In 1963 John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Civil rights leader Medger Evers was assassinated, the historic March on Washington took place and the first American splatter film, Blood Feast, was released. In American Independent Horror Bryan Turnock writes, “The emergence and popularity of such films reflected changing attitudes in American society. The assassination of John F. Kennedy in November 1963 marked the beginning of one of the most tumultuous periods in that country’s history.” Two years after the death of JFK, Lyndon Johnson sent troops into Vietnam, the same year Malcolm X was murdered. One year later in 1966 Charles Whitman became the country’s first mass shooter. The television played footage from warzones abroad, mass protests and civil unrest and death at home, presidents being shot and news reports about prominent civil rights leaders being executed in front of their families. This was the America George Romero, and the rest of the cast and crew of Night of the Living Dead had been living in and their film was, in many ways, both consciously and unconsciously, a reaction to the state of that America. 
But Night of the Living Dead was presaged by Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets. Targets was meant to be a Roger Corman budget picture in which Corman was to cash in on two days of filming owed to him by the aging legend, Boris Karloff. Directing duties were handed off to fledgling filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich for what was to be his first film. Targets follows a Charlie Whitman inspired shooter in one of its two plots as he massacres bystanders with a long-range rifle after murdering his family, and in its other plot it follows a retiring old star of classic gothic horror films. It is a great film that, while it is not horror itself, is about horror, both of the real-world variety and of the cinematic genre variety. In his book Cinema at the Margins, Wheeler Dixon writes, “At the time, the Whitman rampage was seen as an utterly aberrant act. If we look at the era more closely, however, we can see that, alongside the Peace movement and Flower Power era many remember with affection, dark events were occurring in American society with regularity.” Unlike Charlie Whitman, the killer in Targets is explicitly a Vietnam vet. He caught the killing bug and brought it home with him. He shows America a new violent reality, one where they can be cut down by a murderous lunatic at random. A reality Vietnamese civilians had grown accustomed to in the wake of Operation Speedy Express. Meanwhile Boris Karloff’s character opines that his old-fashioned Gothic style of horror is outdated and no longer frightening, because the world itself had eclipsed the horrors depicted therein. “My kind of horror isn’t horror anymore,” Karloff laments as he picks up a newspaper with a headline reading, “youth kills six in supermarket.” What Bogdanovich predicted as far as the direction of the horror genre came to pass just a few months later with the release of Night of the Living Dead. Romero’s film brought about, or at least completed a paradigm shift that saw the gothic cycle of the 1960s lead by Hammer and AIP made utterly obsolete. A new style of horror cinema was born.
When George Romero set out to make his film, he didn’t know that the My Lai massacre had taken place, he didn’t know that Martin Luther King Jr. was going to be assassinated or that Robert Kennedy would be assassinated or that four American college students would be gunned down by agents of their own government at Kent state, or that only about a year after the film’s release the Manson Family would climatically trigger a symbolic death of the 1960s with the Tate-LaBianca murders. But within Night of the Living Dead is the intuitive insight into a country that was eating itself and its neighbors. Other films felt this, too, Easy Rider, and the aforementioned, Targets. But none were as coldly surgical in their deconstruction of ideologies and institutions that abetted this national cannibalism. What Night of the Living Dead represents is a raw and unrestrained attack on traditional and conservative American life and culture. A savage assault on American institutions and attitudes writ large. The institutions that so violently fought against progress and sent the youth of the nation to kill and die, and ideologies that bred assassins willing to uphold them. The backlash to the civil rights movement led to many bodies. Four girls were burned in the 16th Street Baptist Church. Civil Rights workers were beaten to into pulp and shot through their hearts. And scores more lynchings and church burnings took place that were designed to scare the intimidate the black populations and especially those active in Civil Rights movements. The Vietnam war resulted in even more bodies with emphasis from military brass placed on body-count, one anonymous soldier reported he witnessed a My Lai every month for a period of a year. As A.S. Hamrah put it in his article, Now Streaming: The Plague Years, “Romero drove home this central point – that a zombie infested America differed from the status quo only in degree, not in kind.” Night of the Living Dead confronts a microcosm of American society with a legion of bodies that refuse to stay quiet, and in doing so expresses profound cynicism in our status quo.
One way Romero does this is by exploring each characters relationship with the status quo and contrasting it with their eventual fate. Tom and Judy, the young couple, directly from the largely conservative sci-fi/horror films of the 1950s. They’re optimistic, they believe in authority, they’re the next generation of the nuclear family. In the past these types of characters would have survived, but here they explode and get eaten. A glimpse of the meatgrinder that awaited America’s youth.
Harry and Helen represent the older generation. The generation who are already married and have a kid of their own. They bicker and squabble and the only thing that holds them together is their mutual concern for their sick child. There is an implicit sexism to their dynamic, an acknowledgment and critique of their nuclear family’s deferment to the husband. Helen seems more competent, but Harry is more entitled. Their fate, in the film’s most shocking sequence, is their murder and cannibalization by their child. Trapped within the confines of the family that consumes them.
The film’s main character, Ben, was initially meant to be white. Some try to play off the racial element in the film by citing the origin of the character, but I don’t believe the origin matters. While it’s true a racial element to the character was not baked into the script at first, the casting and involvement of actor Duane Jones certainly added a strong racial subtext. In particular in his dynamic with Harry and his eventual fate. Jones and Romero’s ending sent shockwaves through pop culture that echo to this day. In it, Ben, an innocent black man, is thoughtlessly shot by a local white sheriff and mob. An innocent black man shot by the police is a drama that plays out with gut wrenching regularity in America, and it was Jones’ idea. Later in life Jones would talk about how he vetoed a happier ending because the black community would not want to see his character saved by the white establishment. It’s worth noting that Jones was a collaborator on Night, and he was tuned into the black community. He was much more than just a hired gun actor and his influence on the final film should not be understated.
Night of the Living Dead represents the culmination of a cinematic paradigm shift in America seen in many films of the late 60s that put emphasis on challenging cultural norms and dissecting conservative American ideology. It’s also an expression of rage and grief at the status quo. Any time a character puts their faith in an American institution like the strength of the nuclear family, the police or the military, they are failed spectacularly by it. It’s a perfect representation of the angst and terror of a generation that felt their society was unraveling at the seams.
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Maxwell Shepherd is a writer from Sacramento, California, with emphasis on horror fiction, comedy and film studies. His titles include the comic books, Dog of the Dead and Ghost Puncher: Master of the Fistic Arts and the novels Moon High and Crocodile Island.