They’re coming to get you Barbra…A retrospective look at Romero’s original Dead trilogy
Written by: Frank Acosta
1/19/2017, 09:37a
Tweet to: @Slickster_Mag
We all can relate to having lost someone. So if you will imagine yourself visiting the cemetery to pay respects to a lost loved someone with your brother. The sky is a crisp blue, the birds are singing, and everything in the world (apart from the deceased around you) is just right. In the distance, you see a shambling figure heading in your direction but you think nothing of it. You’re here to pay respects and ignore the bickering petty annoyances your brother is spewing out.
Suddenly, in the blink of an eye, in the shortness of a breath, you’re looking down at your brother’s corpse. The shambling man has attacked you, and within the state of fighting him off, your brother has slammed his head against a gravestone. Now, if you will, imagine yourself on the set of a low budget independently funded horror film and this is your first scene. Whether you have realized it or not, you have just paved the way for a dramatic change in the horror film. This is George Andrew Romero’s tale of unexpected success with the one movie that has changed the face of an entire genre.
With the upcoming mid-season start of AMC’s The Walking Dead, let’s have a look back at what started the zombie movement. In 1968, The Latent Image turned Image Ten production team all pitched in $600.00 dollars to fund a low-budget horror film. That film they entitled Night of the Flesh Eaters (later changed to Night of the Living Dead), and it was a simple story of a group of survivors held up in a barn as cannibalistic monsters attacked them. Below the surface, however, social commentary on how the state the world was in was injected into almost every frame. Our hero, Ben (Duane Jones), an African American actor who they chose simply because “he was the best actor out of all of us,” became the national symbol of how minorities were being treated in the 1960’s.
Actor Duane Jones defends himself from hordes of zombies in the original George Romero film, Night of The Living Dead.Our leading lady, Barbra (Judith O’Dea), in her catatonic state was the voice, or void, if you will, of the ignorance people had to the real issues happening at home; the Vietnam War. Our antagonist, Harry Cooper (Karl Hardman), was the inability to cope with fellow strangers in times of peril, thus bringing down their ability to work together. The remaining cast, Harry’s wife, Helen (Marilyn Eastman), and young couple in love, Tom (Keith Wayne) and Judy (Judith Riley), were all more followers than leaders. Harry and Helen’s daughter, Karen (Kyra Schon), for the most part is in a coma after “being bitten by one of those things.” The film showcased some of the most disturbing images ever portrayed on film such as monsters devouring on humans, gratuitous violence, and perhaps shockingly the most, an African American man hitting a woman across the face, AKA “the punch.”
Upon finding a television set, they begin to uncover the reason why these attacks are happening and reciting one of many iconic phrases within this movie, “It has been established that persons who have recently died have been returning to life and committing acts of murder. The unburied dead have been coming back to life and seeking human victims.” As the night goes on, more zombies slowly approach the farmhouse and our survivors’ inability to work together leads to their ultimate downfall with the young couple dying first in an explosion after a gas run falls apart. Ben is trapped outside with the monsters as he fights off a few while trying to gain entrance back into the farmhouse. While Harry has cowardly left him to his own will, Ben forces his way in, re-barricades the door (with Harry’s help) and initiates a fight with him.
Things come to a calm for a while but the storm is only minutes away. The power goes out and the monsters more aggressively begin to pound harder and harder on the windows, finally managing to bring them down. Amidst the battle, Harry gains the only gun and orders his wife to the cellar. Before she can move, Ben wrestles the gun out of Harry’s hands and shoots him point blank in the stomach. He retreats to the basement and dies from his wound.
The monsters, now in full force and bigger in numbers, begin to tear down the boards from windows and doors. Barbra snaps out of it and helps out Ben who is desperately trying to push them back. Helen escapes the clutches of the monsters and heads downstairs to see her daughter feeding on her husband. Shocked, she can only stand in horror as she is stabbed to death with a trowel by her newly-turned daughter. Upstairs, Ben and Barbra try desperately to fight them back but Barbra is left stunned, as is the audience, when her own brother, now turned, is the one who pulls her through the window and into the arms of the cannibals.
Defeated and over run, Ben retreats to the basement. He sees the bodies of the Coopers and slowly they begin to wake up, hungry for flesh. He disposes of them and simply waits as the sounds upstairs leave him, and us, with a sense of despair, loss, and decimation. Morning comes and the noise have ceased, the monsters nowhere to be seen. Cautiously, he returns upstairs and while slowly investigating the scene, is shot straight through the eyes by the sheriff and his pose…mistaking him for one of the undead.
In 1978, George Romero returned to show us the dawn.
Dawn of the Dead can be called a sequel, but most would consider it a stand-alone story set within the same universe. As society breaks down, reporter Francine Parker (Gaylen Ross) and pilot Stephen Andrews (David Emgee) reel in the news of anarchy and chaos within their news station as a doctor and a reporter argue over the epidemic spreading across the nation.