Review - George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead

Famed horror auteur George A. Romero's seminal classic, Night of the Living Dead, revolutionized the genre with its gritty and realistic portrayal of a small band of people fighting to outlive a zombie attack in a rural farmhouse. However the film provided more than just an aesthetic revitalization to horror; it proved that even gruesome filmmaking can contain biting social commentary. As a product of the late 1960s, the film had a lot to work with; the highly divisive Vietnam War was in full swing, both Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr and Malcolm X had been assassinated, and new era feminism was beginning to emerge. The film, though, is heavily, perhaps even primarily, influenced by the rise of the counter culture and disintegration of the nuclear family.

The main thrust of Romero's film is this concept of societal upheaval and unrest. The film echoes the decade in which it is based, portraying a clash for dominance between the living dead and the human population (in reality it was the youth counter culture vs. the remnants of fifties conformity). No other scene encapsulates this conflict better than the death of Mr. and Mrs. Cooper; in a truly terrifying (symbolically and otherwise) image, young Karen literally consumes her dead father before repeatedly stabbing her mother. If one takes the Coopers as representative of the traditional middle-class American family, the scene takes on multiple meanings. It simultaneously displays the very "death" of this older generation who are unable to accept the social changes of the late 1960s, as well as the deterioration of the traditional nuclear family itself. The film also shows other signs of the nuclear family under attack: at the beginning the brother and sister (Johnny and Barbara) bicker continuously, and Johnny is clearly annoyed that he has to spend a whole day visiting his father's grave. He goes so far as to remark that they "ought to move mother out here or the grave out to Pittsburgh", and, upon viewing the headstone decoration, he says that he doesn't even remember his father or what he looked like. This is hardly a "Leave It to Beaver"-esque conversation; Johnny appears to have little respect for either of his parents, let alone his sister whom he bickers with and taunts. In fact, he treats the entire process as an imposition, complaining about his lack of sleep due to the time change, the 6 hour drive, and even the cost of the grave decoration. Romero also makes the character fairly anti-religious; he chides Barbara for praying at the grave (he says it belongs solely "in church") and states that there really isn't a point in him going to church anymore. This character, though not reminiscent of the hippie counter culture, does pose a threat to the concept of the nuclear family: he doesn't care much for his parents, and rejects the traditional concept of church and religion.

Finally if one views the zombies as symbolic of the counter culture movement, and their violence as a mirror of the "attack" of the hippie liberalism on traditional Puritan sensibilities, the fact that the seemingly normal, white middle-class characters die at their hands is significant. Romero effectively says that the concept of the nuclear family, at least as it was known up until the fifties and early sixties, was dead.