Romero revolutionized the horror film genre with Night of the Living Dead; according to Almar Haflidason of the BBC, the film represented "a new dawn in horror film-making".[198] The film ushered in the splatter film subgenre. Earlier horror films had largely involved rubber masks, costumes, cardboard sets, and mysterious figures lurking in the shadows. They were set in locations far removed from rural and suburban America.[199] Romero revealed the power behind exploitation and setting horror in ordinary, unexceptional locations and offered a template for making an effective film on a small budget.[200] Night spawned countless imitators in cinema, television, and video gaming.[7] According to author Barry Keith Grant, the slasher films of the 1970s and 1980s such as John Carpenter's Halloween (1978), Sean S. Cunningham's Friday the 13th (1980), and Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) are indebted to Romero's use of gore in a familiar setting.[201]
The film is regarded as one of the launching pads for the modern zombie movie,[202] and effectively redefined the "zombie".[203] Before the film's release, the term "zombie" described a concept from Haitian folklore whereby a bokor could reanimate a corpse into an insensate slave.[204] Early zombie films like White Zombie (1932) combined this with racial and postcolonial anxieties.[205] Romero never used the word "zombie" in the 1968 film or its script—using instead, ghoul—because he said that his flesh-eaters were something new.[21][206][207][63] The term "zombie" was retroactively applied to Night after its cannibalistic undead became the dominant zombie concept in the United States,[208] to such an extent that zombie has become a byword for concepts that failed to "die".[209]
According to professor of religious studies Kim Paffenroth, Romero's antagonists broke with earlier traditions of "voodoo zombies" by having no human villain in control of the zombie and thus no potential to ever restore the monsters' humanity.[210] Compared to the vampires and Haitian zombies that served as inspiration, Romero's antagonists derive more horror from abjection, the disgust that arises from an inability to separate clean from corrupt. While the vampire myth offers a potential escape from mundane life, the zombie offers an infinite decay more abject than conventional death.[211] Cultural critic Steven Shaviro has remarked that—unlike with other movie characters—audiences cannot identify with the zombies because there is no identity left within their bodies, and that they instead provide audiences a combination of disgust and fascinated attraction.[203][212]
Critical analysis
Barbra and Ben after their first meetingSince its release, many critics and film historians have interpreted Night of the Living Dead as a subversive film that critiques 1960s American society, international Cold War politics and domestic racism.[65] Film historian Robin Wood organized "The American Nightmare"—a sixty-film retrospective combining screenings and director interviews to frame horror in terms of oppression and repression—for the 1979 Toronto International Film Festival. His essay from the program notes, "An Introduction to the American Horror Film", was highly influential, especially in film criticism where horror as a genre had not previously been considered a topic for serious analysis.[213][214] Wood interprets notable horror films including Night through a psychoanalytic framework.[215] He discusses how traits deemed unacceptable are repressed on the personal level or when not repressed, oppressed on the societal level.[215] He identifies repressed taboos and othered groups as the psychological basis for horror monsters.[215] Wood and later critics used this framework to discuss Night as a commentary on repressed sexuality, the marginalized groups of 1960s America, and the disruption to societal norms resulting from the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War.[216][217]
Elliot Stein of The Village Voice sees the film as an ardent critique of American involvement in the Vietnam War, arguing that it "was not set in Transylvania, but Pennsylvania – this was Middle America at war, and the zombie carnage seemed a grotesque echo of the conflict then raging in Vietnam".[218] Film historian Sumiko Higashi concurs, arguing that Night of the Living Dead draws from the visual vocabulary the media used to report on the war, noting especially that the photographs of the napalm girl and the execution of Nguyễn Văn Lém would be fresh in the minds of the film's creators and audience.[219] She points to aspects of the Vietnam War paralleled in the film: grainy black-and-white newsreels, search and destroy operations, helicopters, and graphic carnage.[220] In 1968, the news was still broadcast in black and white, and the graphic photographs that appear during the closing credits resemble the contemporary Vietnam War photojournalism.[65]
Critics have compared the shooting of the film's black protagonist to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.[65][221][222] Stein explains, "In this first-ever subversive horror movie, the resourceful black hero survives the zombies only to be surprised by a redneck posse".[218] In 2018, on the film's 50th anniversary, Mark Lager of CineAction noted a clear parallel between the killing and destruction of Ben's body by white police and the violence directed at African Americans during the civil rights movement. Lager described it as a more honest exploration of 1960s America than anything produced by Hollywood.[223]
Film historian Gregory Waller identifies broad-ranging critiques of American institutions including the nuclear family, private homes, media, government, and "the entire mechanism of civil defense".[224] Film historian Linda Badley explains that the film was so horrifying because the monsters were not creatures from outer space or some exotic environment, but rather that "They're us."[225] In the 2009 documentary film Nightmares in Red, White and Blue, the zombies in the film are compared to the "silent majority" of the U.S. in the late 1960s.[226]
