So, two guys are at a cemetery. Next to them is Patient Zero and a pair of the classic zombie bashing weapon, the shovel. What do they do? They run off! The movie could have ended in about 10 minutes. :smack:
Fun movie though.
Huh. The way I remember it, Barbara and Johnny are visiting their father’s grave and they were unarmed.
Is this in the remake?
In the original, all the recently dead became reanimated.
there was a really horrible remake a few years ago. Night of the Living Dead 3-D…
I saw it in the theaters… i tried to blot most of it out.
Well the two guys took the zombie to the cemetery. That’s when he popped out of the coffin.
There is no ‘patient zero’…Romeroverse zombies don’t reproduce by biting…they just rise, inexplicably, soon after death. This is mentioned exclusively in Night, a major problem in Land of the Dead. (I can’t remember Dawn or Day well enough to say how much of an issue it was in them.)
The handful of people we see both alive and dead in the original Night - the little girl and her father (mom died, but never rose) - died due to being bitten by zombies (she was bitten in a random attack, then bit him), but they’d have risen even if they’d died of influenza, or if Ben had taken the gun and capped them, because the old man was a jackass and the little girl was going to die anyway (assuming they weren’t headshots, of course). I can’t remember if Ben was bitten…either way, it argues against the zombies spreading by biting - if he was, then the fact that he wasn’t zombified, or even rendered ill like the little girl, in the original means that there’s no transfer in the bite…if he wasn’t, then the fact that he was zombified in the remake* means it doesn’t take a bite.
- Kind of ruined the impact of the scene where he was shot, I thought - the zombie hunters killing a living man, either out of racism (Ben was black, the hunters were white), or simply not giving a shit, was much more horrific and fitting with the ‘humans suck, too’ aspect of the Romeroverse. The tacked on scenes with the hunters messing with captured zombies at the end did a much lesser job of that.
Dammit, that should be ‘explicitly’…exclusively totally changes my meaning.:smack:
Can we clarify if the OP refers to the remake, so we can let this thread die and never, ever be resurrected, explicably or in?
I meant the original. Go ahead, bury the thread. Just don’t be surprised if it pops back up again later.
Sorry to not let this die, but I have a nit I must pick. I’m O/C.
Ben was not written as a black man - they just cast a black man because he was the best actor they knew. I guess you can interpret his death in the original however you want, but Romero did not write it as a racial killing in any way.
Then you are severely mistaken. The only thing I can think is is maybe you are confusing Night of the Living Dead with Return of the Living Dead.
One more question I guess. How did the kid in the basement turn into a zombie then? She was clearly bitten.
Because she died. Anybody who died became a zombie, in the PA/NY/OH area*. The best hypothesis was that a probe that had returned from Venus was radiating something that made it happen.
*unless the death involved destroying the brain.
Fair enough. But, in the end, he did cast a black man, thereby adding another layer to the ending. Granted, it’s slightly speculative*, but once Duane Jones was cast as Ben and a pair of white guys as the zombie-hunters, that interpretation did become a valid reading of the scene.
- They MAY have shot him because they were racists, and this way they could kill a black man and get away with it by claiming he was a zombie…or they may have just been trigger-happy idiots - either one fits what happens on screen, and the themes of the series.
The same rules apply in both the original NoLD and the Romero/Savini remake (& in all Romero movies). Everybody who dies of something other than brian trauma. Zombie bites are merely fatal; reanimation is cause by whatever is causing all the other dead to rise. Oh, and Romero zombies don’t rise from their graves either. Sure it’s possible some fresh corpses reanimated in their caskets, but they aren’t strong or smart enough to dig themselves out (especially through concrete vaults). A flood would a problem, but then again by that point humanity would have bigger problems.
They have brains in PA? :dubious:
[Inspector Clouseau] Not any more. [/IC]