Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Disclaimer: The original Night of the Living Dead (1968) review was posted January 13, 2022 and was updated July 15, 2025.

Prior to starting horror reviews and considerably increasing the variety of horror I watch I didn’t love old movies, in fact I avoided them. Once I watched Night of the Living Dead (1968) originally for this post I left shocked and sucked into a new world of horror I’d previously left unexplored. My intention when I wrote the post was to cover an important horror moment for Black creators in honor of MLK Day and continually came across Night of the Living Dead (1968) over and over. Only 3 years after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 eliminated barriers to voting for minorities, particularly Black Americans, Night of the Living Dead features a Black lead character. Being a trailblazer is not uncommon for horror films, creators, actors, and studios, often ushering in new eras of media by proving an audience exists for an idea. To watch Night of the Living Dead on HBO Max now click here.

Night of the Living Dead 1968 spoilers past this point

During my watches of this film it is striking to think of the fear inherent in watching Black characters in media as a Black person. My first watch through I sat with anticipation for something terribly racist or offensive to happen surrounding race but it never quite happened. I became so accustomed to bad endings at one point that I avoided Black media all together, not wanting to indulge in media that exploited the pain and suffering through stereotypes, brutality, and lack of representation in stories about Black Americans. Duane Jones delivers a strong leading portrayal of Ben, a man who is treated like any other man in the film and rather is judged by his actions or ideas rather than the color of his skin. His race isn’t even outright acknowledged in the movie and he’s just a leading survivor in the group facing a zombie apocalypse without any idea what zombies are.

The first character to be introduced is not Ben however and is actually another main character, Barbara, portrayed by Judith O’Dea and her brother Johnny, portrayed by actor Russell Streiner who is uncredited with the role. While visiting their family’s graves at a cemetery in Pennsylvania the siblings are attacked by a man who is recognizable in modern day as a zombie or undead person back to eat humans. In the eyes of the characters however they don’t know what a zombie is and are initially under the impression that a mad man is attacking rather than a viral outbreak. The zombie kills Johnny who famously taunts Barbara due to her fear about the cemetery just prior to the zombies appearing and in horror she flees to a nearby farmhouse. Inside the farmhouse she finds what appears to be a half eaten person, the farmhouse resident, on the stairs and Ben then arrives mistaking her for the resident. Notably rather than being rotting corpses the zombie like creatures look more like sullen, hypothermic in Black and White film people who are brainwashed in a hive mind state; but that is somehow scarier.

Ben is all action from jump and fights off the approaching horde that are headed right to the house and after making it inside boards up the windows and doors. Barbara is basically catatonic and unable to communicate anything, including that she saw the zombie in the graveyard eat and kill her brother. Ben searches the house and finds a rifle and Barbara finds there are people taking shelter in the farmhouse’s cellar. The group, Harry Cooper portrayed by Karl Hardman, his wife Helen portrayed by Marilyn Eastman, and their daughter Karen portrayed by Kyra Schon took shelter in the cellar after running from the zombie people who rushed their car and caused them to flee to safety in the farmhouse. Karen was bit by one of the zombies after their car got overturned, which from a modern perspective is obviously the beginning of her demise but to them they believe she is ill and injured rather than transforming into a ticking time bomb they’re locking themselves inside the farmhouse with. Also in the cellar are a couple, Tom portrayed by Keith Wayne and Judy portrayed by Judith Ridley, who also sought shelter in the farmhouse after hearing an emergency broadcast warning about the killings.

Tom and Ben jump into securing the house while Harry worries that being out of the cellar and above ground isn’t safe, scurrying back down to the cellar with Karen. More and more zombies gather outside of the farmhouse, building a scattered horde and making it increasingly unsafe to exit the house. Once they feel secure inside they listen to the radio and TV broadcasts and find reports of what is being called an “army of corpses” that are mass murdering people across the east coast. The broadcasts also report that armed militias of men are clearing the countryside of the undead, ensuring they are really dead by shooting them in the head or causing other damage to their brain or burning them. Information is also provided to them about survival centers they can travel to for safety and protection from the government.

The zombies are being attributed to reanimations resulting from a Venus space probe exploding and releasing radiation. Needing medical assistance or supplies for Karen the group resolves that Ben will go outside and refuel his car at a gas pump on the farm and then pick up the group and take them to the refugee camps. In the first ever preparing-for-the-zombie-battle prep the group makes a plan to get this done after back and forth about what the best course of action is. The plan they settle on is Ben’s—to have Harry stay inside and throw Molotov cocktails from a second story window to divert the zombies while him and Tom get into the truck and get to the gas pump. They’re fortunate that the undead in their universe are slow and rather unintelligent, groaning and stumbling along to the loud noises and movement.

Using torches and Molotov cocktails they’re able to burn the remaining undistracted undead as they pass safely to the pump to refuel the truck, but the gas spills and causes the pump and truck to catch fire in all the madness. Despite there being some time to flee Judy, who’d been rather needy up until that point and had tagged along on the mission, gets her jacket caught which causes her and Tom to be blown up. The explosion leaves only Ben alive and takes the truck out of the picture. Ben makes it back to the house but Harry is overly cautious (understandably) and doesn’t want to open the door and let him back in. Unfortunately for him Ben isn’t the one to play with and he breaks the door down and gets back inside anyways.

Back inside the surviving people try to come up with ways to get out of the situation safely but are interrupted by a less than encouraging news broadcast. The power cuts out during this broadcast, leaving them in the dark, and the zombies finally break into the house via the doors and windows in jarring fashion. All at once the house becomes a death trap rather than a sanctuary and everyone kicks into their own action, Harry grabbing Ben’s gun until to be shot by Ben. After being shot Harry goes back down to the cellar and dies with his daughter, Karen who then dies and then reanimates and then eats him. Rather than bitting her Karen stabs her mother to death, adding to these zombie’s lore and abilities while clarifying some intelligence exists.

Barbara and Ben are able to keep the horde out for some time after the family is dead but she is drug outside and away by the reanimated version of her brother, Jonny, from the start of the film. The horde is then inside the house and free to keep advancing towards Ben but he makes it down to the cellar and is able to kill Harry and Helen who’ve reanimated. Ben is able to survive the rest of the night and through to the morning when he emerges from the cellar once he hears guns and sirens outside and goes upstairs to get a lookout. In the most jaw dropping shock ending the armed group shoots Ben sniper style in through the upstairs window where he looks out to investigate the noise. The rescue team believes they’ve just killed another zombie and comes inside to check that all the zombies are dead, and no survivors remain. Ben’s body is thrown on the fire with the rest of the undead corpses, an unceremonious ending for the first big zombie movie protagonist.

While I did get this ending, and felt it was really effective at shocking and eliciting a strong response as well as the fact that horror movies don’t typically have happy endings. Generally when they do there’s usually one last remaining scene that implies things aren’t as finished as we’ve been led to believe or even worse than initially. I still wanted Ben to survive though! In large part because he did almost everything right in the zombie-apocalypse scenario and the reward should be surviving, not making it to the point of survival and then getting taken out by not-zombies. Since it is so close to the ending of the movie it didn’t sting as badly. We weren’t forced to watch the movie without Ben and at least we have a definitive conclusion to his story. The movie is entertaining, gross, and triumphant. I can’t imagine how mind breaking this would have been from the perspective of someone in 1968 sitting in the theatre without a zombie template.

The movie is entertaining and even from today’s perspective the gore is spot on and unsettling to watch while adding to the horror of the experience. Watching the black and white gore felt scarier at some points than over the top modern day horror gore of similar nature. I loved that Ben did what we would’ve recommended he do from our POV in the future, minus the not so planned attempt at the refueling of the truck. He has good instincts for defense and can critically think about outcomes based on their survival options, standing up for his opinion with the group. Although this is a good trait when he’s right ultimately he’s going to do what he thinks is best regardless and when that doesn’t work there is collateral like Tom and Judy. It is shocking to see him punch out Barbara but honestly, she had been pissing me off too and I can’t say I wouldn’t have done something similar for her to pull herself together in the bizarre circumstances they faced.

Although many a horror title has tempted the concept of a society unaware of zombies experiencing the zombie apocalypse, like The Walking Dead universe, Night of the Living Dead is the official first. There is a believability about this in this 1968 film that can’t be faked and is captured in the acting portrayals, makeup, costume design, and even zombie elements. The decisions don’t always follow the same lore we identity as standard for zombies today (unintelligent means of murder like an animal or sole desire to eat people as examples), but these random decisions make the film feel personally more unpredictable than a modern horror film. The film follows the characters learning about the undead assailants alongside the audience with new information reveals evenly spaced in the plot, hitting key inflection points.

The decisions of the family that run contrary to their best interest are believable, opening themselves up to being potentially doomed without realizing. The information that the recently deceased are susceptible to becoming undead also isn’t revealed until later around when Karen reanimates and officially poses a threat to the group that had only been suspected and theorized before. The family meets a tragic end all around but the scene of the daughter, Karen, consuming her mother, Helen, is visually and emotionally intense. The chain of events a clear path from action to consequence for Helen and the fact that she’s not killed by being eaten but rather stabbed with a gardening tool is savage and feels more personal. It feels like her daughter is still somewhere in that undead form harboring some sort of resentment that made her kill her in the way she did rather than a more zombie-like way.