Black History of “Night of the Living Dead” (1968)
This post has spoilers! Trigger/content warnings include police brutality, anti-Black racism, the American occupation of Haiti, and occasional swearing. All sources are cited at the end.
I usually hate zombie movies.
I know that’s unusual for a horror fan, but something about swarming post-apocalyptic hordes, plus a completely mindless hunger drive, plus a global disease or zombifying microbe terrifies me. (I saw Outbreak way too young and was so scared of a pandemic, even before COVID.) I have never and will never watch The Walking Dead, even though I’ve heard great things about it. Give me demons or cults or serial killers any day.
So I avoided George Romero’s 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead until I had the idea for this blog. Romero’s second zombie film, Dawn of the Dead, was too much for me when I watched it at a friend’s house in high school. But in a famous example of “colorblind” casting, a Black man leads the 1968 cast in a time of extensive social and political upheaval. Building on a centuries-long, racialized fear of the undead, the film also helped set the tone for decades of zombie media. Those were all things I wanted to know more about.
More than just undead.
Terror of zombies occupies a special place in the American fear landscape because it’s based on racism. I say racism, not race, because race is a social construct (1) and, anyway, not all Black people practice voudou.
The first zombie movie to come out of Hollywood was 1932’s White Zombie. (2) When the film was released, the United States had already occupied Haiti for 17 years, radically changing the nation’s economic, political, and physical landscape. In 1915, during the first year of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson ordered the U.S. Marines to invade Haiti, supposedly to restore political order. In reality, the U.S. sought economic, military, and racialized control over the island that had been independent since 1804. (3) Occupying forces conscripted Haitians to reshape their country’s landscape, ensured that U.S. Marines controlled the Haitian military, and murdered at least 11,500 Haitian citizens. (4)
For our conversation, I also want to talk about how Haitian practices of voudou became warped and presented to the American public. White Zombie centers white characters and bastardizes any traditional voudou ceremonies. Kyle Allkins writes, “As defined in early zombie films, a zombie is a person who is killed and brought back to life by magical means, typically in a Haitian Voudou culture….In these films, zombies are literally slaves, are often seen as natives, and most horribly (to earlier audiences) are often ambiguously innocent white women victimized on the threshold of marriage when they are ‘turned’ into zombies.” (5)
George Romero’s 1968 film is a departure from these early films in the genre in that the cause of the “zombification” is vaguely scientific, not magical. Although nobody in the movie ever says the word “zombie,” Night of the Living Dead is still about the (white) dead coming back to life and killing people to devour their flesh. (Which they actually do on camera at one point. It was a lot for me.) Duane Jones, who plays one of the central characters, is the only non-white person shown on camera for the duration of the film.
Boss.
Jones was cast as the film’s male lead, Ben, in a legendary instance of colorblind casting. Jones, a theatre teacher with a Master’s degree, helped reimagine his character from a blue-collar trucker to an intellectual, multi-dimensional strategist. (6) He presents Ben as a man in an objectively harrowing situation, full of nuance and desperation. He bludgeons three zombies within his first few minutes on screen and, at separate points, hits Barbara and his main challenger, Harry Cooper. Ben’s violence is executed largely out of a direct need for survival, but also as a fight for dominance. I never agree with violence against women, but I fully support him beating up Harry. I can’t stand that guy, but we’ll talk more about him later.
My favorite moments of Jones’ performance, though, are when he’s alone on the screen, sighing or wiping sweat from his forehead — visibly exhausted and human. Jones’ subtle movements and posture in these scenes translates well on camera and, as the viewer, I got a definite sense that Ben was traumatized, afraid, and reaching his limit. I loved when he was vulnerable to the audience, even if it was only for a few seconds. Of course, I also loved when he advocated for himself and asserted his hard-won authority. (Like the line, directed at Harry, “I’m boss up here.”)
Duane Jones was much more than this role, though, and he deserves to be remembered for his other work. He was a stage actor and theatre teacher, an intellectual and a professor. (7) He served as both the director at the Maguire Theater at the State University College at Old Westbury (New York) and the Richard Allen Center for Culture and Art’s artistic director. He was also the head of Antioch College’s Literature Department from 1972 to 1976. (8) He went on to star in theatre productions and other independent film productions. Jones died when he was only 51, leaving behind a legacy of loved ones, artistic influence, and respect among colleagues in a variety of fields. (9)
“You can’t start the car — Johnny has the keys.” GIRL.
But back to the film. We all watched Barbra’s brother Johnny die in the first 15 minutes. Later, she seems to be disassociating to the point that she hasn’t accepted his death and, when Ben asks about the car she drove earlier, she explains that it’s useless to go find it because “Johnny has the keys.” I want to be sympathetic to Barbra — she just watched her brother get murdered and is now under siege with a bunch of strangers. Maybe I’m just tired of the helpless, young white woman trope, and I know that the film is a product of its time, but it is interesting to contrast that characterization with Ben’s hyper-competence. We see her holding or caressing various pieces of lace — first a tablecloth, then a doily on the armrest of the couch — and Ben and the others have to work hard to get her to communicate and understand the gravity of the situation.
In real life and in many fictional situations, Black and Brown people aren’t afforded the physical or emotional space to process our trauma. We have to keep going if we’re going to stay alive. At this point in the film, Ben can go upstairs with the homeowner’s decomposing body, go to the cellar with a sick white child he doesn’t know, or stay on the ground floor with everyone else, but he can’t safely leave the house and he can’t take time alone to process what’s happened to him and the country. In reality and in fiction, white individuals and culture rely heavily on Black and Brown labor for day-to-day operations and ultimate survival. This was true when slavery was explicitly legal in the United States. It was true in the 20th century when Black women remained in white homes as under-paid maids and nannies, and unethical sharecropping “agreements” supported much of the agriculture industry. It’s true today when Black people perform unpaid mental and emotional labor in work, social, and online spaces. And it’s especially true when you consider the literal slave labor being exploited in American prisons and the mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The white capitalist social structure we live under in the United States requires our uncompensated labor, and so it refuses to acknowledge our humanity. In Night of the Living Dead, Ben isn’t just fighting for authority like a white man would in this situation — he’s fighting for survival and for the people he’s defending to see him as worthy of surviving with them. But I’d argue that their perception is less important than Ben’s perception of himself — he knows he should be in charge and, even when the undead come for every other member of the group and they fall one by one, he never questions his own capability. Dangerous racial and power dynamics still exist during a zombie apocalypse: everyone in that farmhouse grew up with cultural narratives and visual depictions of Black men as lazy, ignorant, inferior, and simultaneously violent and a direct threat to white women and the dominant way of life.
Loving v. Virginia, the landmark Supreme Court case that struck down state laws preventing interracial marriage, was only decided in 1967, one year before this movie came out. (10) Given the cultural perception of how Black men interact with white women, I was very surprised at how often Ben touches Barbra and I was absolutely shocked when he hit her. We’ve heard some version of the false story that Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy, verbally and/or physically accosted Carolyn Bryant, an adult white woman, in her family’s store in Mississippi. A 2017 book included her confession that he never did anything like that but by then, of course, it was over 60 years too late. (11) Her lie got a child tortured and killed and it reinforced white Americans’ entrenched view of Black men as extremely sexual and sexually aggressive. (12) In a culture that prized white women’s purity to a near-cultish level, this outrageous, racist narrative was a major threat.
F*CKING HARRY COOPER.
Although Ben doesn’t die first, the Black guy definitely doesn’t survive the film. In a truly heartbreaking misunderstanding, one of the Sheriff’s men shoots Ben in the head through an upstairs window. He made it through a harrowing night, leading a disparate band of unwilling participants in plan after plan for collective survival, only to be taken out by the cops. Ben was a capable, decisive presence, reduced to a monster by the white men who should have saved him. It’s a shocking scene — the only main character we’ve seen die on camera before was Harry. Ben’s death feels unreal, not only because it’s so sudden, but because it’s so unjust.
He even survived Harry locking him out of the house for a few crucial moments after the pickup truck explodes and their last best chance at escape goes up in flames. The look on Harry’s face when he sees Ben coming back alone is chilling. He makes the decision to protect himself and his family above anybody else, again showing his selfishness, small-mindedness, and obsession with being in charge.
I can’t say what I would do in a zombie apocalypse, and I hope I never have to find out. But I like to think I’d be able to put aside my petty personal concerns and do what’s best for everyone. Harry’s racism and fixation on maintaining his authority and his version of order in a national crisis leads him to consistently undermine Ben and his strategies (like when he calls Ben “crazy” over and over but doesn’t propose any reasonable solutions of his own).
I don’t know how much George Romero meant to do this, but the message for Black audiences is clear — even (or especially) in life-threatening situations, you can’t rely on white people to cooperate or simply put others first. Black people watching this film since 1968 don’t need to be told twice, but it’s interesting that the character of Ben repeatedly insists that other people are coming to save them. (Of course, when the “rescuers” arrive, they pathologize Ben and murder him, even though he’s pointing a gun and there’s no evidence that the undead know how to operate firearms.) But even Barbra, whom Ben defends nonstop from zombies and Harry Cooper, doesn’t verbally take his side or stand up for him and his leadership because she’s too wrapped up in her own mind. And I’m sure that, in her world, a Black man acting (mostly) protective and assertive is part of the mind-bending experience.
Of course, the cops who kill Ben will never be held accountable, even if they realized that he wasn’t actually a zombie when he was shot. Presumably, they toss him on the body bonfire and go about their “ghoul” hunt. The extent of Ben’s on-screen backstory is what he went through the day before the main action, when his zombie-related trauma started. We don’t get any indication that he has family or friends elsewhere, that he will be missed. His primary tie to the larger world is a class ring, but we don’t even know if that’s from a high school or a university. Ben is a character of the moment, and I’m very interested in how that writing plays out on a Black body.
Judy, the other young woman besides Barbra in the house, is making Molotov cocktails when she says to her partner Tom that her parents are going to worry if she can’t contact them. At the very beginning, Barbra and Johnny reminisce about family members and previous times they’ve been to the cemetery. But Ben’s experiences are all on-screen and he never expresses concern for anyone who isn’t also present. If a white actor had been cast as Ben, we could maybe have read this lack of context for this character as mysterious. As it is, even though Duane Jones had a hand in re-crafting his character, Ben is always alone in more ways than one. He is always the only Black person seen in this universe. Every other character is shown with a relative or loved one at some point, but Ben never even mentions anyone in his personal life. This is why I’m so excited about Black and Brown creators visibly taking up more space in film, television, art, and literature — when we tell our stories, we usually tell them fully.
For us, by us.
The Black body has been treated as an object for commodification, experimentation, gratification, and exploitation for centuries. Especially relevant to our conversation is the white Western perception of Black people assigned male at birth. Ben’s very presence in the house threatens Harry’s sense of order and his competency and authority.
Part of why I love Black and Brown horror is the control we have over the narrative. We get to make our own spaces (real or fictional), full of agency and self-actualization. Duane Jones made Night of the Living Dead his own and I love the pieces that have been coming out of the Black horror genre.
More to think about.
Below are some questions to ask yourself and prompts for further research. Email me at blackhorrific@gmail.com and follow me on TikTok (@domi_aaaaaa) if you want to talk more!
- Have you seen Night of the Living Dead? What did you appreciate or dislike about the film?
- What had you heard previously about the history of zombies and zombie narratives? What would you like to know more about?
- Is there a horror trope or topic that scares or disturbs you more than others? Why is that?
- What’s your opinion on colorblind casting?
Sources:
(1) Gannon, Megan. “Race Is a Social Construct, Scientists Argue.” Scientific American. February 5, 2016, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/race-is-a-social-construct-scientists-argue/.
(2) Gershon, Livia. “Colonialism Birthed the Zombie Movie.” JSTOR Daily. October 31, 2022, https://daily.jstor.org/colonialism-birthed-the-zombie-movie/.
(3) Brandon Byrd, “Reflecting on the U.S. Occupation of Haiti, One Hundred Years Later.” African American Intellectual History Society January 13, 2015, https://www.aaihs.org/reflecting-on-the-u-s-occupation-of-haiti-a-hundred-years-later/.
(4) Brandon Byrd, “Reflecting on the U.S. Occupation of Haiti, One Hundred Years Later.” African American Intellectual History Society January 13, 2015, https://www.aaihs.org/reflecting-on-the-u-s-occupation-of-haiti-a-hundred-years-later/.
(5) Allkins, Kyle. “‘Those Things’ and ‘You People’: Issues of Racism in Zombie Cinema.” Oakland Journal 19 (2010). 112–124. https://oakland.edu/Assets/Oakland/oujournal/files-and-documents/19_thosethings.pdf.
(6) Kurlander, Carl. “Perspective: An Appreciation of Duane Jones.” Pittwire, The University of Pittsburgh. February 8, 2021, https://www.pitt.edu/pittwire/features-articles/perspective-appreciation-duane-jones.
(7) Kurlander, Carl. “Perspective: An Appreciation of Duane Jones.” Pittwire, The University of Pittsburgh. February 8, 2021, https://www.pitt.edu/pittwire/features-articles/perspective-appreciation-duane-jones.
(8) Kurlander, Carl. “Perspective: An Appreciation of Duane Jones.” Pittwire, The University of Pittsburgh. February 8, 2021, https://www.pitt.edu/pittwire/features-articles/perspective-appreciation-duane-jones.
(9) Kurlander, Carl. “Perspective: An Appreciation of Duane Jones.” Pittwire, The University of Pittsburgh. February 8, 2021, https://www.pitt.edu/pittwire/features-articles/perspective-appreciation-duane-jones.
(10) “Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967),” Justia: U.S. Supreme Court, https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/388/1/.
(11) Pérez-Peña, Richard. “Woman Linked to 1955 Emmett Till Murder Tells Historian Her Claims Were False.” The New York Times. January 27, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/us/emmett-till-lynching-carolyn-bryant-donham.html.
(12) Haugen, Andrea Denise. “‘Sexual Animals’: Persistent Sexual Stereotypes at the Intersections of Racism, Sexism, and Sexual Prejudice,” p. 11–12. August 2018. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/187123376.pdf.
