Night of the Living Dead (1968) Revisited
Dabian T. Witherspoon, Ph.D.
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Creator: George A. Romero
Company Credits: Image Ten, Walter Reade Organization
Genre(s): Horror, Thriller
Rating: TV-14
Runtime: 1 hr 36 min
Data Source: IMDb.com
Edited 5-21-2025
**** Spoiler Alert ***
One may interpret what happens at the end of Night of the Living Dead as purely accidental. Such a reading has been popular as it holds that the shooter kills Ben, the protagonist who had managed to survive the night, because the search party mistook Ben for a zombie. That would have been an interesting turn of events, but that theory makes no sense. Instead, the film’s ending is a sad social commentary by George A. Romero.
When the all-white search party appears with dogs and firearms the next morning, they should have had two objectives: to help survivors and put down any remaining zombies. Yet, a man dressed in plain clothes tells the leader—a man wearing a badge, presumably the police chief or sheriff—that he hears movement in the house they are approaching. Then, they see Ben, a Black man, inside the house. Ben is at the window, and the party is close enough to tell a zombie from a living person.
Oddly, they fail to move closer to get a better look at Ben just to be sure. No one in the party calls out to Ben to see if he would respond by calling back out to them or giving some signal that he is alive, not one of the undead. Furthermore, Ben is holding a rifle and is prepared to shoot, which is something a zombie would not do. By then, the search party had put down enough zombies to know that the behavior of zombies was vastly different from “living humans.” These men would have known that not even an exhausted or wounded “normal” person moves like a zombie, and they had already figured out that it took a shot to the head to put down a zombie. Of course, a living human would fare no better.
Imagine Ben’s inevitable uncertainty and mixed emotions upon seeing these men approaching. They are supposed to be there to help, but their appearance is reminiscent of white lynch mobs historically claiming unfortunate Black victims in the United States.
The man who first spotted Ben hesitates to shoot, but the leader tells him to take the shot. Surely, if they had seen a white face in the window, they would have given that person the benefit of the doubt. If Ben had been white, the all-white search party would have insisted on being absolutely sure he was a zombie, not a survivor, before shooting him.
I would compare this scenario to real-life white police officers killing unarmed Black males doing innocuous things, without hesitation, and other white police officers taking the time to gently arrest a young white male who had just shot nine Black people dead at a church and even stopping at McDonald’s because he was hungry.
Shortly after shooting Ben, the search party gives no second thought about whether they have made a mistake. They use meat hooks to toss his body away as if his life never mattered to them. After adding him to the pile of zombified bodies they had put down, they set the pile ablaze. That evokes images of the lynchings that occurred during the nadir of race relations. Sometimes, after murdering Black people, racist whites watched human bonfires for entertainment and took photos as keepsakes. Often, the all-white police force either participated or looked the other way. Black lives did not matter.
Even if Ben had survived to tell his story, would these white men have believed him or falsely accused him of murdering the innocent white people in the house? Ben is the only Black character in the story. Even the zombies are white.
The film is careful to portray Ben as anti-stereotypical, which is noteworthy considering the period (before or during the 1960s). Ben is also the most rational character in the story, which is the main reason he is the only person in the house to survive . . . well, almost.
When Black creatives and viewers (including the author of this article) have tried to hold this discussion in the past, some of their white peers typically cut them off, not allowing them to explain their reasoning. Either their white peers could not fathom that Ben’s death could have been anything other than an accident, or they simply refused to accept any other interpretation. They are free to disagree, but refusing to acknowledge the possibility is unacceptable.
There have always been some whites who stood against racism, but too many “non-racist” white people have chosen to remain comfortably oblivious because they either do not believe or will not accept that these problems affect their lives and “their” country as well. As decent human beings, they must learn the importance of speaking up whenever they find racial injustice instead of turning a blind eye or a deaf ear.
Romero probably wrote Ben’s cold death scene with no thought to the casting, but he had to have seen the Black civil rights nuance after shooting the scene and watching the unedited footage. Romero has not admitted it, but perhaps he left the scene that way either to avoid being too preachy or to leave it open to interpretation.
It does not matter that Romero stated that he simply cast the best actor who auditioned for the role of Ben and did not fully grasp the social impact the film could make at first. Writers, story analysts, and viewers understand that not all social content is intentional. It is often psychological and so natural to the story that it manages to come out anyway. Considering the modern civil rights era in American history, the timing of the film’s release was not purely coincidental.