What I've Learned

It was the 1985 movie, The Return of the Living Dead, that spawned the idea that zombies eat human brains. Which leads to my favorite joke.

What do vegan zombies crave?

"Grains! Graaaiins!"

Zombie movies can be divided into two eras, those before 1968 and those after.

Prior to '68, zombies were corpses that had been animated through voodoo and mindlessly did the bidding of an evil human master. Two early and notable films of this genre are White Zombie, from 1932, and Revenge of the Zombies, released in 1943.

In the 1960s, three friends, George A. Romero, John Russo, and Russell Streiner, had a film production company that made TV commercials and industrial training films. The three grew bored of this and decided to make a horror film. They estimated it would cost $6,000, so they formed a new production company, Image Ten, and its 10 members each kicked in $600.

When another $6,000 was needed, another 10 investors were found, but it was soon evident that more money was required. Eventually, $114,000 was raised.

If you were one of those initial investors, you would be hap, hap, happy, because the film, Night of the Living Dead, grossed $12 million domestically and $18 million internationally.

The movie is about seven people trapped in a rural Pennsylvania farmhouse by a horde of slow-moving, flesh-eating dead people.

Romero and his partners knew a lot of folks in the advertising industry, and when they put out the call among friends and acquaintances for people to act as living dead in their film – the word zombie is never used – many people showed up to take part.

An interesting casting choice was that of Duane Jones to play the roll of Ben. Jones, a black man, was an experienced, but unknown stage actor. The rest of the actors were white, and to have a black hero in a cast that is otherwise white was somewhat controversial. The reason that Romero gave for casting Jones is straightforward. He "gave the best audition," Romero said.

When the picture was finished, Image Ten had a hard time finding a distributor. Though filmed in black and white, the gruesome scenes were gruesome indeed. And it didn't have a Hollywood ending. Major distributors asked that the gore be toned down and that the ending be re-shot so it concludes on a more hopeful note.

Image Ten refused and kept looking. Eventually they made a deal with the Walter Reade Organization, which agreed to show the film uncensored. Up until then, the movie had been called Night of the Flesh Eaters. Because another movie had been produced with a similar title, the Reade group changed the name of Romero's to Night of the Living Dead.

There had been plenty of horror movies before Night of the Living Dead, but the monsters were always a bit hokey, and the scripts tended to be more suspenseful than scary. Kids loved to go to horror movies, and parents didn't mind, considering them harmless fun.

The MPAA film rating system came into effect in November of 1968. Night of the Living Dead premiered a month earlier, on October 1, so early showings of the film had many kids, some of them quite young, in the audiences.

Though shown in black and white, the depiction of zombies eating people – including a daughter eating her mother – proved a truly horrifying sight, profoundly scaring not just youngsters, but many adults.

And thus was born the modern zombie apocalypse movie.