Night of the Living Dead dir. George Romero

Oh joy, more zombies. I was consoled by the fact that this was a low budget movie, filmed in black and white with overly dramatic characters from the 60's. But I have to admit, I screamed a bit when the camera cut to the half-eaten face in the house. 

One thought bothered me in the beginning. Where were the guns? The house in which they were stuck in had a room fully devoted to animal heads, so the owner had to be a hunter or taxidermist. Thankfully the character, Ben, found it before I became too flustered over the fact that they didn't know how to search a house. But then again, they didn't even check the cellar, where four people were hiding.


Barbra was very irksome. Her role seemed pointless, she had nothing to contribute and just sat moping about. Even the people gave up on trying to talk to her, and just moved her about the house like an object in their way. She kept sputtering nonsense the entire film, only adding to everybody's paranoia. With all the fires they were starting, I thought for sure they'd accidentally set the house aflame. But instead just instead they just set the car on fire. Common sense seems to disappear when all of the characters start to panic. The first thing my roommate and I thought as the zombies began to eat the first two victims was; BBQ. The little girl becoming the zombie and devouring her parents was pretty creepy, but the stabbing scene wasn't well executed with the mother's echoing scream and the strange blood splatter on the wall. These were by far the quietest zombies I have ever seen in film, they didn't groan or yell much.

That was an expected, but depressing ending. The only person who could act was killed off. By the way all the townspeople were firing at anything that was moving, it was clear to see that Ben would be following the fate of all the others soon enough.

I felt that I was watching a long Twilight Zone episode, a conflict of interests amongst strangers in a trapped space in reminiscent of some of the episodes such as "The Old Man in the Cave" and "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?" (and oddly enough both episodes end in the death of the characters.) There is something about confined spaces that adds to the tension and people begin turning on one another. It was just missing Rod Serling appearing on screen with his cigarette, giving the audience the moral of the story.