George Romero’s zombie masterpiece Night of the Living Dead turned 45 on Tuesday; it was released in theaters on October 1, 1968. Not only did the movie kick-start the modern tradition of zombie movies, it also set the expectation that these stories would be a vehicle for stinging social commentary, from the “merciless” consumer satire of Dawn of the Dead to Colson Whitehead’s wake for modernity’s demise.
The thing about good zombie fiction (and I say this as someone who enjoys an awful lot of zombie fiction) is that the zombies are never the most horrific thing. Zombies don’t typically have the capacity for complex thought — they don’t execute stratagems, play politics, torture people. All they do is feed. The true horror in any zombie story worth its salt is what other people do when faced with the zombie threat. Zombies are merely relentless; humans can be sadistic.
Night of the Living Dead created the template. After Ben — the film’s black protagonist, played by Duane Jones — rescues the hapless Barbra from the rampaging horde of zombies, he finds himself trapped on a lot with a group of white folks whose behavior ranges from unhelpful to malevolent. Barbra quickly becomes paralyzed by shock, Tom and Judy get themselves blown up, Karen turns into a zombie and starts munching on folks and then Harry locks Ben out of the house before trying to shoot him. Finally Ben escapes, only to be shot by a white sheriff’s deputy. Given the backdrop of 1968, it’s hard not to read the movie as a commentary on the trials facing blacks at the time. (Romero has said that the night they finished editing the movie, he heard the news of Martin Luther King’s assassination.)
According to Joe Kane’s behind-the-scenes book about NotLD, Ben was not originally envisioned as a black character. But the casting of Duane Jones in the role gave it a societal resonance that later zombie fiction would strive to recreate:
Many audiences perceived the parallel between America’s increasingly violent civil rights struggles — particularly the then-recent assassination of Martin Luther King by racist hitman James Earl Ray, with the suspected cooperation of the FBI — and Ben’s execution at the guns of the redneck posse at film’s end. Without a black actor in the lead, “Night” would still have been an innovative shocker but wouldn’t have hit the cultural nerves it did.
Romero’s own complex Latino heritage isn’t incidental; he got from his father a sense that arbitrary racial boundaries can create real societal divides:
I’m half-Latino. I’m a New York baby, right? So my Dad is Cuban, my Mom is Lithuanian. My Dad says ‘I’m not Cuban!’ (George shrugs his shoulders.) But you were born in Cuba? ‘I am Castilian, from Spain! Family went to Cuba to open a hotel!’ Okay, well, let’s say you’re a Cuban, you’re a Spanish guy? ‘Yes, but I am not a Puerto Rican!’
I grew up in New York with a Spanish Dad right in the days of West Side Story, where you know the Puerto Rican gangs and s***? My Dad is telling me Puerto Ricans are s***. I have a Latino Dad who’s telling me that Puerto Ricans are s***. I mean this is a very confusing situation.
The zombie stories of the past decade carry on Romero’s tradition of using the genre for social critique. For example, the evil at the heart of the blockbuster Resident Evil franchise is the shadowy pharmaceutical giant Umbrella Corporation, which brings about the zombie apocalypse while researching bio-weapons. In 28 Days Later, a small crew of human survivors manage to recreate some of humankind’s most trenchant problems — racism, slavery, rape — within days of the zombie uprising.