Dawn brings the forces of reason and order (ironic, in that the posse clearing away the few remaining dead are little more than trigger-happy, thrill-seeking rednecks, not the wise and industrious vampire-killers of old). Ben emerges from his cellar/grave like one of the dead himself, and within moments is shot through the head, finalizing Barbara’s desire for oblivion. As can only happen to the dream-self on the coming of day, he’s swept away with the debris of the night, and dropped on the bonfire.
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Many critics writing on the visceral and intellectual impact of George Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead mention the film’s nightmarish quality, and when they do they’re mainly talking about its unrelenting tone and the action that spirals from unhappiness to hopelessness, from illogic to chaos and confusion. Few, though, have noted just how closely the film follows the trajectory of these dreams and the experience of the mind dissolving into sleep, though director Romero and screenwriter John Russo have described them in painstaking detail. Beginning with a retreat from the outside world and the pressing in of the anarchic hordes of the unconscious, the confusion in Night escalates until reaching crisis point and then subsides, the survivor falling into a dreamless oblivion just before the coming of day. Morning brings the forces of mundane reality we return to confused, disturbed, and with the sensation of having had an inscrutable emotional upheaval while our rational defenses were down.
Taking Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams as a guide as well as Robert Eberwein’s Film and the Dream Screen: A Sleep and a Forgetting, we can see the deeper psychological material hidden here, adding a few twists, at the same time, to the concept of film as communal dream experience and the way we relate to this experience. Because it’s precisely this dream-connection that has ensured the film a lasting place in the popular as well as critical canon, and may even be a key to the powerful personal response even the most frequent viewer has to its traumatic content. Not only is it the allegory of a society that can’t get its act together in a crisis anymore, it’s also the shared drama of one person caught in her own personal apocalypse and of life itself as an inescapable dream.
Proceeding from the understanding that dreams incorporate stimuli from waking life into their complex psychodramas involving issues carried from childhood, we can interpret the opening action of the film as a key to the dream-material and a clue to what drives the cannibalistic hunger of the ghouls. Studying Night’s first few minutes is essential to an understanding of the film’s whole project.
The Film as Dream
The action begins at dusk, in the fall, when things are naturally going dormant. Barbara, our focus of sympathy, and her brother, Johnny, are on their way to a cemetery three hours out of town to place on their father’s grave a wreath their mother’s given them; their radio, recently gone dead, comes back to life as they’re about to get out of the car. As Barbara kneels in prayer at the father’s graveside, we see the first of what we’ll discover to be the newly reanimated dead stumbling around; eventually it makes its way toward them and attacks Barbara. Johnny springs to her rescue, dying from a blow to the head as the ghoul wrestles him to the ground, and Barbara, panicked, retreats to the car only to discover there are no keys in the ignition. As the ghoul breaks in a window, she releases the emergency brake and the car coasts downhill, where it lodges against a tree. Getting out and running to an apparently deserted house, Barbara finds an array of mounted game heads, a music box that starts up on its own, and a fresh corpse upstairs with its face missing. Outside, she runs into a blinding flash of light (it’s now dark) and Ben, an African American, who shuffles her back inside and proceeds to barricade the windows and doors, using pieces of furniture from around the house.
What we have, besides a fiercely engaging first ten minutes, is a graphic description of the mind’s descent into sleep. Barbara and Johnny’s flight from the city signifies a retreat from the conscious, social world, the car sliding down the road a falling asleep and the withdrawal into the house the shutting off of the mind from the outside, real world. The dead father represents the loss of the governing faculties of reason and order, his absence practically a staple of the modern fantasy film, with roots at least as far back as Hamlet and extending through The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T and Robot Monster in 1953, Carrie in 1976, Blue Velvet in 1984, on up to Edward Scissorhands in 1990. All serve to set the scene for a relaxation of the consciousness necessary for the unraveling of the dream. The cemetery is a traditional double for this sleep: Zeffirelli’s Hamlet begins there, as does Persona (actually, it’s a morgue); Orpheus traffics between life and death in his poetic quest, and Cocteau makes the sleep-connection clear in his 1949 film adaptation. This absence signals a deeper loss, though, “sleep,” as Freud tells us (quoting Baruch), signifiying “an end to the authority of the self.”
The ghoul embodies the coming of this sleep, his numbers increasing as the night progresses, and pressing in on the house – suggesting, as in Gothic and Romantic literature, the individual mind – until dispersing at the breaking of day. The car Barbara can’t control is the body, which “goes on automatic” during sleep, as does the music box she discovers in the house and the apparently brainless, only instinctual living dead outside (their reanimation the mind reviving to dream). Johnny, as her brother, suggests the conscious self, replaced almost immediately by the darkly complexioned antithesis to his blond whiteness, Ben, her dream-protector and imaginary brother. Ben’s boarding up of the house signifies the mind’s withdrawal into itself, the inability of the characters to leave there the inability of dream-chimeras to leave the unconscious. The disembodied animal heads echo the detachment of the sleeping mind, as does the decayed, half-eaten head of the house’s owner upstairs.
Ben’s breaking up the furniture to board up the house parallels the dream’s rummaging of items from waking life to use as tools in its construction, the furniture also symbols of Barbara’s everyday reality turned topsy-turvy, as in the dream sequence – if you can tell it from any other – in Ed Wood Jr.’s Glen or Glenda. Later on, Ben discovers a television set, which can receive information from the outside world but, like the dead telephone Barbara tries to use earlier, can’t communicate back outside with it, just as the sleeping mind receives aural and tactile stimuli but can’t process them as it normally does. This information, related simply and matter-of-factly by the real-life newscasters Romero uses here, becomes less and less sensible as it accumulates during the night, as the unconscious yields up more and more random thoughts and memories (ostensibly from the action of the preceding day – all of the movie’s television footage taking place in broad daylight) that fail to cohere into an articulated whole. The overriding impression we get from these broadcasts is of an arsenal of authority figures, none of whom are able to locate cause and effect for the situation they’re caught in and all of whom are unwilling to accept responsibility. If there is chaos in dreams, Romero seems to be saying, it’s a reflection of the chaos in the real world.
Inevitably, Ben and Barbara – their mutuality expressed in their shared initials – clash when she becomes hysterical at the unreality of the situation and her sudden loss and he strikes her in the face. She withdraws for the rest of the picture and at this point begins reconstructing the actions of the day into the dream-world that, by now, envelopes her. Her withdrawal constitutes a falling into a deeper level of sleep allowing for Ben’s ascendancy in the drama, much as Hitchcock’s Psycho transfers its focus of identification partway through from its female main character to its male in a similarly isolated location. (Like Psycho, too, Night’s dramatic arc is concave, beginning in a graveyard and ending in the basement, where Hitchcock climaxes his film.)
While Ben is away upstairs, Romero introduces two new characters who emerge from the cellar, indicating the actual starting of the dream, the subconscious releasing its contents into the conscious mind.
The Content of the Dream
If we’re to assume some relation between the activity in the opening sequences and the dream, it’s important to regard the new characters and what they represent: a balding, overweight hothead named Harry Cooper, and an idealistic young man named Tom. Their holing up in the basement suggests repression, their eruption into the consciousness a result of the temporary absence of the dream-authority, Ben; together, they’re imaginary equivalents of the father and brother introduced in the beginning of the picture. (Still below are Harry’s wife Helen and their ailing daughter Karen, in addition to Tom’s girlfriend, Judy: three facets of repressed dreamer Barbara, sublimated – woman, child, and lover.)
The Coopers are your stereotypical middle-class ’60s couple, unhappy with each other but staying together for the sake of their child, who lies on a table in a coma similar to Barbara’s condition upstairs, suggesting the frozen girlish state she’s apparently been in for some time. As parents brooding over their moribund child, they’re reciprocal to Barbara in the beginning, mourning her lost father; Tom and Judy, on the other hand, represent the hopefulness of love and the possibility of goodness and comfort in the world. (They are doomed.) By comparing these various and seemingly unrelated relationships with the opening exchanges between Johnny and Barbara, we can develop an understanding of the nature of Barbara’s nightmare and the reason for the apocalypse to follow.
The Meaning of the Dream
From their bickering in the cemetery and on the drive in, we recognize Johnny as a rake and an atheist, distanced from the rest of his family and the tradition they represent; Barbara, on the other hand, is homely, pious, withdrawn, and clinging to the memory of her dead father, whose absence implies not only a mental anarchy but a spiritual one besides, there being no God to explain what will come later or to help out.
Many have commented on Night’s debt to The Birds in its unexplained attack on a small gathering of people in an isolated house; other influences include the 1964 Last Man on Earth and possibly 1959’s The Killer Shrews. Its real antecedent, though, is novelist Shirley Jackson and her gallery of introverted, occasionally psychotic or neurotic and highly suggestible heroines – especially the central character from her best-known novel, The Haunting of Hill House. Barbara is the same spinsterish, no-doubt-virginal daughter we see in Haunting’s Eleanor Vance, afraid of sex (she describes the ghoul’s attack on her in hysterical, sexually suggestive terms) and the world, and dreaming of romance but constricted by her desperate family ties. Like Eleanor, her resolution is in the obliteration of her personality, which Eleanor sees reflected in the besieged house she inhabits with her other characters. She is, in her homeliness and childishness, hanging on to the family she sees crumbling all around her, having nothing to anchor her in the inhuman world; so she displaces her feelings, confusing desire for sexual union with family feeling and translating these incestuous yearnings into the cannibalistic hungers of the undead.
“Johnny has the key,” Barbara rambles at one point, indicating jealousy over her brother’s mobility and extroversion and indicating his central role in the drama. (Tom has a key, too, but it’s the wrong one.) The car is also a bone of contention between Jackson’s Eleanor and her sister and furthers the parallel between Johnny and Ben, who was able to appropriate someone else’s truck on his first encounter with the living dead and drive it to the house. (He earlier recounts the terror of seeing a trucker unable to control his vehicle, suggesting an existential view of the world where one’s survival depends on an ability to propel oneself through the meaningless anarchic hordes.) If dreams, as Freud propounds, represent wish-fulfillment, then Barbara gets hers every time a zombie is shot or bashed in the head (the only way, we learn, to kill the things), for it’s a reenactment of Johnny’s death by a blow to the head: her judgment on him for being so free-living.
Eleanor fetishizes her house and the society she establishes there and exerts her powers of suggestion to keep them together until immolating herself in her car, thinking that way she’ll be made one with her friends and the house. Barbara’s efforts to maintain the new society and surrogate family she creates but is too withdrawn to appreciate also fail, when she goes down into the cellar (signifying deeper retreat and a descent into another layer of sleep) while the men stay aboveground to make a daring escape attempt.
In this adventure, Tom and Ben try to get the truck to a nearby gas pump, the key to which Tom has found earlier, figuring to use it as a means of escape; Judy insists on accompanying them. When this truck blows up with the lovers inside as the result of a tragic mistake, it signifies the failure of romance as a “vehicle” out of Barbara’s cannibalistic family nightmare. At the same time, it serves as a fulfillment of her desire to perpetuate the withdrawn and apathetic world of sleep, in the same way the discovery of sexual love would remove her from the comfort of her family. The fire that consumes the truck carries through a running theme in Night, from the half-light that opens the action to the daylight and fire at the ending. This flame, which repels the zombies, represents light and reason, which would naturally keep figures of sleep and the irrational at bay; it’s only fitting that the fire take other characters in Barbara’s nightmare as well, for with the coming of day all such figures would necessarily be consumed.
Russo and Romero distinguish between natural light and the artificial electric light of dreams and the imagination. Ben, who arrives in the blaze of his truck’s headlights, also switches on the electricity and finds the television set that brings everyone together, equating artificial light with unity and community in the dream-world; the half-light below, in the basement where Harry and Helen hold vigil over half-dead Karen, indicates the tenuous nature of that community. When the lights go out upstairs at the height of the hysteria, it signifies both the onset of an even deeper, dreamless, and private sleep and the sudden, concurrent evacuation of any even false ray of hope for the survivors.
Once inside after his aborted escape attempt, Ben is reduced to his own basest level when murdering Harry for getting in the way once too often, a reenactment of the brother’s figurative patricide in the beginning, for which he’s killed by the, in turn, middle-aged ghoul. It also recalls the climax of the 1946 omnibus film Dead of Night, each of whose stories carried the viewer past successive layers of reality until, in the final episode, all hell broke loose and all order shattered following a similarly irreversible action – the killing of a psychoanalyst, representing the death of sense and reason in the world. No matter how unhelpful or downright dangerous this father may have been, Romero suggests, his murder is unforgivable even in the ambiguous nightmare the title (though it’s not the filmmakers’ own) suggests. Soon after, the electricity goes out, and all that remains is for the plague of darkness to run its course.
Helen, who had abandoned her daughter temporarily to comfort Barbara upstairs, is nearly claimed by the living dead who’ve begun to assault the house in earnest. Barbara snaps out of her stasis long enough to rescue her at the same instant Karen, below, awakens from her sleep to feast on the newly dead father (both, on two different levels, trying to reincorporate the family), and Helen shows her gratitude by retreating to the cellar and trying to reunite with her own, dead, daughter. At the same time this reunion takes place downstairs, Johnny appears at the broken-in door to spirit his sister into the masses of undead, just as Karen stabs her mother to death with a trowel. Barbara’s desire for communion with the family is fulfilled (her brother carries her away in a seeming embrace), and she finally abdicates her own “authority of the self.” Our identification shifts to Ben for the final few minutes, though we know something irreversible has taken place.
The Appropriation of the Dream Screen
Eberwein, in Film and the Dream Screen, reminds us of the “oral world of the infant” and how the child’s connection to the mother’s breast signifies unity with the outside world. Cannibalism in Romero (the idea of suckling drawn to its nightmarish extreme) signifies a similar unity with one’s own, the ghouls returning to life to feed on the living like the baby awaking to nurse off its mother, just as the dream serves to perpetuate sleep while the mind feeds off its own store of memories. When Johnny carries Barbara away in the end to devour her, the scene is reciprocated in the basement, the origin of her dreams, with the newly reanimated Karen munching on her dead father, suggesting the little girl in Barbara’s mind incorporating the departed daddy through this backward oral method.
Eberwein equates the infant’s relation to the breast with the viewer’s relation to the screen, as the breast is frequently the last thing seen by the child before falling asleep, serving as the “screen” its dreams are projected on. For us, this dream screen, as Eberwein puts it, is represented by Barbara herself, whose passivity, pale features, and blonde hair provide the blankness we require for the projection of our thoughts; she is, in Eberwein’s terms, our “breast.” (Of course, this works only by analogy for nonwhite viewers of this, or any, film; there, the screen may be represented by Ben, and a whole new interpretation constructed.) This way, we become involved firsthand in the steadily less real unraveling of events as our consciousness becomes intertwined with hers: we experience her feelings of loss over the absent father and, as survivors or descendants of the filial unrest of the ’60s, share her fear and confusion over the breakdown of the family and society people of the time saw idealized on television sitcoms and domestic dramas. Her abnegation becomes ours, too, as we watch her being swifted away into the blackness. It’s at this moment we assume the dream, now that the original dreamer is gone.
When the house is overrun by ghouls (in a shot equating their intrusion with the emergence of Harry and Tom from below), Ben, with whom we now associate, is defeated and must retreat to the basement, where he barricades himself. He’s all that’s left of the governing personality, and his withdrawal, along with the invasion by the ghouls, signals the descent of the mind into deepest sleep and its own figurative grave. But before he can sleep, he has to kill the daughter, re-kill Harry (who has risen from the dead), and eliminate the just-revived Helen.
This repeating of action anticipates the assertion in Romero’s first sequel, Dawn of the Dead, that the dead are drawn to the places they once habituated to reiterate the behavior that characterized them in life, and suggests the mind’s cannibalization of events from the previous day in constructing its dream scenarios. Just as parody signals the end of a genre cycle, the reiteration of action here indicates a narrative that’s run its course and is now feeding on, or systematically eliminating, itself.
Dawn brings the forces of reason and order (ironic, in that the posse clearing away the few remaining dead are little more than trigger-happy, thrill-seeking rednecks, not the wise and industrious vampire-killers of old). Ben emerges from his cellar/grave like one of the dead himself, and within moments is shot through the head, finalizing Barbara’s desire for oblivion. As can only happen to the dream-self on the coming of day, he’s swept away with the debris of the night, and dropped on the bonfire.
At this point all attempts at flow break down, for our narrator has been obliviated; like Ben and Barbara, the film itself dies, continuing only in moribund, documentary-style stills – random details telegraphing action, as in a dream. When the men dump Ben head-to-head with the zombie who began the nightmare, indicating that the drama has come full circle, the film snaps back to life for a final few moments while we prepare to awaken and return to everyday reality though never quite recovering from our own abnegation.
Hitchcock used this device to similar effect in Psycho, where our attachment to the doomed Marion Crane evoked Norman Bates’s attachment to his mother, snatched away; it might also take us back to the connection we felt to our own mothers, where we first established a sense of the world as a place of wholeness and nourishment. And maybe in some way, too, Barbara is the mother to a new generation of lost souls, unable to discern dream from reality or even feel capable of effecting change in an anarchic landscape. Pulled into the drama by the homely woman’s psychic crisis, nothing lets us out; having been forced to share her loneliness, helplessness, and confusion, the destruction of her ego leaves us in turn desolated. Because of the way the film weaves its spell on us, drawing us into the universal experience of dreaming and sleep and playing on our unconscious relation to the screen as surrogate mother, it reconnects us to the experience of community while exploding that community from the inside.
This is the reason Night remains so effective through the years despite the changing fashions of the gore genre it helped inaugurate (the army of zombie rip-offs following it their own march of the living dead, mindlessly reiterating the movement of the original until cannibalizing themselves into nonexistence). Unlike all such trends and currents – unlike even the personality of our wilting main character and Romero’s attempts to negate his narrative – through the intimacy of the film’s dream structure and the sharing of another’s personal and private mindspace, in Night of the Living Dead, the human material endures.
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All images are screenshots from the film.
