Okay. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:
Two bickering siblings are on their way to a rural cemetery to place a commemorative wreath on their mother’s grave. An annual tradition from what we can gather. But as
they get closer to their destination, behind the wheel, brother
Johnny’s grumpiness over the inconvenience of this 200-mile round-trip
pilgrimage grows even more belligerent.
And as he pokes fun at his uptight sister, Barbara, who obviously has some unresolved issues with both the deceased and an irrational, morbid fear of cemeteries in general because of what’s all buried there, they finally arrive and make their way to the proper cemetery plot.
Well aware of his sister's hangups, Johnny (Moseley) adopts a reasonable facsimile of a Boris Karloff impression as he warns Barbara (Tallman) that the dead are restless where they’re headed and to be wary -- for the dead are coming to get you, sis, he says ominously...
Now, despite his sister's constant calls to knock this crap off, Johnny’s obnoxious behavior continues to escalate. And as they reach their mother’s grave, Johnny pushes things too far when he spots a fellow mourner slowly moving toward them, openly mocks the man, claiming he is an undead ghoul, and then childishly hides behind a large tombstone, leaving it to his sister to apologize for his loutish behavior.
But it’s the elderly stranger who apologizes to them for reasons he does not explain before wandering on in a daze. Seeing he’s bleeding from a scalp wound -- that sure looks like something took a bite out of him, to me -- before they can try to help, another man springs from nowhere and attacks Barbara!
His jaundiced flesh an unhealthy shade, his eyes boiled white, jaws snapping at the exposed flesh of his victim’s neck, hostile intentions clear, Johnny pulls this snarling man off his sister. But as they struggle, Barbara watches in horror as her brother is then killed during the ensuing brawl; his neck snapped when they awkwardly fell onto a gravestone.
She then flees toward the apparent safety of another internment, only to find no one there and the casket open and empty.
With the crazed fiend still in lumbering pursuit, Barbara continues her desperate retreat back to their car, where she locks the doors, sees the keys are missing, and then spies another man walking toward her and calls to him for help.
But as he gets closer, his clothes start peeling off due to them being split-up the back, revealing a huge stitched up y-incision that runs from his neck to his nethers. This, of course, is an autopsy scar, meaning I think we just found the missing occupant of that empty coffin.
The implications of this are both quite impossible and extremely dire, and yet here we are. The girl, of course, does not realize or register any of this yet as she is now trapped in the car between two murderous cadavers. And as one of them successfully manages to break out a window, Barbara disengages the emergency brake, gravity takes over, and the car trundles down a steep embankment until it crashes into a tree.
Thankfully, this provides enough of a head-start for Barbara as she flees into the woods -- away from those slow-moving ghouls -- until she stumbles upon a farmstead and runs for the house at its center.
Hoping to find help inside, the farmhouse appears empty until she reaches the foyer, where blood splashes onto her face from the upstairs balcony, whose source appears to be a dismembered hand until another one of those undead ghouls presents itself.
The thing sees her below, and then crashes through the railing and falls to the main floor to get at her -- just as another homicidal ghoul enters the house through the door she left open in the kitchen.
Fleeing back outside, Barbara sees yet another ghoul stumbling down the road toward the farmhouse -- only this one gets flattened by an oncoming pickup truck.
But despite this massive trauma of having his back broken in two, the ghoul still seems pretty spry as it tries to keep moving.
Again, Barbara is having a little trouble processing all of this when the driver gets out of the truck and starts asking all kinds of questions about the house, assuming she lives here. Obviously in shock, Barbara has no answers for him.
Here, as he susses out she’s a stranger here, too, the man demands that this overwrought woman get her shit together as he drags her back inside -- even as Barbara tries to warn of the danger within; only he won’t listen.
And so, the man has to take out the ghoul in the kitchen with a crowbar, impaling it through the head, while Barbara dispatches the hefty one who fell over the stairs by fracturing his skull with a fire-poker. Then, after dispatching the still-kicking ghoul he ran over in a similar fashion, with the house now relatively secure, the man returns his attention back to the mentally fraying Barbara.
His name is Ben (Todd), and he does his best to assure the girl that what she just did was right and justified in the interest of their mutual self-preservation, and how she needs to keep focused and to keep fighting.
For while he has no answers as to why all of this craziness is suddenly happening, Ben has bared witness to a lot of horrible things over the past few hours as he relates how he wound up here in the truck, now out of gas, while they remove the bodies, find some weapons, and try to secure the house better.
Thus, he is not sure how people with broken necks or those shot full of holes can still be moving around; or why they keep attacking those who have yet to succumb to this madness. The radio stations were full of bullshit conspiracies, saying they were escaped prisoners or the result of a chemical spill. But the local rednecks and hayseeds were having a ball rounding them up and dispatching them -- whoever or whatever they were. But what they definitely weren’t anymore, was human.
Apparently, Ben was at a diner in nearby Evans City when a bunch of those things loaded onto a panel truck broke loose and escaped. And in the resulting mayhem and shoot-out, his car was destroyed, forcing him to steal the truck to escape -- but not before he learned one vital piece of information: to stop these things for good, you have to shoot them in the head or take out the brain by any means necessary.
It was like nothing he had ever seen before, says Ben. Almost biblical. The dead walking. A literal Hell on Earth. And it’s about to get a whole lot worse from the inside out when an interior door behind them slowly creaks open and reveals what was locked and hidden behind it in the basement this whole time...
When, by some miracle, a group of amateur filmmakers from Pittsburgh, P.A., known en masse as The Image Ten, managed to cobble together one of the greatest horror films of all time back in 1967 -- not the greatest independently produced horror film, mind you, but thee greatest horror film ever made, period -- they stuck to their guns while shopping it around, looking for a distributor.
Explaining why they turned down offers from both Columbia Pictures and American International to distribute Night of the Flesh-Eaters, who demanded a reduction in the film’s nihilistic tone and a complete reversal of its pessimistic ending, where the nominal hero is mistakenly shot down by the alleged cavalry when the sun finally comes up; a version which this motley band of filmmakers had put all of that chocolate blood, sweat, and tears into.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (November 1, 1967).
And so, having struck out in the West, they looked to the East and drove a finished print to New York City, looking for any buyers and finally found one in Continental Distributing, a branch of The Walter Reade Organization, who agreed to release the film as is -- well, with one notable, and ultimately tragic, exception:
A title change was needed because they feared their original hewed too close to Jack Curtis’s The Flesh Eaters (1964), a tale of mad science and a horde of man-eating amoebas, and might prove actionable. Thus, Night of the Flesh-Eaters officially became Night of the Living Dead (1968), and the rest is horror film history.
However, behind the scenes, things were about to get really complicated.
Continental Distributing had been around since the 1940s and seemed to specialize in importing and repackaging foreign films, including La Grande Illusion (alias The Grand Illusion, 1937), Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and The Ladykillers (1955). This continued into the 1960s with films ranging from Peter Brook’s Lord of the Flies (1963) and John Schlesinger’s Billy Liar (1963), to Masaki Kobayashi’s masterful ghost story, Kwaidan (1964), and Ishirô Honda’s Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (alias San Daikaijū Chikyū Saidai no Kessen, 1964), which featured Toho’s first real monster rally with Godzilla, Rodan and Mothra teaming up to repel the extraterrestrial triple-threat.
The Grand Island Independent (April, 1969).
They were also responsible for distributing the two feature film adaptations of the popular British BBC TV-series Doctor Who -- Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965) and Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. (1966); the first of which they inexplicably paired-up with Night of the Living Dead, leading to several matinee engagements and a youthful audience that wasn’t quite prepared for the carnage they were about to see.
This, of course, led to noted film critic Roger Ebert’s scathing review of the film, who caught it at a Saturday matinee. Well, not of the film per se, but targeting those who marketed this kind of thing toward children, for which it was never intended.
“Horror movies were fun, sure, but this was pretty strong stuff,” said Ebert (The Chicago Sun Times, January 5, 1969). “The kids in the audience were stunned. There was almost complete silence. The movie had stopped being delightfully scary about halfway through, and had become unexpectedly terrifying. There was a little girl across the aisle from me, maybe nine years old, who was sitting very still in her seat and crying.
“I don’t think the younger kids really knew what hit them. They were used to going to movies, sure, and they’d seen some horror movies before, sure, but this was something else. This was ghouls eating people up -- and you could actually see what they were eating. This was little girls killing their mothers. This was being set on fire. Worst of all, even the hero got killed. I felt real terror in that neighborhood theater last Saturday afternoon. I saw kids who had no resources they could draw upon to protect themselves from the dread and fear they felt.
“Censorship isn’t the answer to something like this. Censorship is never the answer. For that matter, Night of the Living Dead was passed for general audiences by the Chicago Police Censor Board. Since it had no nudity in it, it was all right for kids, I guess … But I would be ashamed to make a civil libertarian argument defending the 'right' of those little girls and boys to see a film which left a lot of them stunned with terror. In a case like this, I’d want to know what the parents were thinking of when they dumped the kids in front of the theater to see a film titled Night of the Living Dead.”
Meanwhile, as ‘their little film that could’ continued to pack audiences into theaters and drive-ins all over the country, the folks back in Pittsburgh were growing a little concerned when their negotiated share of the profits started trickling in -- barely.
By most estimates, Night of the Living Dead made between 12 to $15 million at the domestic box-office on its initial release, along with another $30 million overseas, against a budget of a mere $115,000, which left those at Image 10 -- George Romero, Gary Streiner, John Russo, Karl Hardman, Marilyn Eastman, Vince Survinski, Richard Ricci, Rudy Ricci and David Clipper collectively scratching their heads.
And this discrepancy in the books got so bad, with their other investors breathing down their necks when the numbers just didn’t add up, wondering where all those profits were going, they brought a lawsuit against Continental and Walter Reade, looking to get the rights to their film back as well as $3 million in damages.
This lawsuit dragged on for years -- it wasn’t even settled as to where the case would be heard until 1975, with Pittsburgh winning out over New York City. And after causing several delays, at some point, the representatives of the defendants stopped showing up altogether, leading to a contempt of court charge.
Then, in 1978, Walter Reade declared bankruptcy and the film rights reverted to Image 10. A hollow victory as they never saw any of that money due to them or any damages from the lawsuit. And to add insult to injury, even though they now owned their film again this was practically worthless since Night of the Living Dead, technically, had been in the public domain from the moment it first hit theater screens.
See, when they turned the finished film over to the distributor for duplication the only copyright stamp on the film was placed under the original title in the opening credits instead of at the bottom of the end credits like every other movie. And with that title change, the old copyrighted title was cut out of the prints and replaced with the new one that did not have the needed copyright stamp -- and no one ever caught this before it was released. And according to the current U.S. copyright laws at the time, "any public dissemination required a copyright notice to maintain a copyright."
At some point, several others did take notice of this lack of a copyright claim anywhere on the film and started making their own copies of copies and sending them out to theaters for years, reaping the benefits of others, essentially free and clear because due to this simple, amateurish mistake, by law, the film was in the public domain and fair game.
Meantime, Image 10 itself was starting to fracture from within. Hardman and Eastman bowed out early. And after a couple of lackluster follow-up features -- There’s Always Vanilla (1971) and Season of the Witch (alias Jack’s Wife, alias Hungry Wives (1972), all box-office flops -- a lot of infighting, inflating egos, finger-pointing, and accumulative creative differences finally got to be too much for all involved.
Top all that off with getting screwed over out of all that money, and a massive and apparently futile lawsuit that appeared to be going nowhere fast at the time, they all agreed to call it quits and amicably went their separate ways. The band had officially broken up in Pittsburgh.
George Romero and friends.
“The bottom line is that of all the people involved with Night of the Living Dead I have the least to complain about,” said Romero in an interview with John Kane for his book, Night of the Living Dead: Behind the Scenes of the Most Terrifying Zombie Movie Ever (2010). “Because I’m the one that got the reputation out of it."
Yeah, from what followed it’s easy to see that the rest of the Image 10 needed Romero ah-lot more than he needed any of them. Russo’s solo efforts are pretty risible -- Midnight (1982), The Majorettes (1987). And while he did get the ball rolling on Return of the Living Dead (1985), Dan O’Bannon junked his script and started over from scratch.
And yet, I still contend Romero’s later films -- even Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the Dead (1985) -- are missing a little somethin’ somethin’. A certain homespun alchemy that Night of the Living Dead had that his solo efforts do not. It’s kinda there in The Crazies (1973), and it’s kinda there in Martin (1977). But after? Not really. And his films are lesser for it.
As that copyright issue festered and lingered on into the 1980s, a dozen home video distributors released their own editions of Night of the Living Dead on VHS, too. The most notorious being the colorized version unleashed by Hal Roach Studios through their Film Classics line in 1986; a computerized process which cost twice as much as the actual making of the film.
“The first movie was never properly copyrighted,” said critic Dave Kehr (The Chicago Tribune, October 10, 1990). “Ever since, anyone with access to a print has been free to run off and sell as many copies as the market can bear, which, as it turns out, is plenty. The black-and-white Night has even been colorized -- and that very version, to add injury to insult, is protected by copyright, thanks to a loophole in the new copyright laws.”
“I just think it’s silly,” said Romero of the colorized versiohn (Kane, 2010). “It looks awful, and it kills the gag in the beginning. There’s this guy walking across the cemetery and we think it’s just a human. But now that he’s bright green?!"
Tired of other people making money off of their work, the remnants of Image 10 buried the hatchet long enough to try and see if they could re-establish a copyright claim on Night of the Living Dead and finally rein in all of this profiteering. And it was at this point, around 1986, that they started kicking around the idea of doing a properly copyrighted remake to help shore up their claim on the disputed original.
“About two years ago, people on the West Coast brought up the subject to Russo, Romero and myself about remaking the picture,” Streiner told David Templeton (The Pittsburgh Press, April 1, 1990). “We thought it might be an interesting thing to do and it finally is coming to reality. It will be the first project we’ve worked on together since 1969.”
Thus, “A remake of the 1968 low-budget shocker that changed the face of American horror movies, seems to exist largely for economic reasons,” said Kehr. “The remake seems to be an attempt to re-establish some rights to the original -- or, at least, to cash-in on the first film’s reputation for some of the revenue its actual creators have been denied.”
And if nothing else, feeling a remake was inevitable anyway due to those same festering public domain issues, they figured they ought to do it and make some money before someone else did and cashed in, again, on their dime.
By then, Romero had left The Laurel Group -- Dawn of the Dead, Martin, Knightriders (1981), Creepshow (1982), and Day of the Dead -- as he and his partner, producer Richard Rubinstein, parted ways. And so, Romero approached Menahem Golan for financing, or Golan approached them, depending on which version you here. Golan had just become the head of 21st Century Film Corporation in 1989 after splitting up with his own long time partner, Yoram Globus, when Cannon Films ultimately collapsed into bankruptcy.
Armed with a budget of a little over $4.2 million, and a distribution deal secured with Columbia, Golan and Romero would serve as executive producers, Russo and Streiner as producers, while Romero would handle the screenplay, adapted and tweaked from the original written by himself and Russo. He would also find the film a director since he wanted to focus on his other duties. (More on this selection process later.)
Meantime, from what we’ve seen so far, Romero didn’t change a whole lot from the original script as everything rings familiar; but he did plant a few seeds here and there that would later germinate into some major changes as the film progresses further. The biggest thus far being Ben’s treatment of Barbara.
In the original film, Barbara spends nearly all of it in a catatonic state. When she initially meets Ben, her hysterics end with a sock to the jaw and an extended timeout on the couch.
Here, she gets a reassuring hug and constant positive reinforcement for killing one of the ghouls.
And so, this version of Barbara will be a lot more proactive than the old, which will later serve the biggest narrative change in the remake after it’s revealed several others had been hiding in the basement of the farmhouse this whole time:
Harry and Helen Cooper (Towles, Anderson), a bickering married couple, and their daughter, Sarah (Mazur), who was bitten by one of those ghouls as they made their way to the farmhouse after their car broke down; where they found Tom Bitner (Butler) and his girlfriend, Judy Rose (Finneran), who were also there seeking shelter because Tom’s Uncle Regis owned this farm -- stress on the “owned” as its revealed Uncle Regis was the ghoul Barbara had killed -- who lived there with his invalid brother, Satchel.
Here, we learn second-hand that when the others arrived at the farmhouse, Regis was out of his mind and attacked Satchel. And while Satchel led him upstairs, the others, unsure of what was going on, fled to the cellar, barricaded the door, and planned to stay there until help came.
Ben found Satchel’s body upstairs while looking for a gun to match some bullets he’d found, who had shot himself in the head before being partially devoured by Regis, leading to all that blood and the stray hand, which was done with the very same repeating rifle Ben now has in his possession.
Things degenerate from there as Ben and Harry Cooper take an immediate dislike to each other as they fight over the next best course of action. Cooper wants everyone to return to the basement, where they can hide and be safe; while Ben says no, that’s a deathtrap with no means of escape, and insists they should all remain upstairs, where they can barricade the doors and windows against the ghouls, who are slowly massing outside, with the cellar being their last fallback resort.
They also scratch together the barest bones of an escape plan with the truck when Tom reveals there’s a gas pump near the barn; but they’ll need to find the keys first since his uncle always kept it padlocked, which prove maddeningly elusive until they rifle the pockets of the deceased. A plan the belligerent Cooper calls insane. An opinion the equally belligerent Ben does not want to hear.
Thus, the internal battle-lines for this pissing contest are soon drawn as the Coopers remain locked downstairs, while everyone else stays upstairs, who quickly work to shore up their defenses, not realizing all the noise they are making, nailing whatever they can find over the windows, is only attracting more and more ghouls.
In
the search for more barricading materials, they find a TV upstairs,
plug it in, but every channel is showing a standard Emergency Broadcast
System holding signal with instructions to stay tuned for further
developments.
Later,
Cooper finds it, too, only now an incredulous newscaster is going over
the initial reports that some kind of virus is causing the dead to come
back to life; a report the CDC vehemently denies.
When he tries to bring the TV downstairs, Ben assumes he’s trying to sneak it into the basement. Cooper denies this, saying he brought it down for everyone to watch. They fight, and the TV is destroyed. This one is on Ben, though, as Cooper rightfully points out he wouldn’t be able to get any reception down in the basement.
Meanwhile, Helen Cooper learns of the plan to gas-up the truck and wants to help search for those keys since Sarah’s fever is only getting worse; but her asshole of a husband won’t let her, and then ends this conversation with the back of his hand.
Now, I believe it was author Danny Peary who first popularized the notion of the ultimate irony of Night of the Living Dead '68 when he included the film in his seminal book, Cult Movies (1981). “Cooper is a cowardly bully, and Ben is brave and concerned about the welfare of others in the house; so we side with Ben,” says Peary. “Yet, if we were in the house with those two men, maybe we should think again.
“It took me many years to realize this, but Ben, our hero, turns out to be terribly wrong when he adamantly tells everyone that they have a better chance for survival if they remain upstairs with him instead of following Cooper’s advice and locking themselves in the basement. Everyone dies as a result of following Ben’s lead of staying upstairs -- and ironically, Ben alone survives the night and keeps away from the ghouls by locking himself in the basement. Has anyone else noticed this?"
I honestly hadn’t put all of that together until I read Peary’s book. Of course, this really doesn’t work out for Ben either in the original film with that pisser of an ending. But I think the main thing Romero was trying to get across was it didn’t matter whose plan they followed because either was doomed to failure due to human nature and basic instincts.
If there had been more cooperation and coordination in securing the house, would everyone have made it? Would the mad dash for the gas pumps have worked if only Ben hadn’t fallen out of the truck? And if they all wound up in the basement, they would’ve still had the Sarah problem to deal with.
It’s an insidious combination of Murphy’s Law, where anything that could go wrong will go wrong, and exponentially at that, where any attempt to fix things only makes the situation infinitely worse as things snowball from there -- for no matter how sound the plan, once the wheels come off they come off completely, cinematically speaking, in what I have affectionately dubbed Romero 101.
And so, realizing this, I think, Romero makes the biggest change to the remake by introducing a third option through Barbara, our new voice of reason, who notes how slow and uncoordinated the ghouls are, saying they could easily walk right by them and head to safety. But no one is listening, because they’re too busy squabbling like school children.
And when she insists this is a viable option, she is out-voted for an attempt at the gas pump, which does not go well at all when the keys they secured turn out to be the wrong ones, leading to the accidental deaths of Tom and Judy, whose remains are then consumed by the ghouls, and leaves Ben locked outside while Barbara and Cooper fight over the only remaining rifle inside.
But Ben manages to get back in just as Cooper secures the rifle, who intends to lock himself and his family in the cellar and leave the others up here to die as the ghouls start breaking in unabated.
Unfortunately, by now, Sarah has succumbed to the fever and has turned into a ghoul, who just tore the throat out of her mother and ambled upstairs. Seeing she is no longer human, Ben tells Cooper to shoot her before it’s too late -- but he can’t.
Somewhat conveniently, one of the first ghouls to break into the house is a police officer; and as Barbara and Ben subdue him and get his pistol, Ben takes aim at Sarah, who is drawing a bead on Barbara. And so, Cooper shoots Ben, Barbara secures the cop’s even more convenient back-up piece and shoots Sarah in the head. They exchange more fire, Ben is hit again, as is Cooper as he flees upstairs.
Reaching Ben, Barbara says they can escape on foot together but his wounds are too grave. Promising to find help, Barbara wrestles off the dispatched ghoul’s gun-belt and makes her way outside before the house is overrun by a horde of the undead.
Upstairs, Cooper finds the pull-down entrance to the attic and hides. Ben, meanwhile, retreats to the basement, where he has to shoot a reanimated Helen.
Taking a seat, he lights his last cigarette and turns on a transistor radio, which gives the latest updates; how it is now confirmed by multiple sources that the dead are indeed coming back to life and cannibalizing the living. Ben then has a morbid chuckle when he finds the proper keys to the gas-pump, clearly labeled, hanging on the wall.
Barbara, meanwhile, is proven right when she manages to easily escape the farmhouse deathtrap on foot and eventually comes upon a group of armed men out hunting down the ghouls, where she discovers one of the undead they’d already bagged was Johnny.
Come the dawn, Barbara callously watches as the undead are cruelly toyed with and looted by the large posse organized to systematically hunt them all down, wondering out loud who the real monsters are.
She’s there when they reach the farmhouse, just as two rednecks finish chainsawing through the barricaded cellar door. But her hopes are dashed when Ben stumbles out of the darkness, his flesh pasty, his eyes bled white, and the others quickly gun him down.
Unable to watch this, she ducks into another room, where she runs into Cooper, alive and well, who thanks her for coming back for him.
And as a way of saying your welcome, Barbara shoots the man in the head, telling the others she has another ghoul for the fire, bringing our macabre tale to an end.
I’m not sure if a lot of people realize how close Tom Savini came to doing the special-effects for Night of the Living Dead back in 1967.
Inspired by the Lon Chaney Sr. biopic, Man of a Thousand Faces (1957), Savini soon became obsessed with doing special makeup-effects on himself and his friends.
“I know for a fact that in that theater, that day, something happened [to me],” Savini revealed in an interview with Marylynn Uricchio for The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (June 4, 1981). “I was born again, I went mad, I went crazy. I went passionately into makeup and read everything I could find about Lon Chaney.”
“I wanted to be Lon Chaney,” Savini later emphasized (The Indiana Gazette, August 16, 1983). “I went nuts. I flipped out. I wanted to be a makeup man so bad.”
Tom Savini.
A Pittsburgh native, Savini first got on Romero’s radar when the filmmaker was scouring the local high schools, looking for actors for his proposed film Whine of the Fawn, a romantic, Bergman-esque period piece that was eventually shelved in favor of doing a horror movie instead. When Savini got wind of this, he showed his special makeup portfolio to Romero, who was so impressed he agreed to let the young man work on the film.
But fate intervened when Savini’s enlistment came up just as the film was going into production. And so, Savini went off and was inducted into the Army instead, who eventually sent him to Vietnam, where he served as a combat cameraman. “My job was to shoot images of damage to machines and to people,” said Savini in an interview with Sarah Lolley for The Pittsburgh Gazette (October 11, 2002). “Through my lens, I saw some hideous [stuff]. To cope with it, I guess, I tried to think of it as special-effects."
Using the lens of the camera to separate himself emotionally from the real life horrors he was witnessing to preserve his sanity, Savini had some trouble turning those emotions back on when his tour of duty ended and he once more became a civilian. He was, according to his own self-description, for all intents and purposes, a walking zombie.
And all of that greatness to come could’ve been lost if not for a chance screening of Midnight Cowboy (1969), whose heartbreaking ending opened the floodgates as he broke down outside the theater and released all of that bottled-up tension and anguish.
Then, as part of the continuing healing process, Savini would tap into these experiences when he started working on makeup-effects again, shooting for the same kind of anatomical realism that he saw first hand; first for Bob Clark and Alan Ormsby on Deathdream (alias Dead of Night, 1971) and Deranged (1974), Sean Cunningham on Friday the 13th (1980), Bill Lustig for Maniac (1981), and, of course, for Romero in Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead.
“It was clearly excellent work, really wonderful stuff,” said Romero (Uricchio, 1981), who first officially worked with Savini on Martin, an offbeat tale of a serial killer wrapped in a vampire’s clothing. “He clearly had a creative sense for fantasy. More importantly, he was very enthusiastic.”
“Sometimes I feel like a hired assassin, always on the move,” mused Savini (Uricchio, 1981). “I get a phone call from someone who says, ‘Tom, can you come to Florida, there’s somebody we want you to kill.’ And I grab my suitcase and get on the plane.”
Now, when Romero first contacted him about the proposed remake of Night of the Living Dead (1990), Savini assumed he wanted him to do the special effects; but, nope, Romero had hand-picked him to direct the sequel, feeling he was ready to take that next step.
Said Kehr (October, 1990), “By choosing not to direct the remake, Romero has, in effect, refused to allow it to supplant the original, which is a wise decision. However naive and occasionally clumsy the first film might be, it represents a valuable moment both in Romero’s development and in American culture; no other of Romero’s films, from the brilliant Martin through the two features that completed the Dead trilogy, has had the same wide-ranging impact or occupies quite the same place in American mythology.”
By
then, Savini had some directing experience, having done three episodes of
Romero's anthology TV series, Tales from the Dark Side (1983-1988). But even though their intentions for the Dead remake were noble, it was still a minefield Savini wasn’t sure he wanted to mess around in.
“There are advantages and disadvantages in doing a remake," Savini confessed to Uricchio (The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, October 19, 1990). "One, it’s a classic before you shoot it, so maybe there’s a guaranteed audience." On the other hand, "I was reading in a magazine that ‘Tom Savini is directing the ill-advised remake of Night of the Living Dead.’ I was like, What do they mean by that? The thinking is, you’ve got a classic here, don’t mess with it. Don’t touch it."
But, “I [also] kept reading George was doing it for financial reasons. What he meant by that was there were a lot of investors in the first film who didn’t get anything. And the movie was making zillions. Now if the [new] movie makes out, they can [finally / hopefully] pay back those investors.”
There were also precedents of other Cult Classic Creature Features being remade with quantifiable improvements over the originals and the sun still rising the next day: John Carpenter had remade The Thing from Another World (1951); Philip Kaufman did a rehash of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956); David Cronenberg had a nauseatingly delightful spin on The Fly (1958); and Chuck Russell and Frank Darabont had defrosted The Blob (1958) for another go ‘round of creeping, leaking, gliding, sliding, and mass consumption.
And so, Savini eventually came around; and when Romero gave the novice director the revised script, he said to use it as a framework and gave his blessing to change whatever he wanted to, saying this version of Night of the Living Dead would be a Tom Savini movie. “He handed me the script and said this is your movie,” said the novice director (Uricchio, 1990). “I will answer any question you have honestly, said Romero, but use it as a guide and do what you want.”
The Pittsburgh Press (May 19, 1990).
But this kind of hands off approach didn’t pan out, as Savini was kind of left hung out to dry and would later claim only 40-percent of what he wanted to do wound up in the finished film. And without Romero on the set to protect him, who was wrapping up Two Evil Eyes (1990) and getting the ball rolling on The Dark Half (1993), he was pressured by others to make all kinds of changes. Some were novel, most were not, and none of them really panned out.
“The living dead have become comical,” Savini told Jeffrey Bair for The Record Searchlight (June 8, 1990), fearing flesh-eating ghouls didn’t inspire real terror anymore.
“Look at Michael Jackson’s Thriller (1982) or Joe Piscopo in the beer commercial.” This was in reference to an advert featuring Piscopo that was a send up of both the original Night of the Living Dead and O’Bannon’s Return of the Living Dead, which had debuted in 1988 around Halloween.
Shot in black-and-white, zombies arise and chase the comedian into a familiar farmhouse, where he appeases their chant of “Miller Lite” instead of “Brains!” by emptying a fridge conveniently stocked to the brim with the beverage.
“People laugh at that,” explained Savini. “That’s not what we want. I don’t even like the word ‘zombie.’ It conjures up images of voodoo and all that -- mystical stuff. If you look at our script, we only use the word ‘zombie’ once. We call them ‘the dead people or ‘the dead things.’”
But the remake itself got off on the wrong foot from the first fade in. One of the things that made the original so creepy was the undead appeared to be normal -- until they tried to eat you. They were us, and we were them.
Here, after a bit of misdirection, the cemetery zombie looks like some kind of hideous mutant and comes off just as silly as his colorized counterpart on that Roach VHS tape. Imagine if it had been the other, more normal looking cadaver that approached them first as its clothes slowly fell away, revealing those autopsy scars. That might’ve been something clever, but, nope. Screw subtlety -- even though Savini and special effects supervisors John Vulich and Everett Burrell and their Optic Nerve team claimed they were trying to keep the grue to a minimum.
“This is not a splatter movie. It’s like a film noir -- but it’s in color,” said Savini (Bair, 1990). Added Vulich, “We’re using the idea that less blood is worth more. I think a film’s more scary if it’s realistic -- like the girl next door coming after you.”
And while the blood wasn’t necessarily flying the FX more than overcompensated when it came to depicting how the walking dead died the first time only to be reanimated by as of yet clearly undefined means -- one of the things the remake did right; leaving the cause to conjecture.
“Just when people who have seen the first film think they know what happens next it doesn’t -- or it happens in a different way,” Savini claimed in an interview with Barbara Vancheri of The Pittsburgh Post Gazette (May 24, 1990). “There are twists and turns they won’t expect, and new zombie characters. The zombies have more personality.”
“That seemed to have led to the success of the first film, the zombies were very natural. They looked like they could’ve been your next door neighbors,” Vulich explained (Vancheri, 1990). “All of us thought the zombie thing had been done into the ground. People had been very skeletal, rotted, wrinkly, and that’s not necessarily the way people look as they decay and die.”
One makeup was based off a 14 year old who died when her face got caught in an escalator, while others were modeled after an emaciated death camp survivor from World War II.
Thus, from the very beginning, it becomes quite obvious that the special-effects would be dictating the story and not the other way around. Something that also plagued Romero’s Dead sequels -- but I believe I am in the minority on that opinion.
All the subtle social commentary was gone, all the characters were reduced to screeching assholes or surly dickheads or idiots or non-entities -- with Helen Cooper taking the worst of this; and her iconic death is reduced to a mere cutaway and some blood splatter on the wall -- over a trowel no less.
However! To be fair, according to Savini's DVD commentary, there was a much more elaborate scene planned here, where Helen would try to perform CPR only to have her lips bitten off during the mouth to mouth resuscitation. And as she fell away, she would grab the trowel to defend herself, only to lower it away, unable to strike her daughter, and allow the ghoul to feed unchallenged. But, the production simply ran out of time and money.
And so, the otherwise fairly talented if relatively unknown cast never stood a chance but did the best they could under these dubious circumstances.
Tony Todd was a fan of the original film and appreciated it because, one, it scared the hell out of him; and two, it was among the few films of that era to feature a Black actor in the lead whose race wasn’t a factor in the role. (Sub-textually, sure, but overtly, no.)
“Duane Jones hit the mark with that one.” Todd recalled to Annette Bassette for The New Pittsburgh Courier (October 27, 1990). “It was one of the films that helped inspire me to be an actor. I saw a Black man carrying a film. I saw this was something that was possible. He played an alienated Black man fighting an enemy that was not his own"
The New Pittsburgh Courier (Otober 27, 1990).
As for the remake, the theme remained intact. Said Todd, "There are so many points of view. We don’t listen to each other. The question in the film finally becomes, Who is the [real] enemy?" Todd, of course, would later go on to carve out his own genre niche as the villain in Candyman (1992).
His co-star Patricia Tallman was an actress and a stunt-woman and a long time friend of Savini’s, who had worked together with him and Romero before on Knightriders. She deserved better than her character was written -- though I must say Tallman is one of the best cinematic screamers I have ever heard.
In an interview with Yardena Arar for The Oakland Tribune (October 25, 1990), Tallman admitted she didn’t really like scary movies. “They give me nightmares,” she said. “I don’t enjoy being frightened. I don’t think that’s fun.”
Being in a scary movie, however, was a different story -- even though Tallman had some trouble adjusting to some of her co-stars. “We all broke for meals at the same time, and I wasn’t the only one who would not eat with the zombies. In fact, we got to the point where the zombies would have a totally separate area to go eat.”
Todd, meanwhile, found inspiration from the enthusiasm of these gung-ho extras, telling Bair (June, 1990), “I’ve become jaded as an actor, but being out here really rejuvenates me. I watch these extras and it’s so important to them. It’s the most major thing they’ve done in their lives, and they’re putting a lot into it.”
During the production, Todd and Tallman would keep a daily tally of how many zombies they dispatched; the daily winner getting to claim the front seat of the transport van that took them back to their accommodations. By most accounts, Tallman spent the most time in the coveted seat.
Meanwhile, William Butler and Katie Finneran are fine in their roles as the disposable hayseeds, but Tom Towles, fresh off an arresting performance as the degenerate Otis in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986), is stuck in one gear as, essentially, the villain of the piece. And McKee Anderson and Heather Mazur’s characters are reduced to absolute nothing, and that’s a shame.
So all we have then is a familiar story that moves along in fits and spurts as we wait for the next set-piece to pop-up and pop-off -- the most embarrassing when the strident Barbara takes up the gun to prove that what they’re dealing with were no longer human, even when they recognize those attacking them, as she puts several slugs into a ghoul before finally taking the head-shot.
Sadly, I think Barbara’s change into a mini-Rambo was less of a progressive ideal and more to do with copying Sigourney Weaver’s role in Aliens (1986). This could have led to an interesting parable when the men don’t listen to her due to her gender, even though she is obviously right; neither upstairs nor downstairs is safe, and ignoring her winds up getting everyone else killed. It was an interesting idea that was just kind of left to go wherever it wanted to -- like a charged fire-hose with no one manning it.
And this lack of focus and a general malaise seems to get worse and worse as the film progresses; and after an interminable middle act where they board up the house with the most windows of ever, the film seems to be both indifferent and in quite the hurry to hit all the familiar story points and to just get this all over with as soon as possible. Turns out that wasn’t too far from the truth:
“I still have nightmares that I’m still on that movie set, directing that movie, and waiting for the sun to come up so I could just stop shooting and go home,” said Savini (Kane, 2010). It didn’t help matters that Savini was going through some personal issues -- a nasty divorce and custody battle, at the time.
“It was the worst experience of my life. Everybody had a different idea, or wanted a favor. I’ve learned that even if they’re your best friends, if it's your vision, then you should stick with it because nobody stabs you in the back worse than your best friends."
Even
the ghouls, mostly local recruits, proved to be a bit of a disaster. In
the interest of proper biology, Savini wanted them to move as if they
were relearning to walk and breaking out of rigor. And to those ends he
hired Tim Carrier and Barbara Bailey, a couple of his old drama
professors at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University, to head up a
“Zombie Class” to teach the extras how to move.
“If
you died and came back to life, you would move in a shadow of how you
once moved,” said Carrier (Bair, 1990), who also played one of the
cemetery ghouls. “But you’re learning to work with a brand new body, and
you don’t know how it operates, and that’s difficult.”
The Pittsburgh Press (October 18, 1990).
Carrier and Bailey encouraged the extras to “be creative and avoid the zombie cliches” of walking with stiff legs and extended arms. Said Carrier, “Human nature made the teaching task easy. I find there’s a little zombie lurking inside all of us.”
Again, another good idea that didn’t work out as the free-for-all movements didn’t translate so well on film and the decision was made to just have them move slowly like the originals.
With a goal of an October release right before Halloween, pre-production on Night of the Living Dead began in February, 1990, with principle shooting starting on April 23, at the Hopewell Cemetery, with the majority of the shoot taking place at a rural farmhouse in Hopewell county, where the makeup department set up in the barn to mass produce the living dead. And meals would be served in the basement of a nearby church.
Meanwhile, as filming finally wrapped and post-production began, “People asked me: Is it going to be gory? Is it going to be a bloodbath?” noted Savini (Uricchio, 1990). “I would remind them that the first movie wasn’t, except for the intestine scene. But I also said, With my name on the film and with George’s name, fans are going to expect that. So we did three, maybe four shots. We hoped to appease the fans, the gore fanatics.”
Alas, to add even more misery to the production, the film was initially slapped with an NC-17 rating due to the graphic nature of those special-effects supervised by Vulich, a protege of Savini’s, who had worked with him on Day of the Dead.
Said Savini (Uricchio, 1990), “We finished this movie just two days before the new NC-17 rating came out, and I was a little dismayed. The ratings board said, and this was part of their criteria: any splashing, any blood zooming out, we will always cut … I was in LA when it had to be cut because you can’t fight for stuff like that. You can go in and say, well, look, they’re zombies. They can only be killed by a shot in the head. So we have to show head hits or people will think they’re still alive. No one was there to argue. No one was there to resubmit it 20 times. But we wanted an R anyway. We didn’t want to alienate the kids.”
The Houston Chronicle (October 19, 1990).
Thus and so, to get the needed R-rating, most of these set-pieces were neutered or removed altogether, leaving a movie that was just kind of … there. When it was finally released, critics were mixed but the majority agreed on one thing:
“Why anybody thought the world needed a remake of George Romero’s 1960 black-and-white cult classic is beyond me,” queried Jim Butler for The Bryan-College Station Eagle (October 21, 1990). “This version -- in ‘living’ color' -- provides some legitimate scares for the first 30 minutes, then gets bogged down with the battle going on among the not-yet-dead inside the besieged country house … For the most part, Night of the Living Dead pits people with bodies and little control of their brains against people with brains and little control of their bodies.”
The Syracuse Herald Journal (October 22, 1990).
And Jim Leydon of The Houston Post bemoaned to the tune of Dooley Wilson’s “As Time Goes By” (October 22, 1990), “It’s still the same old story, a fright that’s cheap and gory, a case of redo and revive. There may be something new George Romero wanted to add, some different angle he wished to explore by co-writing and co-producing a remake of his classic 1968 cheapie-creepy, Night of the Living Dead. But what appears on screen is merely a rehashed monster mash, a slightly more expensive and brightly colored version of a grisly thriller that, all things considered, seemed a lot more viscerally effective in low-budget black-and-white. This new Night of the Living Dead is neither strikingly good nor spectacularly bad. Rather, it is, quite simply, unnecessary.”
“If you shivered at the fiendish cannibalism in the 1968 horror classic, there is no reason to see the 1990 version of the same movie,” warned Candice Russell for The South Florida Sun-Sentinel (October 24, 1990). “The differences between the two are what you might expect. Instead of black-and-white film stock, this spectacle of terrorizing zombies and oozing gore on their bodies is in color. The language is rougher. The violence is more explicit. And yet, Night of the Living Dead is a redundancy upon itself. The original was original.”
The Capital Times (October 19, 1990).
Desmond Ryan of The Philadelphia Inquirer agreed, saying (October 23, 1990), “That’s precisely the problem with trying to remake Night of the Living Dead. Corpses beyond counting have been piled up in the fright films in the intervening 22 years. What shocked us then barely registers now. The remake repeats rather than refreshes Romero’s scenario of a group of survivors barricaded into a lonely farmhouse. The countryside teems with zombies who lay siege to the building. The first time around, Romero injected into the proceedings a droll commentary that is only faintly echoed here. Most remakes are merely redundant; this one is a grave error.”
And Doug Brode of The Syracuse Post-Standard (October 27, 1990) felt “If it ain’t broke. Don’t fix it. Them-thar words of wisdom whizzed through this critic’s mind less than five minutes into Night of the Living Dead, an expensive but ineffectual remake of George Romero’s cheapo-creepy cult classic ... Though no one has ever accused Romero of suffering from an abundance of good taste, or claimed his film was a subtle work of intellectual subtexts, then again it’s pretty difficult to miss the remarkable emotional intensity, the perfect pacing, the honest to goodness horror of it all in his 1968 mini-epic. Even the film’s shoddy production values somehow worked in its favor, adding to the neat, seamy feel of the piece. It was perfect -- or, at least, perfect of its type. Which means that a remake by anyone else could serve little purpose but to further heighten the reputation of the original. And that’s precisely the case here.”
The Oakland Tribune (October 25, 1990).
In his review for The Chicago Tribune (October 19, 1990), Kehr wrote, “It’s doubtful that, had this new version been the film released in 1968, Night of the Living Dead would have achieved anything like the notoriety it has. Savini’s direction is sturdy enough, but it is too literal (not surprisingly, he concentrates on the gore effects) to carry the same richness of meaning and strength of association. The characters are small and remote; their experiences are not shared but observed.”
But Kevin Thomas felt the remake had merit, writing in The Los Angeles Times (October 19, 1990), “George Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead has deservedly become a horror classic, a work of relentless terror in which seven people, holed up in a western Pennsylvania farmhouse, fight a seemingly losing battle against an invasion of remorseless flesh-eating ghouls. No remake could hope to be as scary as the original, but the smart new remake suggests that Romero and Tom Savini, the veteran horror makeup maestro making a dynamic directorial debut, realized this going in. And well they should.
The Tampa Tribune (October 21, 1990).
“What they have done -- quite shrewdly -- is to play for a dark, saving humor when the living start coming at us in Living Color … In a very real sense Romero and Savini have taken the hard, cynical humor audiences have come to expect in comedy and action [movies] and confronted us with it, showing us what it reveals about ourselves. In short, this remake is to the original what Philip Kaufman’s 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers was to the 1956 Don Siegel film: not to copy or attempt to improve on a classic but to discover what it has to say to us today. The impact of the new Night is allegorical rather than visceral, its blood and guts patently phony no matter how skillfully designed.”
And in conclusion, “While this Night hasn’t the chilling, almost cinema-verite credibility of the original, it is certainly a well-sustained entertainment.”
The Huntsville Times (October 25, 1990).
And we’ll give Michael Price of The Fort Worth Star-Telegram the last word: “Substantially more than a gratuitous retread, the new Night of the Living Dead benefits from the subdued color cinematography by Frank Prinzi (the original was in black-and-white). Like the source, this version works because it’s not strictly about walking cadavers; they are the macguffin, the unnerving symbol of ordinary terrors ... And by the way: don’t give away the new twist on the original’s twist ending.”
Whoops.
Look, I don’t hate this remake. Despite the complaining, I don’t think it’s all that terrible but it’s not really great either; and the only thing I found truly unforgivable was the terrible synth-score by Paul McCollough. And while it didn’t really light up the box-office, it did make some money. And as of September 2025, a complete uncut version has been released on Blu Ray.
I just wanted it to be better than it is, a little riskier, a little less content, a little more willing to veer away from the ingrained narrative, but given the circumstances under which it was made I understand why it was not. Better.
However, when I first saw it in the theater, I found the changed ending oddly cathartic in a weird way; a chance to not only escape this inevitable madness but to survive it indefinitely. Price called it “a surprising tangent away from the original’s cowering helplessness.” That’s what the film really needed. More of that kind of outside-the-box thinking.
And if nothing else, the Night of the Living Dead remake is much more palatable than what Russo and Streiner unleashed a few years later with that gawdawful 30th Anniversary “Special Edition” -- which we will someday take behind the woodshed and give the proper shellacking it deserves, where any sympathy I had for these guys over that copyright snafu was lost. And lost for good. Mostly.
Originally posted on October 19, 2020, at Micro-Brewed Reviews.
Night of the Living Dead (1990) 21st Century Film Corporation :: Columbia Pictures / EP: Menahem Golan, Ami Artzi, George A. Romero / P: John A. Russo, Russell Streiner / AP: Christine Forrest / LP: Declan Baldwin / D: Tom Savini / W: George A. Romero, John A. Russo / C: Frank Prinzi / E: Tom Dubensky / M: Paul McCollough / S: Tony Todd, Patricia Tallman, Tom Towles, McKee Anderson, William Butler, Katie Finneran, Heather Mazur, Bill Mosely
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