Birth of the Living Dead Page #5

We said, "Well, wait,

it was in the script

before the guy

was black."

And, but he was saying, "Well

yeah, but he is black now!"

And so you have

to think about that.

And as I said,

I've in recent years

come to the thought that maybe

we should have explored

the racial issue a little bit.

We thought we were being really

hip by not changing the script.

I think it's also

what made the movie

feel like it belonged

to another generation.

That sense of not

wringing its hands

and having to talk,

stop for a moment,

they're all being pilloried

by zombies and saying,

"You know, Ben,

when I was a boy,

we had a colored maid

and she never worked

as hard as you

did for us."

I mean, by not having

a scene like that,

it felt exciting and new.

It truly did.

Hold it!

Don't shoot!

We're from town.

A radio!

One great thing about

"Night of the Living Dead"

is that it doesn't resort

to the clich of like,

well, everybody would put

aside their differences

in the face of such

a big threat.

How long you guys

been down there?

I could've used

some help up here.

That's the cellar.

It's the safest place.

Which is this hokey thing

that horror movies

and sci fi movies still do.

That no matter, you know,

how much you may differ

in real life, all that's

going to get cast aside

because you have

to fight the monster

or fight the alien or whatever.

The cellar.

The cellar, there's

only one door, right?

Just one door, that's

all we have to protect.

Tom and I fixed it so it locks

and boards from the inside.

But up here, all these windows?

Why, we'd never know where

they were going to hit us next!

You got a point,

Mr. Cooper.

But down in the cellar,

there's no place to run to.

Romero actually suggests that,

nope, it's going to be embedded

even in the way

you choose to fight,

even in where

you choose to hide.

But the cellar is

the strongest place.

The cellar is a death trap.

Who you are in real life

is going to absolutely affect

how you treat this threat

and how you see this threat.

You put people in this

incredibly extreme circumstance

and, you know, what kind

of society do they create?

And that's the heart

of "Night of the Living Dead."

You two do whatever you like.

I'm going back down

into the cellar

and you better decide!

Because I'm going

to board up that door

and I'm not going to unlock it

again no matter what happens!

Some parts of the movie

almost play like Beckett.

You know, that sense

of what happens

when you trap people together

and they just have

to deal with themselves.

And that sense of anticipation

and knowing that

there's no place to go.

Then slowly there's

cracks in the crevices

and the hands

start coming through,

and they're trying

to get the hands out.

And he shoots the guy

a couple of times.

The guy won't die until

he shoots them in the head.

To kill them you need

to chop off their heads.

Or what?

Or just shoot them

in the brain.

Because the way they

work is by the brain.

Usually you have

to throw fire so that,

so that you can save

yourself or someone else.

Then, they see the news report.

It's on!

It's on!

We've never had the budgets

to really explore

that this is

a worldwide phenomenon.

We did it mostly with media.

What they were hearing

on the radio and on the TV.

Otherwise it was

all the farmhouse.

The wave of murder

which is sweeping

the Eastern third of the nation

is being committed by creatures

who feast upon the flesh

of their victims.

Chuck Craig was

an actual newsman.

The guy that has most

of the airtime in the movie.

First eyewitness accounts

of this grisly development

came from people who were

understandably frightened,

and almost incoherent.

Wrote his own copy.

Read the script and we sat

around and we bullshat

about the concept

of what was going on.

It's hard for us here to believe

what we're reporting to you,

but it does seem to be a fact.

That stuff has a ring

of authenticity about it

because Chuck did it himself.

The kind of low key realism

of those broadcasts

of those newsrooms

absolutely is intended

to situate the movie

in reality.

That sort of unfiltered

sense of nobody's

spinning the news,

just reporting it.

It's saying that if this

were happening in your town,

this is what your newscasts

would look like.

Major contact came

in a pre-dawn attack...

I think the newscasts

that were created

for "Night of the Living Dead"

are in sync with the kind

of newscasts that I was seeing,

my generation was seeing

on television, when we used

to watch Morley Safer

out in Vietnam

in the bush and stuff.

Vietnam was America's

first televised war.

And while the networks

systematically

downplayed the bloodshed,

viewers, for the first

time in TV history,

got glimpses of what

war was really like.

I think the news coverage

of the Vietnam war was unlike

news coverage from ever before.

I remember just

the amount of dead.

All law enforcement agencies

and the military

have been organized

to search out

and destroy

the marauding ghouls.

Particularly, when you

saw the vigilantes

get prepared and stuff.

It made me think of

the stuff I would see

on the television and stuff

of the Newark riots, of Watts.

This was all happening, man.

You saw National Guard

on the street,

you saw looting and stuff.

So it all was very

reminiscent of that stuff.

I mean, it was obviously

of those times.

I grew up in Detroit in 1967

and I remember that summer

being terrified.

There's a famous story about

a house in my neighborhood that,

somebody was hanging

out in their house.

There were a bunch of,

you know, National Guardsmen,

which was teenagers

with guns who'd probably

been jacked up on coffee

and up for two days in a row.

There was a guy lighting

a cigarette hiding out

in an attic, they thought

somebody fired a gun,

and hundreds of rounds

of ammunition were

expended on this house.

That this guy wasn't killed

was a complete miracle.

I mean, they shot

the house up so much,

it almost took

the top of it off.

And so to see that

stuff in a movie.

And also to see that stuff in

a movie with a black guy in it.

It was like a welt of social

consciousness in filmmaking.

There were so many

things I don't think

anybody could ever do again.

In other words, you feel that

the radiation on the Venus Probe

was enough to cause

these mutations?

There was a very high

degree of radiation.

Just a minute.

I'm not sure that

that's certain at all.

Big traditional institutions,

whether it's the government or

the army or network television

are utterly unable

to be counted upon,

not only counted

upon to stop it

but counted upon

even to explain it.

Um, so, there's this

great sense of just,

and this is very 1968,

great sense of the complete

ineffectuality

of any institution that

purveys itself to you

as being trustworthy.

I must disagree with these

gentlemen presently

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes