Wanted: Undead or Alive

My friend's experience should make the film trivial. When you've known someone whose father literally ate his son's heart, Night of the Living Dead isn't the same movie anymore. What's remarkable, though, is that it doesn't become a stupid or squalid movie--it becomes deeper. Whether Romero and Russo intended to or not, what they made was really a worst-case scenario on what being alive means.

Even if outer-space radiation could make dead bodies get up and walk around, why would they turn into cannibals? Though the film's style is bluntly realistic, its premise isn't logical, even in sci-fi-horror terms. But it makes perfect metaphorical sense, if you believe that to be human is to mindlessly consume--first food and other necessities, finally your neighbors, your family.

In the film, we overhear a scientist on Civil Defense TV being interviewed about the situation, and he advises immediate cremation of the dead, lest they, too, become zombies. "The loved ones will have to forgo the dubious comfort of a funeral service. . . . They're just dead flesh, and dangerous."

Romero's ghastly vision is of a ghoul world without spirit. That's what makes his zombies different from the demon in The Exorcist or even from the slashers of Halloween and Friday the 13th, with their masked killers who stick to their agenda of slaughtering the sexually active no matter how many times they themselves are killed. Night of the Living Dead is the opposite of a ghost story. Romero's ghouls aren't evil, or even tormented. They're just, in a very human sense, hungry.

The poignancy in Night of the Living Dead is in the desperation with which the victims fight for their lives, the preciousness with which authentic, individualistic life is seen. That's what raises this crudely wrought movie from the level of a mere mean-spirited horror show, what gives it a tinge of the genuinely tragic.

That's why even my friend's horrible misfortune couldn't reduce the film's power for me. Scaring me to death, it scares me to life.