Although zombies never gained the audience appeal and loyalty of the great monsters lineup of Universal Studios’ Wolfman, Dracula, and the Mummy, White Zombie and I Walked with a Zombie actually depicted elements truer to the mythos of the real zombie than did Night of the Living Dead.
One of the titles that George Romero considered for his film was Night of the Flesh Eaters, which in my opinion would have been more appropriate and surely would have made the film no less frightening. The film is not really about zombies at all. The things staggering toward their victims from the darkness are not members of the undead who have been raised from their graves to serve as mindless slaves for a cruel taskmaster. Mysteriously, on this one fateful and grisly Night of the Living Dead, corpses crawl out of their graves to attack baffled and horrified victims.
When the film’s principal characters take refuge in a farmhouse, they learn from an emergency broadcast on television that the murderers, who appear to be in some kind of trance, are actually the recently deceased who have been somehow returned to life and who are seizing the living and eating their flesh. None of the experts polled claim to be able to explain the hideous reanimation, but a science consultant persistently insists the cause of the dead rising from their graves is somehow the result of radiation from a Venus probe that exploded in the Earth’s atmosphere.
As the night of horror progresses, the mindless, shuffling undead continue to advance in a seemingly unending army of monsters lusting for the blood of the living in the farmhouse. The film sustains a sense of genuine fear and helplessness that grips the audience and relentlessly never releases its grip. The fact that the film actually scares the viewer has made the Night of the Living Dead a film that horror buffs see over and over again.
Romero has never denied that he was greatly inspired by author Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend (1954), in which a plague decimates Los Angeles. Victims of the terrible blight return to life as vampires, seeking to feast on the survivors, thereby killing and infecting them. One lone man struggles against impossible odds to stay alive and to preserve the human race. Matheson’s novel was translated into film in 1964 as The Last Man on Earth, starring Vincent Price. (Subsequent adaptations of Matheson’s novel have been The Omega Man [1971] with Charlton Heston, and I Am Legend [2007] starring Will Smith.)
It has become a popular group activity to dress up like zombies and gather to embark on zombie walks or dances. Here, Maria Eivers has applied the appropriate “undead”-type makeup in preparation for the San Jose Zombie Walk (photo by Shannon McCabe).
Because Matheson’s novel describes a plague that infected and killed people who later return as vampires to hunt the uninfected, Romero decided that his film should not utilize that same kind of monster. At the same time, he wanted to fashion his motion picture around an equally horrifying premise. After some deliberation, he decided that it would be truly nightmarish if dead people should no longer wish to be dead and suddenly rise from their graves to begin to kill the living.
Romero’s film delivered enough terrifying action to stun its initial audience with the shock of raw realism that left many too frightened to leave the theater, but too numb with terror to stay. Night of the Living Dead, with its image of the grotesque mindless, lurching undead, became a classic horror film.
Although Romero decided against having the undead transform into vampires after their death, the stumbling, staggering corpses in his film do bite people and eat their flesh; and, vampire-like, their bloody victims become undead cannibals as a result becoming involuntary meals. The film was strongly criticized for its graphic and explicit content. Nonetheless, the archetype of the modern zombie horror film was born.
Groups of thousands of “zombies” have gathered to join zombie marches and parades. On Halloween 2008, 1,227 zombies joined to set a world record for the largest number of zombies dancing to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” (photo by Shannon McCabe).
Romero has gone on to make five zombie motion pictures, remaking Night of the Living Dead twice, most recently as Night of the Living Dead 3D (2006), directed by Tom Savini. It may be impossible to derive a completely accurate box office take for the initial Night of the Living Dead, but reasonable estimates indicate that it has grossed more than $30 million internationally. Romero has not forgotten his debt to the undead. He came full circle to the beginning of his success with the film Diary of the Dead (2008).
While George Romero brought the zombie into contemporary consciousness with The Night of the Living Dead, it seems unlikely that anyone could have predicted the enormous popularity of the creature in today’s culture. Large numbers of our current population have gone “Zombie Nuts,” which hopefully will not lead to anything more than role-playing and gathering in large groups to dress, dance, and act like the zombies do.
In today’s zombie films, the mangled undead are much more agile than Romero’s lurching creatures, who shuffle, drag their feet, and extend their flopping arms for balance. Today’s zombies can run, fast.
Not only are the zombies becoming more agile on screen, you may encounter large numbers of pseudo-zombies dancing at the local mall. Even on days other than Halloween, large groups of the undead may appear everywhere from town squares to prison exercise yards to perform the famous “zombie dance” from Michael Jackson’s music video “Thriller.”
On Halloween 2008, 1,227 of the undead filled the Old Market Square in Nottinghamshire, England, to set a new world record for dancing zombies. The previous record for zombie choreography had been set in Monroeville, Pennsylvania on October 28, 2007, with 1,028 participants. BBC News quoted Margaret Robinson, one of the organizers of the Nottingham zombie event, as saying that on that night the dancers were all zombies, all undead. She was covered in blood and very happy to be so.
On December 3, 2009, officials at the University of Colorado at Boulder warned that students who were caught walking around campus dorm buildings with Nerf guns could be arrested. More than 600 students had signed up to play the popular game “Humans vs Zombies” in which humans shoot the zombies with the sponge Nerf balls. When the Nerf guns were banned, the “human” participants in the battle resorted to using rolled up stockings.
The enormous popularity of the zombie in contemporary times has no doubt confused many individuals who try to balance their religious beliefs with a growing fascination for tales of a monster from the world of Voodoo and the undead. How should they respond to the ever-growing Cult of the Zombie? Is it possible that millions of people could become “zombified” after a great apocalyptic event? In the great majority of current motion pictures, books, games, and other media expressions, the zombies are themselves initially the victims of a great biological warfare, a mysterious virus, or some kind of mass pandemic that first kills them, then resurrects them with the uncontrollable desire to chomp on the uninfected and to create one big gory family.
Many of us who were reared in one of the Abrahamic monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—were told from our very early childhood that one day the graves would open and free the dead to face a day of judgment. Many of us who learned of this coming event in quite graphic detail were quite likely left with nightmares that convinced us not to walk through any