Tom Savini’s ‘Night of the Living Dead’ is a Perfect End to the ’80s Horror Remake Wave
Remakes thrived in the 1980s. The stellar reimagining of Invasion of the Body Snatchers at the end of the 1970s had kicked off a trend for the next decade. Chuck Russell’s The Blob was grotesque in a way that would have shocked viewers of the 1958 original, likely causing them to faint, yet it lost none of the small town spirit and care for its teenage characters that had made the first film so successful. David Cronenberg’s The Fly is a romantic masterpiece of body horror, treating the transformation as a slow, gradual disease akin to cancer. It honestly portrays the pain of both a person watching their body degenerate before their eyes, as well as the lover who is forced to watch them go through this and is helpless to stop it, or to even offer comfort.
John Carpenter’s The Thing was admittedly panned when it was first released, so it didn’t actually thrive in the ’80s. In fact, quite the opposite, it nearly killed Carpenter’s career. But its reputation has grown so much, as much as any single movie can, to the point that many now regularly cite it as the single greatest horror film of all time. It has to be included for that reason alone. Arriving in 1990, only two years after Russell’s The Blob, Tom Savini’s Night of the Living Dead is without a doubt part of that trend.
In many ways, Night of the Living Dead is a perfect film to mark the end of that wave of remakes. The Thing, The Fly, Invaders from Mars, The Blob, those were all remakes of classic 1950s sci-fi/horror films that were perfectly representative of their era. Arriving in 1968, George Romero’s original Night of the Living Dead was seen, alongside Psycho as one of the two films that broke apart from that atomic age philosophy and the gothic horror of Universal before it, to bring visceral horror into American neighborhoods in deeply unsettling ways.
They both presented atrocities that felt as though they could have happened next door. And yet, Night of the Living Dead still carried the slightest hint of that atomic age connection, with the film’s repeated TV news reports mentioning a space probe that entered the atmosphere with high levels of radiation, presenting it just as one possible explanation for the zombies.
Psycho, of course, was also remade in the ’90s, that remake arriving in 1998 nearly at the end of the decade, but that feels like an entirely different beast. That was almost an arthouse experiment on the studio’s dime, sticking almost frame for frame, making every flourish it did add absolutely wild. There were other remakes of ’50s and ’60s classics throughout the 1990s, but they were often direct-to-video and simply didn’t have that push or excitement behind them in the same way this one had. Night of the Living Dead carried right on from the wave of ’80s remakes of ’50s and ’60s classics, arriving on the heels of The Blob, adapting perhaps the movie that truly ushered in the modern horror film.
There was no shortage of excitement among horror fans from the moment the film was announced. George Romero returned to write the update of his original classic himself, and the film was directed by makeup effects legend Tom Savini, who had created the zombies for Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead. This was his opportunity to not only work on a version of that original story, but make his directorial debut to tell it himself. The movie also featured genre heavyweights like Bill Moseley (Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2) and Tom Towles (Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer) as well as Tony Todd in the lead role of Ben, two years before he starred in Candyman.
The story adheres closely to that of the original, for the most part, making clever updates here and there. While Barbara started off as the lead in the original film, that role quickly shifted to the cool and capable Ben, as Barbara sank into catatonia due to the shock of the day’s horrors. This movie opens the same, with Barbara and her brother Johnny in a cemetery, visiting their mother’s grave. They see an old man shambling as though in shock, just as in the original, but this time that old man actually is in shock, and the first zombie is revealed a few moments later. This perfectly sums up the approach of the remake. You know what to expect, but at the same time, you don’t.
Barbara is the character most obviously different than the way she was depicted in the original, and as a result she’s typically what people remember most about this movie. In the 1968 film, Barbara (or Barbra, as she was called there) broke down under the weight of the horror going on around her. She regressed to an almost childlike state, she was distant and barely aware of her surroundings, and went catatonic before eventually dying. Far from a capable heroine, but a very realistic response to the dead rising from their graves to eat the living. I do think there is a place for both depictions, I think both are valid in their own ways, because it’s almost refreshing on some level to see a character who is meant to be the lead but is utterly, realistically terrified.
Still, Romero naturally wanted to do something different when he set about writing the script, and so remake Barbara was born. This is a woman who keeps a level head, who is believably horrified by the unfolding situation, but compartmentalizes it for the sake of communication and problem solving. It is unfortunately not a trait shared by everyone else with whom she is stuck in the house. Tony Todd is incredible as Ben, so assured, giving a genuine leading man performance so wildly different from Candyman, yet with a recognizable vulnerability. This Ben and Barbara are initially united against Hooper, who is even more of an outrageous piece of shit than he was in the original, but the two men drive each other so crazy that Barbara often has to step in as referee. The men escalate things in version to such a degree that by the end they are literally shooting at one another.
But the thing that makes this remake shine for me, the reason I wanted to write about it, is purely and simply the fact that it has the deadest zombies I have ever seen on screen. Ever. These zombies look like actual walking corpses in a way that I don’t think any other film in the genre has ever pulled off as successfully. Because of that, this is one of the only zombie movies that genuinely creeps me out. These are dead things, but recently dead, nothing’s rotting and somehow that looks scarier. Somehow that looks more realistic. The whole film has a mood, a quiet sense of overwhelming dread that perfectly accompanies its grotesque undead stars.
Tom Savini had already proven himself as a director on some of the best episodes of Tales from the Darkside, but this was his feature directorial debut and definitely showed that he had what it took to be one of the greats. Unfortunately, he joins a long list of special effects artists who directed one film and then never directed another. He’s in great company among Stan Winston on Pumpkinhead, Kevin Yagher with Hellraiser: Bloodline, even Michael Lantieri with Komodo. I know that Savini has long said that this version is far from what he originally intended, and that has a great deal to do with why he never directed another movie. I’m very happy to see that the new 4K will include his long-lost director’s cut, or at least a likely close approximation.
But I will always go to bat for this film in the way it has always existed, because I think it turned out very well. Even if the movie that was released was not what he had intended, he delivered the scariest zombie movie of the ’90s, and that’s no small feat.
