Night of the Living Dead/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Cult Classic
  • Downer Ending: Ben alone survives the night but is shot by rednecks who supposedly mistake him for a zombie.
    • Bittersweet Ending: The (first) remake by Tom Savini. Barbra manages to find help while Ben finally finds true (temporary) shelter in the basement. As he is listening to the radio, Ben finds the gas key and laughs as the power goes out. Come morning, Ben has succumbed to his injuries and become a ghoul. Barbra also survives, but sees the utter lack of respect and common sense the rednecks have for the living dead.

Barbra: We're them. We're them and they're us.

    • Also from the remake, Harry Cooper managed to survive by locking himself in the attic (and all the others outside it, where all but Barbra fall to the zombies); when he hears someone kill Ben, he comes out and is happy to see Barbra still alive. She then shoots him in the head and tells the zombie hunters to throw him on the fire.
  • Fanon Discontinuity: A "30th Anniversary Edition" of the original film, which cut about 15 minutes' worth of footage from the original (replacing it with newly-produced scenes) and added new sound effects and a modern music score, was made in 1999. It was not well received by fans or critics.
    • Harry Knowles threatened to ban anyone from posting on the Ain't It Cool News comment board if they said anything positive about the 30th Anniversary Edition.
  • High Octane Nightmare Fuel: When Barbra gets carried away by a sea of zombies all at once. Ben tries to grab her but the huge swarm of hands envelope her screaming body into the crowd almost as if absorbing her. What makes it especially bad is one of the zombies is her brother from the beginning of the movie.
    • When Karen turns in the basement, she kills her mother and eats her father's corpse. There's just something wrong about a child doing that.
  • Informed Wrongness: Cooper, the obnoxious Jerkass, is right about what to do (barricade the basement). Square-jawed hero Ben's plan to defend the house ends in disaster.
  • Memetic Mutation: "They're coming to get you, Barbara!" from the original
    • Also from the original, "Yeah, they're dead. They're all messed up."
  • Narm: Ben's description of the diner incident and the scene where he beats up on Cooper kind of flirt with this.
  • Padding: Barbara slowly tells Ben the whole story about how she got to the house, which we've already seen. Worse is that it follows Ben's far more interesting and action-packed story.
  • Seinfeld Is Unfunny: Night completely rewrote how horror movies are made - more graphic, more political, more nihilistic. Before this movie, even horror movies rarely had any Downer Ending. Nowadays they're expected. Today, this film would be relatively goreless, but still pretty scary.
  • Straw Man Has a Point: Jerkass Cooper was right about barricading the basement, as evidenced that Ben (the one most against it) survives the night that way.
  • What Do You Mean It's Not for Kids?: This shock movie was the first of its kind - parents were used to their children going to a saturday afternoon matinee seeing "scary" movies with monsters in rubber suits, little gore, and upbeat endings. The MPAA rating system still hadn't been established. Roger Ebert noted that when he went to see it the children in the theater weren't taking it very well in the second half.
  • What Do You Mean It's Not Political?: A lot of people have argued that the movie was making a statement about race via the conflict between Ben and Cooper, not to mention the ending where Ben gets shot. Actually, however, Ben being black had far more to do with Duane Jones simply being the best actor to audition for the role. According to some production members, the only changes to the script to come of his casting was making Ben a smarter person (per the insistence of Jones, who was himself well-educated).
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