Night of the Living Dead

Is there such a thing as “bad film”? Night of the Living Dead is cheap at worst and unsavory at best. It was directed by George A. Romero who failed to copyright it. The film is based on the idea that the dead have come back to life and turned into blood thirsty zombies. The start of the film shows a brother and sister in a cemetery who suddenly get attacked by a dead man who has come back as a zombie. The beginning was a little slow in the story development and hard to understand why exactly they were in a cemetery. I feel as if the writers were trying to go for an overly dramatic effect in the scenes with the walking dead. I highly doubt Night of the Living Dead satisfies really active horror fans today, however, the last scene was definitely a shock to me (spoiler alert) when the last survivor gets mistaken for a zombie and is shot.  

                   From an original perspective I really think the shot depths were great throughout the entire movie. I didn’t like the fact that they used a few shots multiple times. For example: the one shot of Barbara up close when she was still in shock was used probably like 3 or 4 times. The budget came out to an estimated value of $114,000. With this small budget, the quality is bound to be much lower. I also thought it was pretty ironic when the cop says “somebody had a cookout here” referencing the truck that caught on fire with the male and female inside. They ended up getting eaten by the zombies which was by far the grossest part of the movie. The scene of the zombies tearing apart their limbs was absolutely horrific and I had to close my eyes. 

                Besides the cheesy script and old fashioned scenes, the director used a lot a unique camera angles. To emphasize the simple but strange idea that the recently deceased could come back to life the camera shot are very straight forward.