The ski-masked punk started slicing the neck of the corpse with his free hand. The fingers on his other hand were stuck in the corpse’s mouth due to a supposed muscle spasm triggered in the deceased man. He kept hacking away at the neck to no avail. As he was about to take another slice, the corpse’s left arm shot up and grabbed the wrist of the punk’s free hand. The switchblade clattered on the floor as the punk tried desperately to wrestle his other hand free from the bony fingers of the cadaver. 

—To be continued.

Tonight’s movie is 1968’s Night of the Living Dead from director George Romero. How I’ve gone over ten years without discussing this film is a mystery, but better late than never. I think Joe Bob Briggs once referred to Night of the Living Dead as the first modern horror movie and regarded it as highly as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I discovered it myself in a discount VHS bin at a Kmart back when I was in grade school. At that point, it was the third zombie movie I’d seen, but wouldn’t be the last.

Night of the Living Dead begins with Barbara and her brother Johnny visiting their father’s grave. Johnny taunts Barbara, pretending some random stranger in the distance is a monster out to get her. It turns out the random stranger is a monster out to get at Barbara and we’re introduced to the first modern zombie. Johnny vainly tries fighting him off.. Barbara escapes to a nearby farmhouse, the zombie in close pursuit.

She wanders about. The zombie disconnects the phone line as those troublemakers are wont to do. Blood drips on her from a dead body upstairs and then she really starts to freak out until a man named Ben shows up. He asks Barbara if she lives there, but she’s incontinent. Ben listens to the radio while trying to board up the house. We learn that this strange phenomena is nationwide and Ben recounts his own horror story of how he made it to the house.

We are soon introduced to Mr. Cooper and Tom who’ve been hiding out in the basement with their loved ones. Ben and Mr. Cooper don’t get along. Ben is not pleased that Mr. Cooper didn’t come up to help Barbara when he heard her screaming. Mr. Cooper says the zombies nearly turned over their car on their way to the farmhouse. He wants everyone to hold up in the basement, but Ben doesn’t want to be trapped down there. Ben tells Mr. Cooper that he’s the boss up here and that Mr. Cooper can be boss in the basement.

We learn from the news that the Venus probe NASA sent off came back with some unusual radiation.

There you go.

That’s what brought the dead back to life.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that the zombies eat regular people. They don’t eat each other so that doesn’t make them cannibals. There’s a failed attempt to fill Ben’s truck up with gas that ends in some ghastly fatalities. The living dead break into the house despite Ben’s best effort to fortify it. Mr. Cooper was right, but he was still a class-A jerk who got what was coming to him. Not that I want to spoil a movie that’s over fifty years old!

Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, episode 549, episode 575, episode 596, episode 597, episode 598, and episode 599) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.