Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [21]
Romero cleared this up. You need to be afraid of his zombies for a very simple reason: they wanted to eat you and chew on your bones. More to the point, they wanted to eat everyone. They were going to take over the world. And when they ate, it was messy. One of the original investors in the movie was a meat packer, and the buckets of animal innards that he donated to the production were put to extensive use. The zombies feasted on human flesh with a passionate abandon. They looked like they were in heat, and Romero was very smart in using the extreme gore to punctuate a scary scene. It was a cheap trick, but it gave audiences something to groan about. “Gore to me was a slap in the face. A wake-up, an alarm clock,” Romero says. “You’re romping through the film and then—whop!—it stops you.”
The image of a child feeding on her father and a mob of undead carries obvious political implications, even if it was not intentional. “We were young bohemians, so in that sense we were automatically against authority,” Romero says inside his modest Toronto apartment, while flashing a childlike grin that seems at odds with his severe black glasses and intimidating height (almost six and a half feet). “But I didn’t think it was that political.” John Russo, who wrote the script, is blunter about the suggestion that the movie had a point to make about the times: “All that stuff’s bullshit.”
So why was Night of the Living Dead taken so seriously as a social commentary? It helped that it was shot in black and white, which made it appear arty to certain audiences. Most horror by that time was in color. But the political readings of the movie and its resulting success were mostly due to the fact that it was one of the rare movies of the day with an African American hero. Duane Jones plays the defiant Ben with the dignity of a civil rights leader. Fighting off an army of the recently dead before being gunned down by a white mob, he stands erect and proud in the face of madness. In the original screenplay, the race of the hero was entirely incidental. To the extent that Romero thought about the character in any depth, what was in his mind was a white truck driver, but when Jones auditioned, plans changed. “He simply gave the best performance,” Romero says.
Jones may have distrusted Romero’s motives, suspecting he was exploiting his race. He insisted on playing a proud man who stole a truck to escape as opposed to a crude truck driver. Romero allowed him to change the script, but they did argue over the scene where Ben slaps the blond Barbara to calm her down. “Duane said: ‘You’re asking me to hit a white woman. You know what’s going to happen when I walk out of the theater?’” Romero says. “We kept saying: ‘Come on, it’s a new day.’”
Romero reconsidered this argument while inside a Ford Thunderbird convertible on his way to New York to try and sell his movie. He had planned to start with Columbia Pictures, make a tidy profit, and then concentrate on films that he really cared about. But his calculus changed after a bulletin came on the radio that reported that Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. Immediately Romero thought about the white men who gunned down his black hero as he considered the fallout of this terrible assassination. The newspapers would be full of headlines about racism and apocalypse and random, senseless violence. As a liberal,