Review #115: Night of the Living Dead (1968)

This review was originally written in October 2021.

October 2021 Movie Review #1- Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Full disclosure: I have never seen any of the Living Dead movies before. Or any of the Dead movies, except for the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead. All I've seen are movies that parody it, mimic it, or reference it. I've heard quotes from this film all over the place, I've seen references, and I thought I had a pretty good idea what I was going to be seeing before I went in. However, I can't say it was what I expected!

The first thing I want to say is that the beginning of this movie definitely got things going way faster than I thought it would. If you cut out the five minutes of a car driving (as is common in much older films, so they could get all of the credits out before the action started) there's something like two minutes of screen time before the first zombie shows up. It happened so fast, I thought it was a joke (as a modern movie would do, playing with your expectations by subverting them). But as the movie that popularized the subgenre, Night of the Living Dead put the car into drive almost immediately!

...Unfortunately, it then slammed on the brakes, hard. I expected this movie to be fairly slow-paced and quiet (as many older/classic horror films tend to be by today's standards) and first few minutes aside, I was absolutely right. The first half of this film has almost nothing of substance to it. A woman is attacked by zombies, runs away to a random house nearby, runs into a random guy, and then the two of them just sort of hang out for like 45 minutes until some other people just happen to also be nearby and then something that could be called "plot" happens. For the first half of the film, there is basically no dialogue- there's plenty of monologue, with characters just talking to or about themselves for a long time, and a radio broadcast setting the atmosphere for the zombie attack, but in a modern film this entire half of the runtime could be summarized in like five minutes. That doesn't necessarily mean modern films are better- there is definitely something to be said about a slower pace for media- but my modern sensibilities left me watching the clock and wondering when anything else was going to happen.

That's not to say that the first half of the film is bad. It really isn't. In fact, I'd say it's one of the most accurate zombie films I've ever seen, as the characters do what I feel actual people would do- they're looking for tools, barricading themselves in a safe place, and talking to pass the time and keep their sanity. So that was definitely appreciated. As more characters got introduced, I actually feel like the movie got a little bit less good for much of the second half- a lot of the dialogue seemed improvised, or maybe just hastily-written, and the characters didn't feel very realized. This movie carries a lot of the hallmarks of a low-budget horror flick, for better and for worse.

I definitely appreciate that this was the movie that really started everything, and I can understand why it attracted so many followers and why it's so well-regarded today. However, I think it just doesn't quite hold up against modern cinema, and I'm eager to see how the series evolved as time went on!

Oh, one more quick thing- why did nobody ever tell me that in this film, the film that jump-started the zombie subgenre, the stated reason for the zombie apocalypse IS SPACE RADIATION FROM VENUS? 36 years of life and this is the first I'm ever hearing this.

Overall Rating: 4/10 Exploding Trucks

Most Memorable Quote: "They're coming to get you, Barbra!"