When There’s No More Room In Hell: Night of the Living Dead, A Love Letter
“They’re coming to get you, Barbaraaaa!”
Those words instilled in me a world of great terror but also a deep fascination with all things undead. The shambling, rotting corpses took center stage in the Romero cult classic and created a sub-genre akin to those of werewolves and vampires—both of which I enjoy thoroughly, but none so much as the insatiable horde of festering flesh. And so began my love of the film that changed my life: Night of the Living Dead.
The zombie horde became a cult classic when George Romero unleashed the film in 1968. It was not well-received in its time due to the social commentary behind the film (racial and political), but also for the rawness of it. Seeing humans consume other humans just doesn’t seem to sit well with most folks, especially during the era that the movie was released. The film had an incredibly small budget, but George Romero and John A. Russo enlisted the help of local talent from to create something that spawned films inspired by it for years to come. They also cast noteworthy actor Duane Jones as Ben, a Black man. Seeing a Black man in a leading role, at least in my young eyes, wasn’t commonplace. It wasn’t something that Romero did on purpose, he stated but he thought Jones was the best choice for the role. He was not wrong. Although the original film was great and earned Romero and his team a huge return on their investment, the 1990 version really kicked it off for me.
NOTLD ’90 was a remake of the original film with a few character changes that really appealed to me as a young person watching it for the first time. Directed by SFX extraordinaire Tom Savini, the remake kept the meat of the original screenplay by Romero and Russo, and to say that the ’90 version didn’t up the ante would be a great disservice to the film. The zombie makeup was much more realistic and the way they gnaw on movie magic meat left you feeling a bit queasy because it was so well done.
The ‘90 remake’s casting was also amazing, with the incomparable and iconic Tony Todd taking on the role that Duane Jones fleshed out expertly in the original and Barbara being played by Patricia Tallman. The new Barbara turned into a complete badass instead of the damsel in distress offered in 1968’s film, even changing the attire she donned to visit her mother’s gravesite into Uncle Regis’s overalls and shoes while touting a shotgun; she took control and didn’t let fear ruin her. The roles of the Coopers, Tom and Judy Rose, were cast pretty well, but Judy Rose and Tom left a lot to be desired, especially when they opted to try and help everyone off of the farm with a pickup truck. Let’s just say, things didn’t end well for those two, one of whom made a fatal mistake that left them nice and toasty for the flesh-eating fiends that surrounded them. The Coopers’ patriarch was just as ridiculous as he was in the first, but the youngest Cooper—the daughter—put an end to ama Cooper, who wanted nothing more than to let Ben lead and to find a doctor for her ailing child. Papa Cooper was too busy beefing with Ben to notice that his daughter had turned until it was too late.
In a rather sad turn of events, Ben and Cooper had it out in a brief gun fight, although it was Barbara who dealt the final blow to good ol’ Cooper in the end. Unfortunately for our guy Ben, he wasn’t given the same exact fate as he had in the first film—he was the only survivor in the original but was gunned down by a group of townsfolk even though he was still alive. In the remake, after succumbing to his wounds in the cellar, Ben became a part of the undead. This turn of events left Barbara alone to witness the townspeople using the zombies as target practice, ushering them into makeshift pens like pigs would be kept in. The lingering question left to hang in the air was, “are humans worth saving?”.
To say this movie had a profound effect on me is understating what this movie meant and still means to me, and also how it shaped my love for zombies in horror. It opened up the world of horror to me in a way that led me down a rabbit hole of horror films and horror icons. It holds a fond place in my heart, as it was the first horror movie that my grandmother introduced me to that I can remember. It also led to my wanting to consume as many zombie stories and films as I could. I went on to watch more Romero films centered around zombies—even The Crazies, which is definitely zombie-adjacent. George Romero became my favorite go-to for all things zombies. And although there may be many zombie films out there, none will have my heart and my attention like f Night of the Living Dead.
