So, wow. This movie was apparently made on a shoestring budget by like ten people, and you’d never know it. It’s so assured, it’s so clearly what it is, and it’s just completely setting the template for what zombies (famously not a word used in this movie) are.

Like, holing up in the abandoned farmhouse and boarding up the windows! The real threat is within! “We’ve got to fuel up the truck and escape” (a scenario I have played in at least three board games and two videogames)! Government safehouses! “Shoot them in the brain!” Even molotov cocktails! It’s just all here.

If the movie had done nothing other than create an entire subgenre, it’d be legendary, but it does a lot more than that. Even being familiar with all the downstream tropes, I was still shocked by the ending, where—

(Do I need to spoiler protect this? I feel like it’s 50+ years old and everyone’s seen it; but then again, I hadn’t, so I guess, here, have a cut.)

Spoilers

— the cops end up shooting the last survivor. Because like, as they were combing the countryside shooting zombies, I was kind of like “lol, they’re not really doing a lot of verification before they assume that the thing they shoot is a zombie, and I guess once they shoot it, it is a zombie, so nobody can really prove they were wrong” and then, bam, there goes the last surviving protagonist.

Which, by all accounts, they didn’t write the movie so that it had a Black man as the protagonist, Duane Jones just happened to try out and was really good, so they gave the role to him instead of one of the non-professional actors making the movie. But it’s impossible to think that anyone in 1968 was blind to the implications of cops killing a Black man, with Martin Luther King having just been assassinated earlier that year. (Or, indeed, of having that Black protagonist coldly murder one of the other survivors along the way to that ending.)

But it’s not just a shocking ending, either. Throughout the movie all the characters are drawn well, from the woman who goes into catatonic shock, to the selfish asshole coward guy. The movie just does so much with the pressure cooker of this closed-up farmhouse in this crisis, and drives the characters to their breaking points.

For it to hit this hard a half-century and a zillion imitators later is remarkable, and I can’t imagine what a lightning bolt it must have felt like to see it back then. Probably people didn’t even realize what they were seeing the start of, and under-rated it tbh. (Or, uh, sent little kids to go see it, yikes.)

At any rate, this is an influential classic that’s worth seeing in its own right. Highly recommended.