Night of the Living Dead George A. Romero

Development and pre-production

George Romero embarked upon his career in the film industry while attending Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.[39] He directed and produced television commercials and industrial films for The Latent Image, a company he co-founded with his friend Russell Streiner.[40] The Latent Image started small, but after producing a high-budget Calgon commercial spoofing Fantastic Voyage (1966), Romero felt that The Latent Image had the experience and equipment to produce a feature film.[38] They wanted to capitalize on the film industry's "thirst for the bizarre", according to Romero.[41] He, Streiner, and John A. Russo contacted Karl Hardman and Marilyn Eastman, president, and vice president respectively, of a Pittsburgh-based industrial film firm called Hardman Associates, Inc. The Latent Image pitched their idea for a then-untitled horror film.[42]

These discussions led to the creation of Image Ten, a production company chartered to produce a single feature film. The initial budget was $6,000;[12] each member of the production company invested $600 for a share of the profits.[43][b] Ten more investors contributed another $6,000, but this was still insufficient.[44] Production stopped multiple times during filming while Romero used early footage to persuade additional investors.[45] Image Ten eventually raised approximately $114,000 for the budget ($999,000 today).[46][44]

Writing

The script was co-written by Russo and Romero. They abandoned an early horror comedy concept about adolescent aliens,[47] after realizing they would not have the budget to create a convincing spaceship.[48] Russo proposed a more constrained narrative where a young man runs away from home and discovers aliens harvesting human corpses for food in a cemetery.[49][50] Romero combined this idea with an unpublished short story about flesh-eating ghouls,[51] and they began filming with an incomplete script.[45][47] According to Russo, the screenplay written prior to filming only covered events up to the emergence of the Cooper family.[52] Russo completed the script while filming and Romero later expanded the final pages of his short story into the sequels Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the Dead (1985).[53]

Romero drew inspiration from Richard Matheson's I Am Legend (1954),[54][c] a horror novel about a plague that ravages a futuristic Los Angeles. The infected in I Am Legend become vampire-like creatures and prey on the uninfected.[55][44][56] Matheson described Romero's interpretation as "kind of cornball",[57] and more theft than homage.[58] In an interview, Romero contrasted Night of the Living Dead with I Am Legend. He explained that Matheson wrote about the aftermath of a complete global upheaval; Romero wanted to explore how people would respond to that kind of disaster as it developed.[59]

Much of the dialogue was altered, rewritten, or improvised by the cast.[60] Lead actress Judith O'Dea told an interviewer, "I don't know if there was an actual working script! We would go over what basically had to be done, then just did it the way we each felt it should be done".[18] One example offered by O'Dea concerns a scene where Barbra tells Ben about Johnny's death. O'Dea said that the script vaguely had Barbra talk about riding in the car with Johnny before they were attacked. She described Barbra's dialogue for the scene as entirely improv.[61] Eastman modified the scenes written for Helen and Harry Cooper in the cellar.[42] Karl Hardman attributed Ben's lines to lead actor Duane Jones. Ben was an uneducated truck driver in the script until Jones began to rewrite his character.[62][42]

The lead role was initially written for a white actor, but upon casting black actor Duane Jones, Romero intentionally did not alter the script to reflect this.[63] The film appeared in theaters at a time when very few black actors played leading roles. The rare exceptions, like the consciously black heroes played by Sidney Poitier, were written as subservient to make those characters palatable to white audiences.[64][65] Asked in 2013 if he took inspiration from the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in the same year that the movie was made, Romero responded in the negative, noting that he only heard about the shooting when he was on his way to find distribution for the finished film.[63]

Filming

Principal photography

The small budget dictated much of the production process.[42][66] Scenes were filmed near Evans City, Pennsylvania, 30 miles (48 km) north of Pittsburgh in rural Butler County;[67] the opening sequence was shot at the Evans City Cemetery on Franklin Road, south of the borough.[68][d] Lacking the money to build or purchase a house for the main set, the filmmakers rented a nearby farmhouse scheduled for demolition. Though it lacked running water, some crew members slept there during the shooting, taking baths in a nearby creek.[71] The building's neglected cellar was not a viable location for filming, so the few basement scenes were shot beneath The Latent Image offices.[72] The basement door shown in the film was cut into a wall by the production team and led nowhere.[73]

Props and special effects were simple and limited by the budget. The blood, for example, was Bosco Chocolate Syrup drizzled over cast members' bodies.[74] The human flesh consumed by ghouls consisted of meat and offal donated by an investor's butcher shop.[75][76] Zombie makeup varied during the film. Initially, makeup was limited to white skin with blackened eyes. As filming progressed, mortician's wax simulated wounds and decaying flesh.[77] Filming took place between July 1967 and January 1968 under various titles. Work began under the generic working title Monster Flick, was changed to Night of Anubis after Romero's short story that provided the basis for the script, and was completed as Night of the Flesh Eaters, a title not used in the final release due to a potential conflict with a similarly named film.[78][79][80] The small budget led Romero to shoot on 35 mm black-and-white film. The completed film ultimately benefited from the decision, as film historian Joseph Maddrey describes the black-and-white filming as "guerrilla-style", resembling "the unflinching authority of a wartime newsreel". He found the exploitation film to resemble a documentary on social instability.[81]

Directing

Night of the Living Dead was the first feature-length film directed by George A. Romero. His initial work involved filming advertisements, industrial films, and shorts for Pittsburgh public broadcaster WQED's children's series Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.[82][83][84] Romero's decision to direct Night of the Living Dead launched his career as a horror director. He took the helm of the sequels as well as Season of the Witch (1972), The Crazies (1973), Martin (1978), Creepshow (1982) and The Dark Half (1993).[85][86] Critics saw the influence of the horror and science-fiction films of the 1950s in Romero's directorial style. Stephen Paul Miller, for instance, witnessed "a revival of fifties schlock shock ... and the army general's television discussion of military operations in the film echoes the often inevitable calling-in of the army in fifties horror films". Miller admits that "Night of the Living Dead takes greater relish in mocking these military operations through the general's pompous demeanor" and the government's inability to source the zombie epidemic or protect the citizenry.[87] Romero described the film's intended mood as a downward arc from near hopelessness to complete tragedy. Film historian Carl Royer praised the film's sophistication—especially considering Romero's limited experience—and noted the use of chiaroscuro (film noir style) lighting to create a mood of increasing alienation.[88]

While some critics dismissed Romero's film because of the graphic scenes, writer R. H. W. Dillard claimed that the "open-eyed detailing" of taboo heightened the film's success. He asked, "What girl has not, at one time or another, wished to kill her mother? And Karen, in the film, offers a particularly vivid opportunity to commit the forbidden deed vicariously."[89] Romero featured social taboos as key themes, especially cannibalism. Film historian Robin Wood interprets the flesh-eating scenes of Night of the Living Dead as a late-1960s critique of American capitalism. Wood argues that the zombies' consumption of people represents the logical endpoint of human interactions under capitalism.[90]

Post-production

Members of Image Ten were involved in filming and post-production, participating in loading camera magazines, gaffing, constructing props, recording sounds and editing.[91] Production stills were shot and printed by Karl Hardman, assisted by a "production line" of other cast members.[42] Upon completion of post-production, Image Ten found it difficult to secure a distributor willing to show the film with the gruesome scenes intact. Columbia rejected the film for its lack of color, and American International Pictures declined after requests to soften it and re-shoot the final scene were rejected by producers.[45] The Walter Reade Organization agreed to show the film uncensored but changed the title from Night of the Flesh Eaters to Night of the Living Dead because of an existing film with a similar title. While changing the title, the copyright notice was accidentally deleted from the early releases of the film.[9][92]

Soundtrack

The film's music consisted of existing pieces that were mixed or modified for the film. Much of the soundtrack had been used by previous films.[e] Romero selected tracks from the Hi-Q music library, and Hardman cut them to match the scenes and augmented them with electronic effects.[94][42] A soundtrack album featuring music and dialogue cues from the film was compiled and released on LP by Varèse Sarabande in 1982. In 2008, the recording group 400 Lonely Things released the album Tonight of the Living Dead, an instrumental album with music and sounds sampled from the 1968 film.[95]