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Night
of the Living Dead (1968)
In George Romero's raw and uncompromising low-budget
midnight movie about flesh-eating zombies:
- the opening memorable and haunting scene, set around
8 pm on a Sunday evening (with thunder and lightning threatening),
as two bickering siblings, Johnny Blair (Russell Streiner) and
his sister Barbra (Judith O'Dea) arrived after their annual three-hour
trek from Pittsburgh in a two-door Pontiac to visit their father's
grave in an abandoned, rural western Pennsylvania cemetery
- Johnny's recollections of their childhood play when
he recalled scaring Barbra in the same location when they were younger: "Do
you remember one time when we were small, we were out here? It was
from right over there. I jumped out at you from behind the tree,
and grandpa got all excited, and he shook his fist at me, and he
said, 'Boy, you'll be damned to hell.' Hah! Remember that? Right
over there. Well, you used to really be scared here...Well, you're
still afraid'
Johnny Teasing Barbra: "They're coming to
get you, Barbra"
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Attack of a Real Zombie Upon Barbra
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- the repetition of their child's play when Johnny
joked and teased Barbra using a Boris Karloff-like (or Vincent
Price) voice: "They're coming to get you, Barbra... They're
coming for you, Barbra...They're coming for you. Look, there comes
one of them now"; Barbra took the prank seriously (she angrily
reprimanded him: "You're acting like a child!") - when
suddenly a staggering, stumbling, pale-faced zombie figure (S.
William Heinzman) looking like a drunk vagrant in a disheveled
suit approached and then actually attacked Barbra - when Johnny
came to her defense, he was killed as they struggled and he fell
and his head struck a tombstone, while Barbra watched in horror
- the zombie's pursuit of Barbra, who was forced to
abandon her crashed car and race to a nearby, isolated, and empty
two-story farmhouse for refuge; inside after grabbing a butcher knife,
she noticed an additional army of ravenous, trance-like zombies approaching
the outside of the house; she discovered a half-eaten, partially-mutilated
body of a female at the top of the stairs
- the horrific sequence of a horde of crazed, lurching,
flesh-eating zombies surrounding the old farmhouse and terrorizing
survivors, including the traumatized Barbra and smart black hero
Ben (Duane Jones), who had come to her rescue; he swiftly barricaded
the doors and windows
- the radio news report that an "epidemic of mass
murder" was being committed by a virtual army of unidentified
assassins with no apparent pattern or reason for the slayings - it
was a "sudden general explosion of mass homicide"; further
ghastly reports were that murder victims were being devoured by their
murderers ("the killers are eating the flesh of the people they
murder")
- the discovery of other survivors hiding in the home's
cellar: loud-mouth, obnoxious and domineering husband Harry Cooper
(producer Karl Hardman), teenaged Tom (Keith Wayne), Tom's pretty
girlfriend Judy (Judith Ridley), Harry's wife Helen Cooper (Marilyn
Eastman) and their injured, zombie-bitten ill daughter Karen Cooper
(Kyra Schon)
- the jump-out-of-your-seat moment when Ben walked by
a partially-boarded up window in the kitchen and hands suddenly reached
out to grab at him
- the emergence of dozens of zombies, including one
nude female from the morgue with a burial tag still attached to her
left wrist, and another reanimated female who ate a squirming worm
off a tree trunk
Zombies Approaching Farmhouse
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- the failed escape attempt when Tom and Judy tried
to fuel Ben's pickup truck at an outdoor gas pump, and the truck
exploded in flames, killing them inside; afterwards, the cannibalistic
zombies ate their charred remains, including entrails, body parts,
internal organs and bone fragments
- the words of local redneck Sheriff McClelland (George
Kosana) on TV on how to eliminate the zombies: "A ghoul can
be killed by a shot in the head or a heavy blow to the skull...Kill
the brain and you kill the ghoul"
- the series of murders: first, the lethal shooting
of Harry in the abdomen by Ben, after which zombie-bitten young daughter
Karen, now reanimated as a "living dead" zombie, consumed
her father's corpse in the cellar, and Karen also stabbed her traumatized
mother Helen to death with a garden trowel, and afterwards ate her
- the further "undead" attack and murder of
Barbra by her own zombified brother Johnny who dragged her off into
the horde of hungry zombies, who had invaded the farmhouse; meanwhile,
Ben was forced to shoot and kill the reanimating corpses of both
Harry and Helen
- in the shocking last scene - the tragic and mistaken
shooting of Ben by one of the 'search and rescue' vigilantes, believing
he was a zombie; the sole surviving black man was shot in the forehead
as he stood near a window in the farmhouse living room (Sheriff McClelland: "Hit
him in the head, right between the eyes. Good shot. OK, he's dead.
Let's go get him. That's another one for the fire")
Downbeat Ending
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Posse Sniper Murdered Ben - His Body Was Added
to Pyre of Other Zombie Bodies
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- the ending credits sequence: Ben's body was dragged
from the house with a meat hook and burned in a pyre of other zombie
bodies (in a series of still frame shots), as the downbeat film
ended hopelessly
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Opening Cemetery Sequence
Johnny Killed as He Tried to Defend Barbra
Graveyard Zombie
Half-Eaten Female in Farmhouse
Jump-Scare: Hands Reached In Window
Failed Escape Attempt: Exploding Truck Killed Tom and
Judy
Cannibalistic Zombies Ate Charred Remains
Karen Consuming Father's Corpse
Zombie Karen's Brutal Matricide
Zombified Brother Johnny's Murder of Sister
Barbra
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