stronger, Hitchcockian dramatic narrative” in Living Dead (Hoberman and Rosenbaum 120).
Additionally, I hope that students will gain further insight into the radical, transgressive political and social content of midnight movies. Neighboring chapters of the book showcase the examples of Rocky Horror Picture Show, El Topo and Pink Flamingo, placing Night of the Living Dead within the ethos of anti-establishment politics. Hoberman and Rosenbaum argue that the film peaked in the midnight movie circuit in the early 1970s because it depicted “a word in which moral failure is the natural human condition,” popular sentiments as the counterculture began to fade (Hoberman and Rosenbaum 126). The film responds both directly and inadvertently to failing establishment institutions, popularizing its address among disaffected youthful midnight movie audiences.
Secondary Source #2: Heffernan, Kevin. “Inner-City Exhibition and the Genre Film: Distributing ‘Night of the Living Dead’ (1968).” Cinema Journal, vol. 41, no. 3, 2002, pp. 59–77.
Rather than focus on the film’s exhibition within the midnight movie circuit, this article by Kevin Hefferman addresses the film’s early inner-city exhibition techniques. Hefferman notes that “Many of the theaters that showed Night of the Living Dead were in the inner city and served a predominantly African American audience,” noting also that Living Dead was usually combined by Continental Distribution in a double feature package with a “race themed topical feature” (Hefferman 60-61). As a whole, Hefferman argues that Night of the Living Dead “ marks a crucial turning point in the history of the low-budget horror film… The absence of stars and the movie's marginal place in the network of 1968 horror-film production and distribution led the filmmakers to seek a particular type of product differentiation that emphasized graphic violence, bleak social commentary, and a downbeat ending” (Hefferman 66).
Part of the uniqueness of Night of the Living Dead is not only its midnight movie presentation, but also its intense distribution within the inner-city network. Appearing before the blaxploitation era of the 1970s, Night of the Living Dead nevertheless received a similar distribution strategy due to its black lead. Yet unlike later blaxploitation films, which emphasized a black protagonist battling and defeating a white system in their marketing techniques, Night of the Living Dead hardly features its black protagonist in its marketing campaign. I hope that students can trace how Night of the Living Dead in some ways acts as a precursor to popular cinema marketed towards primarily black audiences.
Secondary Source #3: “Zombie Capitalism: Night of the Living Debt.” Zombies, Migrants, and Queers: Race and Crisis Capitalism in Pop Culture, by CAMILLA FOJAS, University of Illinois Press, Urbana; Chicago; Springfield, 2017, pp. 60–81.
“Zombie Capitalism” puts Night of the Living Dead in conversation with later zombie horror films. Tracing the film’s anti-establishment themes across later films and television such as The Walking Dead and World War Z, Camilla Fojas poses the question of what the representations of a post-capitalist world through zombie films look like. Fojas argues “In the absence of money, the social system of capitalism persists through the multilayered and interconnected symbolic economies emblematized by the white U.S.-based heterosexual patriarchs” (Fojas 69).
I find this article compelling and include it for its analytical readings of race and gender within not just Night of the Living Dead, but zombie films at large. By asking what an apocalypse looks like, these films textually represent how race and gender function in end-of-times scenarios. Fojas’ text should push students to think about Night of the Living Dead’s ideological energy, comparing its anti-establishment themes with those of its successors. These conversations would hopefully raise critical questions about contemporary apocalyptic representations, bringing my lesson plan to a current-day relevance.
Primary Source #1: Romero, George. “Night of the Living Dead Theatrical Trailer.” Continental Distribution, 1968.
This is the first official trailer for Night of the Living Dead, released in 1968. In it, the images frequently cut from the title of the film, to images of zombies eating human flesh. An ominous male narrator announces the film as a “bizarre adventure in fear… an experience in shock, more shattering than your strangest nightmares.” Crucially, the trailer eschews any hints about the film’s plot or characters, instead just presenting images of zombie carnage
I include this primary source to illustrate the qualities marketed in the film’s promotional campaign. The trailer repeats the promise of an unprecedented freak show, unashamedly showcasing its gory scares. These promises of horror must have been satiating to audiences seeking new, thrilling highs of terror as a spectacle to attend in midnight movie screenings. The uncensored nature of the imagery shows little concern for any subtlety or restraint, making its cultural address clear: if you are seeking unparalleled scares, you are welcome, but if you are not up for the challenge, this film is probably not for you.
Equally worthy of discussion is not only what appears in the trailer, but what fails to appear. There are no indications of any meaningful plot or emotional connection to be made with protagonists. In fact, the protagonists themselves appear sparingly in the trailer. There are hardly any clues that the film’s leading protagonist is a black man, an aspect of this marketing campaign that sets it uniquely apart from later blaxploitation marketing tricks.
Primary Source #2: Beau. "Film Reviews: Night of the Living Dead'." Variety (Archive: 1905-2000), vol. 252, no. 9, Oct 16, 1968, pp. 6-6, 26.
This Variety “review” of Night of the Living Dead from 1968 reads less as a review and more as a full-scale takedown. Condemning the film’s “pornography of violence,” the author Beau claims that the film “sets a new low in box office opportunism.” Beau not only condemns the film on moral terms, he also does not spare the film’s formal aspects from critique: they represent “amateurism of the first order,” with “abysmally lit” photography, and a screenplay of “verbal banality.”
I include this telling piece of critical writing because it holistically illustrates the film’s earliest critical reception, showcasing how critics were left out of the film’s initial cultural address. This piece appears after Roger Ebert’s portrait of how traumatized children received the film in the theater he saw it in, which had been the first popular piece of writing on the film (Ebert). After Ebert’s piece (which he later maintained to have not been a real review, in a positive retrospective of the film), Variety and the New York Times published critical hit-pieces on the film. I find Vanity’s to be the most insulting of the three, the one that showcases the most critical disdain for the low-budget horror film.
Beau’s piece unabashedly combines both moral and formal critiques of George Romero’s film, further demonstrating the film’s loyalties to lie with the underground. In a crucial turn of phrase, Beau writes, “On no level is the unrelieved grossness of ‘Night of the Living Dead’ disguised by a feeble attempt at art or significance.” This particular sentence, combined with the aforementioned full scale moral and technical criticisms, should reveal to students a critical condescence towards films without “art or significance.” Students should also notice the invisibility of the film’s race-relations subtext to the critical audience, who were too aghast at the horrific imagery.
Primary Source #3: McKinnon, George. "Movies / 'Night for Living Dead' Reaches Cult Status." Boston Globe (1960-1988), Dec 03, 1971, pp. 36.
In this local article about the film scene in Boston in 1971, the author George McKinnon briefly discusses the emergence of the midnight movie phenomenon. He notes that the films seem to be most popular with students, and then continues to celebrate their vibrancy as a part of the local film scene. McKinnon writes, “the handsome new theater in Brookline Village has been jammed Friday midnights for several months for the most talked about of the recent horror films, ‘Night of the Living Dead.’ This film has reached cult status.”
Though the article is not strictly about Night of the Living Dead, I include it for its passing mention of the film as part of a growing midnight movie scene three years after its initial release. There is a fundamental shift in the film’s perception: from “amateurism of the first order” to a legitimated “cult status.” This achievement can be credited to the growth in popularity of the midnight movies. By now, students should notice that what had in 1968 initially confounded critics had, by 1971, made its popular culture niche of legitimacy within the midnight movie sphere.
Sequence Analysis 1: “Helen, get in the cellar!” 1:21:36 → 1:25:26
Night of the Living Dead reaches its climax of action in the infamous scene documented by Ebert. The scene starts with a final showdown between the two contesting male authority figures of the film, Ben and Harry Cooper. Harry, the bald white man dressed in white-collar middle class clothes, attempts to usurp Ben’s authority before this point, who not only is black but also does not retain patriarchal authority over an American nuclear family. As Ben is busy boarding up a window from zombies, Harry sees Ben’s gun lying on the floor and takes his chance, pointing it at Ben and ordering Helen to go down to the cellar, where their bitten daughter lies. Ben quickly subdues Harry and shoots him dead, signifying the death of the traditional white male authority. As Harry stumbles down to the cellar, followed by Helen, they are both graphically murdered and eaten alive by their undead daughter, completely disintegrating the American middle class nuclear family. It’s no wonder America found this scene particularly unnerving—it documents the counter-culture ethos of destroying normative American familial values, a sentiment undoubtedly popular within the midnight movie sphere.
Sequence Analysis 2: 1:29:16 → 1:34:06
After the climax of zombie violence of the past sequence, Ben remains the only man alive in the boarded-up farmhouse. The next morning starts with a quiet calm after the storm, as the authorities begin to regroup. They quickly, effectively shoot down all the remaining zombies surrounding the house, showcasing the brute strength of the American state apparatus. Yet, in a tragic, shocking twist, as Ben rises to see the approaching authorities after having survived the onslaught of zombies, he is shot dead by the police. They do not question once whether he is alive or a member of the undead—he is shot as per the orders of the superior officer, who says “Alright Vince, hit him in the head, right between the eyes.” This image of police brutality concludes the film, turning the efficient murder machine of the state apparatus from undead bodies to live, black bodies. Unquestionably racialized, this scene depicts a complete distrust in the morally failing American establishment at the time of Vietnam, a theme overlooked by the initial critical reception and likely shared within the underground.
