One night my brother took Marian, me, and my friend Darryl to a horror double-bill. The first movie was a dud — in truth I can’t even remember what it was — but it was enough of a yawner to convince us that we were in for one of those at least we get popcorn and Coke kind of nights.
The second movie was something else indeed. It was called Night of the Living Dead, and I’d never seen a movie quite like it in my life. Watching NOTLD now, my writer’s eye can pick it apart and see how it works and why it still works after all these years. But then… well, I think part of the reason that it hit me — and everyone else in Larry’s Mustang — so hard was sheer surprise. We had no idea what to expect going in. No preconceived notions. We’d read no reviews, seen no previews. All we knew about the movie was the title, which we’d seen spelled out on the marquee with the same plastic letters that had spelled out the titles of a thousand other movies over the years.
In short, we had nothing to prepare us, and I can’t imagine that there was any way possible to sit through a impromptu viewing of NOTLD without batting an eye. This wasn’t the recycled terror we found in Hammer movies. After all, you killed the Hammer Dracula the same way you killed the Universal Dracula — ram a stake through that sucker’s heart and you were good to go. But the old familiar fix-its weren’t going to fly this time out. No way. Director George Romero’s movie featured something new—armies of flesh-eating zombies that could only be destroyed by serious head trauma. Mix that with some late sixties we’re knee-deep in Vietnam and the world is going to hell in a handbasket attitude and a hyper-realistic style rarely used in horror movies, toss in a black “everyman” hero (Duane Jones), and you had yourself a real mindslammer. My brother, who usually amused himself by grabbing me from behind whenever a cinematic “boo” moment arrived, was actually the first one to jump the night we saw NOTLD. During one of the film’s few quiet moments, a zombie unexpectedly reaches through a window and paws at Duane Jones, and the shock jolted Larry so hard that he actually jumped up and hit his head on the car roof.
Things got worse for old Duane as the movie progressed. You bet they did. Boarded up in an old Pennsylvanian farmhouse with a bunch of people who refused to listen to sense, he had no real chance of escape, and neither did I. I was sucked straight into his world, fending off an army of zombies who wanted Duane and his pals for dinner.
Yeah. I was trapped… until I began to consider what waited in the moonlit shadows outside the corners of the drive-in screen. See, the drive-in in my hometown had not one… not two… but three cemeteries as neighbors. Realizing that, a nasty little idea began to nibble at the corners of my imagination. I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if the dead folks in those cemeteries clawed their way out of their graves and came shuffling across the road to pay us a little visit.
I stared through the Mustang’s side window. A fence topped with barbed-wire bordered the drive-in, but I didn’t think it (or the retractable tire spikes at the exit) would slow down a determined army of the living dead. Across the road, the cemetery waited. This one was the oldest of the three, and it had the whole gothic atmosphere thing going—mausoleums with stained glass windows, marble funereal monuments, and granite statuary. My eyes studied silhouettes in the moonlight. A lot of cold black stone out there. None of it moved at all. Only the trees moved, branches swaying in the late night breeze.
Well, that made sense, I told myself. Even if the dead were to return to life, the folks in the old cemetery had been dead a long time. I figured most of their coffins didn’t hold much more than a pile of bones… or maybe a couple fistfuls of dust. Even if the occupants of those coffins managed the Lazarus trick, there wouldn’t be enough left of them to get up and actually do anything.
So I wasn’t too worried about the dead in the old cemetery. No. But the new cemeteries—which included the one behind us—were something else indeed.
They didn’t look nearly as scary as the old gothic cemetery. There were no imposing granite monuments or statuary. The new cemeteries had plain little bronze placards planted in the grass. Really, they weren’t very frightening at all.
But when you’re talking living dead, I knew that what counted was under the ground, not above it… the same way I knew that there were lots of fresh graves in the cemetery behind us, and each one of them held a recently deceased corpse.
I always avoided fresh graves when walking home through the cemetery. They creeped me right out, almost as much as seeing the gravediggers at work. I’d seen that a few times while hanging around with my buddy Chris. We’d be riding our bikes around the drive-in lot, and we’d happen to look across the road and see a couple of guys working with a backhoe, digging holes for people who’d been sucking wind just a couple days before.
Up on the screen, the zombies got the crazy blonde girl. I sat there watching Duane Jones fight off the living dead, and I thought about that cemetery behind me, and I wondered what I’d do if the “fresh ones” in the new cemetery started coming out of the ground.
I didn’t like thinking about that. I’d known more than a few people who were buried in that cemetery. My own grandfather was buried up there. So was the alcoholic barber who’d nearly sliced off my ear. And there were other people. Neighbors I’d liked and disliked, old ladies whose windows I’d soaped on Halloween —
Imaginatively speaking, I knew that I was treading dangerous ground. I knew I should concentrate on the movie. Sure, it was scary, but it wasn’t as frightening as the things my imagination churned up. Those things couldn’t be contained between four corners on a drive-in screen. They had dimension, and strength, and a reality all their own —
I imagined what I’d do if the zombies came stumbling across the road. I was just a kid. I couldn’t drive (just like the crazy blonde girl in the movie)… but for some reason I was the one sitting behind the steering wheel, so I’d have to get out of the front seat and switch places with my brother. Who knew how long that would take. It didn’t seem like the zombies in the movie were very fast, but there were a lot of them, the same way there were a lot of people buried in the cemetery. And once they got hold of you—
I could almost see them coming.
The dead neighbors who didn’t like me…
That crazy barber, a rusty razor in his hand…
The husks of withered old ladies who’d dropped Halloween candy in my trick-or-treat bag, leering like Graham Ingels characters in some old E. C. comic…
“You soaped our windows, Norman! And now you’ll die!”
For years after that night, I had NOTLD dreams in which I’d wake up, open my bedroom drapes, and see the streets teaming with zombies. Sometimes I’d try to barricade myself in the house, boarding up the windows and the doors. Sometimes I’d escape on my bicycle, pedaling as fast as I could, and I’d head for a friend’s house… preferably one whose parents owned lots of guns.