I've talked before about how my brother and I watched this movie for the first time when I was ten and he was eleven. my mom didn't want us watching horror movies, but since this one was in black and white she considered it a classic and therefore good for us to watch, or at least not as bad as the gory, trashy mivies we wanted to watch. I still remember sitting with him transfixed as the movie played out, and being punched in the gut with the ending. Some movies never die, they just get stronger over the years as you get older and you appreciate them more. This one gets better every time I watch it.
This movie is about a small group of survivors who are thrown together in an impossible situation when dead people suddenly start coming back to life hungry to feast on the flesh of those who are still living. A black man named Ben becomes the defacto leader of the group because he's the one most capable of keeping a level head amidst all the chaos. As the night wears on and the small group of survivors is besieged by more and more zombies, their options for survival grow slim and they have to figure out what to do. Will they be able to keep the zombies at bay long enough to be rescued, or will they be eaten alive by the army of the living dead?
To this day George Romero swears it was purely a coincidence that Duane Jones, the actor who plays Ben, was black, but the movie has a much bigger political impact because the main character is black. Back in 1968 was the year when the president signed the Civil Rights Act into law, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, and a significant portion of the population of the United States still didn't support the act, which means 1968 was still a hugely tumultuous time as far as race relations were concerned, so this movie came along at exactly the right time for it to have the greatest impact. The fact that the roving bands of "good guys with guns" that are hunting down the zombies at the end of the movie look suspiciously like a lynch mob was not lost on me.
I notice something new every time I watch this movie, even though I've seen it a million times before. This time around I noticed how the marriage between Mr. Cooper and his wife (the ccouple in the cellar of the farmhouse where the survivors are holed up) was obviously on the rocks, because she says to him "we might not like living together, but dying together isn't going to help anything." I suppose being in a life or death situation exacerbates whatever other problems may be going on in your life. I also noticed how the TV broadcast the survivors watch is trying to pinpoint the cause of the dead coming back to life, and that they speculate that radiation from outer space might be responsible. Grasping at straws while looking for an answer as to why, and deciding to act to kill the zombies without bothering to ask why they are there. Shoot first, ask questions later. I can't help but feel that's what would happen even today if the world were under attack by zombies. This movie will always be topical, no matter what year it is, and that's why it is a classic. If you haven't seen it yet, what have you been doing with your life? Watch it immediately!
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