So, it’s the 55th anniversary of the first showing of Night of the Living Dead, in Pittsburgh, when a movie made for a little over $100,000 created (according to Jason Paul Collum, author of Assault of the Killer B’s) “a permanent shift in modern horror cinema”.
In that book, Judith O’Dea (who played Barbra) talks about just how cheaply it was made — and the (necessary) creativity that resulted:
When O’Dea is queried about improvisation on set, she laughs, “Oh, all the time! I don’t know if there was an actual working script! We would go over what basi- cally had to be done, then just did it the way we each felt it should be done. We didn’t have a lot of film stock to spare, so we didn’t do many retakes. The sequence where Ben [Duane Jones] is breaking up the table to block the entrance and I’m on the couch and start telling him the story of what happened … Johnny (Russ Streiner) with the candy… it’s all ad-libbed. This is what we want to get across … tell the story about me and Johnny in the car and me being attacked. That was it … all improv. We filmed it once. There was a concern we didn’t get the sound right, but fortunately they were able to use it.”
…also telling a story about falling down and losing a shoe:
So we built in another shot where I fall and lose my other shoe so I could be running barefoot for the rest of the movie.
It’s also remarkable, of course, for having a black leading man, Duane Jones. When he auditioned, apparently, everyone in the room — including the actor originally earmarked for the role — said “Hey, this is the guy that should be Ben.”
According to the American Film Institute, “critical reception was largely negative”. The LA Times liked its “effectiveness and imagination”, but other reviewers “called into question the morality of the filmmakers, distributors, and fans of such a gory production”.
Strangely, audiences were less concerned about this, and the movie made $30m. Mind you, its distributors “did not subscribe to the Motion Picture Association of America’s (MPAA) production code”, so anyone, of any age, could get in to see it.
When Roger Ebert caught it “in a typical neighborhood theatre”, he estimated that in the packed house, “There were maybe two dozen people … over 16 years old. The rest were kids, the kind you expect at a Saturday afternoon kiddie matinee”
Apparently, it all started out fine
After a while, things got a little flat…
But, as you’ll know if you’ve seen it, an escape plan goes wrong — really very wrong — and…
Then there’s the ending… Assault of the Killer B’s says American International told George A Romero that they’d distribute it if he changed the “too unmitigating” final moments. He turned them down.
Yes, I’m not sure I’d take a 9-year-old to see it — and dropping them off to watch it unaccompanied seems unlikely to pop up in a list of top ten parenting tips all that soon.
One can understand why Joe Kane’s Night of the Living Dead: Behind the Scenes of the Most Terrifying Zombie Movie Ever reproduces this rather fine bit of cinema-foyer publicity from the time:
In an entertaining foreword to Kane’s book, Wes Craven talks about being invited to see a film he hadn’t heard of, and responding “Sounds dumb”. But later that evening, he’d been “liberated … to make Last House on the Left”…
And Assault of the Killer B’s reproduces this later photo of Judith O’Dea by Ward Boult, which is also pretty entertaining:
But I think the most enjoyable thing I discovered in my research was where had Romero been working to pay the bills before he made his first feature… children’s television. Specifically, shooting short segments for Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.
Occasionally, after Fred had hung up his sweater and fed the fish, he would ask his trolley to bring a new episode of “Picture, Picture”. A screen would open, the studio camera would push in, and a short film would be blue-screened. I shot a dozen or so of those short films. Some were meant to be educational (How Light Bulbs are Manufactured). Some were meant to be purely exploratory, to inspire thought in a four-year-old (Things With Wheels, Things That Feel Soft). Some were meant to defeat fears, to show that Mr. Rogers had to go through the same scary shit that a our-year-old had to go through sometimes, and that he came through it unscathed, so the four-year-old was likely to come through it unscathed, as well. (Mr. Rogers Gets a Tonsillectomy).
That last one named, Romero liked to say, was the scariest thing he made
You can watch the whole thing now on iPlayer if you like — or, indeed, pretty much anywhere else, because when the film was renamed at the last minute, the company forgot to put a copyright notice on the new title card.
Anyway, all together now: “They’re coming to get you, Barbra”
