#31: Night of the Living Dead (1968)

It's always hard to find a good closing movie for October's Horror Movie Review-A-Thon.  There's so many old favorites I want to include, and I know most everyone is out doing Halloween stuff or, if you're me, watching other horror movies.  I've never reviewed tonight's movie before (that I recall), but it's certainly a lot of people's favorite.  I caught it on Turner Classic Movies.

Night of the Living Dead (1968) begins like most horror movies, with people in a car heading to an unknown destination.  When the final destination isn't the Twilight Zone, most of the people in the vehicles usually end up dead.  In this case, it's a brother and sister heading to a distant cemetery to honor their deceased father.  There's some intial dialogue, and then it's all "THEY'RE COMING TO GET YOU, BARBARA!  THEY'RE COMING, BARBARA!  THEY'RE COMING TO GET YOU!"

Everyone knows the line now, because this movie made it famous.  It's in black and white, which I don't find ideal, but that's really the only issue I have with it.  Like Sabrina says in her opening dialogue in the Netflix series, back in the old days, people were under the assumption that long-dead folks were still suffering from rigor mortis, so the zombies moved slowly.  Fast-movies zombies weren't featured until Return of the Living Dead (1985), which not only made the dead fast, but smart, making them much more of a threat.  They're slow as dead folks in this movie, and typically overpower the usual adult male through strength of numbers.  Still, there's a lot of them, and in the dark, they are hard to see.  They don't feel pain, or pity or remorse, and they absolutely WILL NOT STOP, until Sarah Connor is dead!  Oh.  Wait.  Wrong movie.

Effects were good for the day, acting was decent, and the plot was good enough to spawn the modern zombie horror movie genre, so who can fault this movie?  Not me.  It even passes the re-watchability test.  I always wonder what happened to the brother, who hit his head on a gravestone at the beginning of the movie and was knocked unconscious, but I don't guess they ever show him again.  Or maybe I missed it at some point.  There's even some minor nudity (okay, I saw a butt).  Like most horror movies, there's also a lot of conflict amongst the living, on how to deal with the zombie threat.  Or, maybe the other movies are all subconsciously trying to emulate this movie, who knows?

There are a lot of movies that try and encapsulate the holiday, and I think John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) and Trick 'r Treat (2007) do it better than most, but this one isn't too bad.  The title of the movie is Night of the Living Dead, which is basically a summary of what's supposd to happen to the spirits of the dead on All Hallow's Eve, in that they return to walk the earth once more.  Also, Barbara and her brother are at the cemetery to honor their deceased father, which sums up the other holiday around this time of year, the Mexico's Day of the Dead holiday.  Then, all the living people in the movie spend the night in a boarded-up house trying to avoid the windows, listening to the social media of the time talking about zombies!  Which, is pretty much how I avoid trick or treaters, and save all the Halloween Candy for myself.  :-D  What's more Halloween than that, I ask you?

That's it for this year's OHMRAT!  Thirty one horror movie reviews in 31 days!  Yeehawww!  I feel like I just ran a marathon 26 miles up the slopes of Mr. Everest, without oxygen!  Yeah, when you sit in a chair and play computer games all day, any activity is a workout.  :-)  As soon as I finish Sabrina and the Haunting of Hill House on Netflix, I'll review those for you, if I'm not in a diabetic coma from all the Halloween Candy.  Happy Halloween, everybody!