Review by C.J. Bunce
It took nearly six decades but fans of horror and zombie movies at last get a deep dive into the making of the modern horror classic that launched a thousand other horror classics. Night of the Living Dead — The Official Story of the Film is available this week for the first time, a hardcover full of cast and crew interviews and behind the scenes photographs, all chronicling George A. Romero and John A. Russo’s indie film from idea to the final edit and its legacy (order it now here at Amazon). Film writer Simon Braund chalks up another comprehensive look at a film we never thought we’d see covered this way so many years later. And it’s not just for horror fans. As Braund takes readers through the unusual route the film was made, he practically paints a roadmap for any group of friends to take an idea and make it into a movie on a low budget.
Night of the Living Dead — The Official Story of the Film is a tale of visionaries and a big group of friends and clients who agreed to dress up in gore makeup to help them get their vision into theaters. And it’s the story of one man’s journey to become the godfather of the zombie genre. Let’s dig into this book.
Initially called Night of the Flesh Eaters, the zombie moniker wasn’t there at the beginning. Romero and Russo saw the monsters of their story as a rise of the “recently deceased.” From the first chapter you see all these average looking, middle class twenty-somethings posing in photographs and they look like anyone, certainly not like John Carpenter and his circle of later horror crew members that could double for zombies themselves. No, these filmmakers all looked like the engineers at NASA in the movie Apollo 13 and The Right Stuff. You really get the feel the project to make the movie was their Citizen Kane, only the answer to everything was not to do too much of anything–except when it came to makeup and gore, supplied by cheap dime store materials and (ack!) donated animal intestines from a butcher friend. Thanks to the early decision to use black and white film, they could use chocolate syrup for all the blood. Yes, the volunteer cast members who were the undead actually had all this nastiness in their mouths as they pretended to eat the flesh of the undead. Blech! All for the sake of cinema!
Readers will see pages of Romero’s script, including his hand-written notations. After what seems like a traditional post-production process, the process to get the film distributed had some ups and downs. Columbia Pictures initially seemed interested, then backed down. The thought shared in the book is that the studio was wary of releasing a film with a Black actor as the lead so close to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. The writers made clear that the script didn’t specify the race for any character, but that Duane Jones was just the right person for the role of Ben. But the surprise ending that focuses on Ben’s heroism followed by the acts of the local townspeople added a political layer to the film that still resonates with viewers. Braund references Roger Ebert (who initially didn’t endorse the movie), Stephen King, and Quentin Tarantino, who embrace the film for different reasons.
The book discusses the reception of the film across different regions of the country. Ebert’s initial review noted how the audience was shown in a classic monster movie theater screening full of little kids dropped off by their parents, sitting alone and crying. This was before the ratings system, so of course movie theaters, distributors, and audiences weren’t ready for what was coming to their town. Taboos were faced head on in the movie and even breached, the way Russo and Romero depicted a child as a zombie may have been the beginning of creepy little girls in horror. You can see the twins from The Shining came straight from the poster girl for the movie.
In most “making of” books, you’d find a chapter on the location scouts tracking down all the places to film. That’s here, and it’s like none you’ve read about before. One of the locations included the U.S. Capitol grounds in Washington, DC, but the key set was the farmhouse where the star characters, the strangers, made their final stand against both monsters of fantasy and monsters of 1960s racism. That farmhouse ended up available to them at no cost–it was going to be torn down soon anyway, so they had carte blanche to tear it apart for the action footage. And it just so happened to be close to a cemetery, which provided the setting for the opening sequence.
Added fun includes detailed end notes (including the brand of chocolate syrup they used), notes on sequels, and unofficial spin-offs, as well as colorized versions and a remastered edition. For such a small production Braund was able to assemble so much contemporary ephemera from the production, the premiere, movie still cards, posters, and lots more. If you’re looking for photos of the makeups and early body horror (pretty much PG stuff in this century) you’ll find that in the book, too.
The Poseidon Adventure. Prince of Darkness. 28 Days Later. The Happening. Shaun of the Dead. The Walking Dead. Get Out. Last year I reviewed Night of the Living Dead–The Official Novelization here at borg, and it reminded me of how many movies have borrowed from or built upon Night of the Living Dead. In this book you’ll learn about the influences that fed into this production. The film mirrors the framework of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds in its depiction of boarding up a house to fend off the outside threat, and the shock value of revealing the earlier victims. It’s the same feeling evoked later in The Poseidon Adventure as the passengers were trapped–like these unrelated people trapped inside the farmhouse–only their threat was a sea of water. When you see Alice Cooper among the street zombies outside the building in John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness, you’re reminded of the staring, lifeless threat surrounding that farmhouse. And the use of the radio to share updates in the national threat is a direct callback to Orson Welles’ radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds. Virtually any thriller where people were stranded and trying to defend themselves from some kind of monstrous onslaught–all fed into the story of a group of disparate and desperate people in a rural town trying to fend off the flesh-eating, shambling undead.
It’s a love letter of sorts to the small-town contributors around Pittsburgh who worked on the film, and the fandom that exists to this day, and a surprising look at a movie you’d never guess was made the way it was. Fans of horror, zombies, and Midcentury filmmaking won’t want to pass this up. Get your copy of Night of the Living Dead — The Official Story of the Film now here at Amazon. It’s one of the year’s best nonfiction reads.
