George A. Romero
La notte dei morti viventi

"Night of the Living Dead" (1968). For the series "the classic that never dies." In every sense.

Seven strangers find themselves barricaded in an old farmhouse to defend against a horde of resurrected dead, hungry for human flesh. The house, however, soon becomes surrounded by zombies: for the seven, a desperate siege begins where tension and resentment seem to erode the characters almost as much as the risk of being devoured. Thus begins the Romero saga of flesh: with an apparently simple plot (co-written by the two buddies Romero-Russo) and, at least to today's viewer, rather banal, yet full of food for thought.

Let's start by saying that Romero doesn't invent anything, or almost. The very figure of the undead has been part of Haitian and Dominican culture for centuries and not only appeared in some stories but even in several films already in the early decades of the 1900s (among which the most embarrassing is surely "Plan 9 from Outer Space" by the misunderstood Ed Wood, from 1959). Having said that, Romero's work presents itself rather as a reinterpretation (but perhaps it would be more correct to speak of a real upheaval) of some of the most classic archetypes of horror and gothic cinema.

First of all, the setting: the events take place in modern-day Pennsylvania, dotted with little-known towns far removed from each other, whose vast meadows provide the ideal setting for the frantic initial chase. From old horror tales, only the cemetery is spared, given a necessary, but all in all minimal appearance in the film's first sequence. The intent is evidently to strip the story as much as possible of the fantastical, fable-like element that normally accompanies a scary story. Romero wants to trap viewers with a story that, in its "implausibility," can be as realistic as possible: the filming is essential, described by many as even "documentary-like", clearly of Hitchcockian origin (especially in the initial chase sequence, with close-ups of the objects towards which Barbara is headed, but also the idea of using black and white to avoid censorship issues is said to have been first used by the Master). Romero is a skilled craftsman, not a genius, yet he manages to skillfully make do with the little money the budget gives him: the shots (often static, but most times slightly tilted compared to the scene's plane) disorient the viewer, confuse them. Above all, it is the continuous, sudden oscillation from moments of prolonged apparent calm to others of intense emotional frenzy that proves successful. This results in a distorted sense of time in the story for the viewer: what actually lasts little more than twelve hours is perceived as an endless, exhausting siege, leading to the urgent (ill-fated and irrational) need to escape that house, to find a way out, a way to leave, to reach the gas pump.

Outside the house, meanwhile, the zombies increase. But these are creatures quite different from those in folklore representations told by Whitehead. They are a mass of ragged corpses in various states of decomposition, slow, clumsy, and hungry. They are a "choral" monster, with a tendency to aggregate, to besiege, and apparently, they are tireless. No one commands their actions, they don't respond to a bokor's orders, they are slaves only to their own will, instinct, and hunger. They even feel fear. And to stop them, one must destroy their brain. But Romero aims to reshape the collective imagination and succeeds by taking inspiration from the novel "I Am Legend": he adds to his creatures a characteristic typically vampire-like, the ability to transmit the disease by biting the victim's flesh. And just like in Matheson's masterpiece, there's an attempt to provide a (sci-fi) explanation for the reawakening of loved ones. And the culprit, unsurprisingly, is progress, technological evolution. Man.

Thus, the monsters, blood, and rotten flesh hide something far more terrifying. Because in the macabre theater staged by Romero, the real threat is not the monstrous, inhuman one waiting outside, but the miserable, mediocre, and mean one that has found refuge within the walls of an old farmhouse. Indeed, the house, the closed and impenetrable place: no longer the beast's lair, the villain's castle, the witch's hideout, but the bourgeois nest where we can feel protected, where we can be safe because if we bar doors and windows, or even shut ourselves in the cellar, no one can harm us. Not the zombies. Nor the thieves. Or, why not, given the Cold War times, the Russians. We don't even realize that the real enemy is inside. It is ourselves. It is humanity. And its actions are not driven by instinct, by hunger, but by reason at the service of the social ugliness we carry within: racism, envy, the desire to dominate, and above all, an unbounded, pathological selfishness. Mind you, however: it would be too easy to point out as the sole culprit the stereotype of the average American bourgeois, that Mr. Cooper who from the first lines is indicated as the unpleasant one in the situation, the spoilsport, the one who even dares to contradict the hero. Because all the characters in "Night of the Living Dead" make mistakes. Even the "very black" Ben, whom we quickly learn to love and respect much more than he deserves, has his flaws, his stubbornness, and his violence. The real problem for the refugees (armed and supplied, by the way) will thus end up not being that ragged mass of slow, staggering corpses, but the absolute inability to unite, to put aside mutual distrust and antipathies, to face a common threat. Better to sit and listen to the radio, watch television and wait for someone else to solve the problem, perhaps the authorities, that established order that, in the film's final sequences, looks so much like those villagers armed with torches and pitchforks who chased the monster of the moment to lynch it.

Thus, it is the zombies that end up representing the most "pure" part of the entire film, the most consistent, most clear. They are the symbol of a slow, but inexorable revolution, launched against the society as represented by the seven (almost "chosen ones," given a chance to save themselves from the epidemic, and who have decided to waste it due to their stupidity). A revolution that is somewhat a return to origins, to a natural state where instinct replaces social stereotypes to form the true bond between people.

Let the dead return to earth, then, because perhaps the living don't deserve it.