by Tyler Smith
Of all the pop culture trends of the last twenty years, few have been more pervasive than zombies. These shambling, decaying creatures with a hunger for human flesh have been featured in movies, TV shows, and games. Zombies are so iconic it feels as though they’ve been around forever, as integral to the horror genre as vampires and werewolves. And those certain versions of zombies have indeed been around for over a century – usually related to voodoo lore- the idea of corpses coming to life and desomating the population is relatively new, beginning in earnest with George Romero’s groundbreaking 1968 film Night of the Living Dead.
The story is as simple as it is terrifying. A brother and sister visit their mother’s grave, only to be attacked by a mindless zombie that they mistook for a normal person. The sister gets away and runs to a nearby farmhouse, where she encounters other people who have had their own experiences with the walking dead. As more and more zombies begin to close in on the farm house, tensions between survivors rise and tempers flare, to the point that there are just as many threats inside the house as outside.
If this dynamic sounds familiar to you, it is because every single zombie movie or TV show has featured a story that is a slight variation of it. Romero’s film not only introduced us to the idea of modern zombies, but it arrived with its narrative structure and thematic elements fully formed. So much so, in fact, that future zombie stories would deviate from this formula at their own peril. The film also established the iconography that we still see in zombie movies to this day. Rotting flesh, boarded up buildings, and grasping hands are such common images in these movies that it would feel wrong if one did not incorporate them.
The film not only set the standard for future films in the genre, it also firmly established the zombie movie as fertile ground for political commentary and social satire. The idea of inner conflict, when there should be unity, in the midst of a global scourge is an evergreen concept, as we have learned in the last few years as reactions to the COVID pandemic quickly lead to worldwide hostility. Add to that subtle explorations of ingrained societal racism, and you have a film that is ripe for in depth analysis by film critics and social scientists alike.
Even deeper than these themes though is the universal underlying fear of death. Our main characters are terrorized by walking corpses, a none-too-vague metaphor for death itself. And like death, there is a feeling of inevitability in zombie movies. The zombies are slow moving, but patient. And no matter how fast we run, or how effectively we hide, the dead eventually catch up to us and we soon join their ranks; just one more corpse among billions.
It would be easy to write off a film as thematically robust as this as more interested in provocation than horror. But Romero wisely understands that the more truly frightening the film is, the more potent its themes. The ever present threat, along with its unknown origin, set an oppressive tone that any viewer of the film will not soon forget. That is the sign of a true horror masterpiece, which Night of the Living Dead undeniably is.
