4. Night Of The Living Dead (1968)
Barbra and her dickhead brother Johnny are at a cemetery to lay flowers on their father's grave. Barbra doesn't like the gloomy atmosphere in the cemetery and Johnny teases her "They're coming to get you Barbra!". This actually ironically becomes true as a man attacks them in the cemetery. Johnny dies as he hits his head on a gravestone and Barbra flees the zombie and the scene in her car. She ends up in a farmhouse full of disparate people who have taken refuge there from the dead rising in a murderous manner. Barbra is largely mute and in a state of shock in the film so it is left to the others to try and fend off the zombie staged home invasion. There is a boorish man and his wife who are killed when their daughter rises from the dead and murders them. Tom and Judy, a teenage couple, try to escape but are blown up thus making interesting food for the zombie horde to chow down on. Ben has to fight the zombies by himself and when we see him at dawn time, the zombies have retreated. This is because there are posses of armed men scouring the country to kill the zombies and burn them on a pyre. Ben is unfortunately mistaken as a zombie and shot which is a terrible pity as he fought so valiantly against the zombies. The end credits show Ben being thrown on a pile of corpses and set alight. The authorities may be doing their best, but there is a gloomy atmosphere at the end that suggests this is one storyline to run on and on... Made at the height of the Vietnam war, Night of the Living Dead is an intensely bleak film. Much more bleak than Dawn of the Dead's satirical tone or the island paradise ending of Day of the Dead. The shock that audiences must have felt at the film was not only the sight of the lumbering flesh hungry zombies, entrails being eaten, but also at the film's totally grim tone. To have a hero die at the end so needlessly really packs a punch with Night of the Living Dead and can offer us with no hope that this depressing farrago will end any time soon. Chilling in the extreme.