Why ‘Night of the Living Dead’ is still scary

56 years on, Romero’s zombies remain terrifying.

A few weeks back, my son asked if I could show him a “real” scary movie. That’s not an easy request with a 12-year-old. He’s a bit too young for anything R-rated and gory (even though I was sneaking downstairs to watch Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street at his age). We’ve had a bit of success with some horror-hybrids like Goosebumps, The Mummy and Gremlins (one of the biggest hits). But I could tell that he was really hoping for something without comedy; truth be told, I think he was hoping I would okay It…but, no. 

Instead, I chose George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. I put it at #3 on my list of scariest movies a few weeks ago, and it had been a while since I’d last watched it. Zombies are still pretty big in pop culture – Mickey has never seen The Walking Dead or a true zombie movie, but he’s aware of them, and even went as a zombie football player for Halloween a few years ago, so I thought it might be good for him to get in at the ground floor. Plus, I had a hunch this one might actually rattle him a bit. 

We settled in after his baseball game on a recent Saturday night and I pulled the movie up on the Criterion Channel (because of its weird rights issues, it’s available on multiple platforms, but Criterion’s transfer is the best I’ve ever seen this movie look). We started the movie, and about 30 minutes in, as Ben boarded up the farmhouse, my son asked “Dad, does this move ever get scary?” 

He did not ask that question again. 

Almost 60 years after its debut, Night of the Living Dead is still the king of the zombie subgenre, a no-nonsense horror movie that transcends its premise to become a haunting tale of social collapse. Many of the choices Romero made out of budget necessities – using 35mm black-and-white film instead of color, employing a cast of largely untested actors, limiting the film to one contained location – are the very things that help it seep under the skin and terrify new generations. There’ve been other zombie films – good ones, many of which were made by Romero – but none pack the pure existential horror and sense of the world falling apart as well as the original. 

I think much of that is due to the way the movie tricks its audience into expecting cheesy B-movie fun instead of something stark and horrifying. Night of the Living Dead is the kind of nonsensical title that exploitation studios would slap on a film because it was eye-catching on a marquee. It’s overwrought, a bit silly. And, indeed, the movie’s first scares feel like the kind of low-budget schlock we might expect from sci-fi and horror of that time. The first zombie (“ghouls,” as they’re called here) is just a random dude walking through the cemetery, and although he takes down Barbara’s brother, their fight is clumsy (Johnny dies when he falls and smacks his head on a tombstone). Likewise, our earliest glimpses of other ghouls are just normal folk standing around aimlessly in the woods outside the farmhouse where the characters take refuge. Why should I be scared of normal folk? 

But it's that normalcy – and the way that an isolated non-threat becomes deadly in a mob – that provides Night of the Living Dead with its suffocating terror. Years back, around the release of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later and Zack Snyder’s remake of Dawn of the Dead, there was the suggestion the slow-moving zombies were no longer scary. Boyle and Snyder ramped up the speed – and yes, 28 Days Later’s rage-fueled monsters are not technically zombies – and gave us a full-speed threat. And while I think there’s some effectiveness in that, as well as a thematic fit to our hot-take, ever-angry culture, by the time Shaun of the Dead and The Walking Dead took to the screens, we once again accepted that zombies shuffled, and that was still scary. 

The fear of Night of the Living Dead isn’t that one isolated threat is going to kill someone; you can easily stop a zombie by shooting them, decapitating them or smashing their head with a rock. But as the film goes on and two or three ghouls turn into a handful, then a dozen, and then more, it becomes overwhelming. The woods are soon choked with ghouls, and even if you get past them, it’s clear that the cities have been overrun. Romero’s shots of hands shooting through every boarded up window and ghouls absently shuffling along by cars and in the woods surrounding the house constantly remind us that the indoors won’t be safe for long. You can outrun a mob of fast-paced zombies and have a moment of respite; it’s more terrifying to consider being completely overwhelmed by the mob. And this fear of the suffocating herd is only more terrifying in an age of social media groupthink and mob anger. 

Working on an ultra-low budget, Romero doesn’t have the resources for the mass chaos he’d employ in his sequels. With his characters secluded in one location, he had to find innovative ways to build out his world and convey the scope of the threat. He turns, instead, to more grounded means, conveying the unfolding situation via radio and TV. For an audience that was watching the Vietnam War and riots unfold on the nightly news, the use of mass media brought an eerie verisimilitude. And while the sight of zombies chowing down on flesh later in the film has a visceral power, for me, it’s the calmness of the TV anchors talking about waves of mass murder, assailants devouring their victims, and matter-of-factly telling people to burn the bodies and leave them in the street that takes Night of the Living Dead from being a fun, spooky movie to something more unsettling. We’ve all had moments where the news being reported is too surreal for our minds to comprehend; Romero weaponizes the media's ability to filter horror to the masses, and it’s why nearly every zombie since has incorporated scenes of TV news into montages of the world falling apart. 

Night of the Living Dead wasn’t the first movie to show extreme gore – you could find blood and guts in brilliant technicolor in the Hammer films or movies like Blood Feast. But there’s something about the matter-of-factness of Night’s carnage, delivered in stark black and white. There aren’t obviously fake sequences of geysers of bright red blood spewing across the screen; but there are zombies chomping down on what are very obviously real pieces of meat (donated by a local butcher). Ghouls are munching down on what appear to be intestines, and the fun, B-movie vibe of the movie gives way to something surreal and nauseating. Back in 1968, Roger Ebert called this out in his review, writing: “The kids in the audience were stunned. There was almost complete silence. The movie had stopped being delightfully scary about halfway through, and had become unexpectedly terrifying." 

I’ve seen much gorier films, but Night of the Living Dead is the one that still unsettles me. Much of that comes from expectation. My son rolled his eyes when he heard we were watching a 56-year-old black-and-white movie; we associate older movies, especially in black and white, with being intense “for their time,” but tame by today’s standards. It feels transgressive when a movie we think of as coming from a more naive time suddenly breaks that promise, showing us imagery like that. My son certainly didn’t expect a sick little girl to come back to life, chomp down on her father and then stab her mother with a trowel, Romero showing us every impact. Sure, it’s no Terrifier or even It in terms of what we see; but the atmosphere of dread and the unrelenting pace with with the film’s back half unfolds give it a power that few modern horror films match. 

And then there’s the film’s bleaker-than-bleak ending. There’s no pretense of artistry or careful framing when the house is suddenly overrun by ghouls. My son gasped as Barbara was pulled away by her zombified brother, and the doors burst open, bringing in a horde of undead threats. It’s chaos and it’s overwhelming, and there’s only a brief respite when Ben gets enough shots out of his gun to force the zombies out of the house. But even that isn’t a happy ending, as Romero sends us out on an even crueler trick. We’re given a scene meant to reassure us that the worst is over; roving teams have rounded up the zombies and are cleaning up the mess. But Ben barely gets to walk across the living room when one of the men sees him and, fearing a threat, puts a bullet in his head. 

Much has been written about the social politics of that ending, and they would have been impossible to ignore in the racially charged atmosphere of that time (as they remain impossible to ignore). Romero denied any intentionally and said he cast Duane Jones because he was the best actor (which is also true). But there’s no way Romero didn’t understand the power of his visuals and use them to imbue social commentary in his horror story; his career was filled with horror films that made a point. And it’s a button that ends the movie on a note that while the most outlandish horror might be over, real evil is still out there.

Watching it in a post-pandemic era, it also taps into modern fears about whether we hold together in a crisis and if it’s ever safe to leave the home. During the lockdown days, it was probably easy to relate to a movie where people boarded themselves in their homes against a threat. But what was more disturbing was the mob behavior we saw during and after the lockdowns, in the violence over the racial unrest and the insurrection on Jan. 6. And this film’s depiction of zombies without much (or any) makeup packs a punch Romero’s sequels didn’t; in the last 10 years, too many of us have seen people we love and respect reveal the monster under their skin in their political views, racial outlooks and embracing conspiracies. The enduring power of Night of the Living Dead is the way that normal, kind people become faceless, unrelenting monsters when they join the mob. 

My son was pretty rattled after watching the movie (but never fear; he slept fine and asked if he could watch it again). Me? I was glad to see that several years since my first viewing, Romero’s film has lost none of its impact. It’s still one of the scariest movies ever made.