BLOG #3: The Fate of Ben in “Night of the Living Dead”
By: Sana Iwao
Tags: Film, Black Horror, BlackLivesMatter, Civil Rights

Ben and Barbara, “Night of the Living Dead”. https://images.app.goo.gl/4zz1UduPKbEnApym7

Night of the Living Dead was truly a pioneer of its time. Not only did it shape the portrayals of zombies into what we know today, as slow, undead, and flesh-eating monsters, but it was one of the first films to feature a Black lead, and be directed by one. Director George A. Romero actually conducted a blind casting for the lead role, and chose Duane Jones to play Ben since “he simply gave the best audition,” (Jones 118) but it is undeniable that Jones’ casting allowed for a deeper, darker social commentary to be left at the ending.

Although Ben is not the first character that we encounter in the film, he is undoubtedly the most powerful. As ghouls approach the farmhouse where Barbara is taking refuge, Ben suddenly appears, boarding up the windows and driving the ghouls away from the house using fire. The way Ben immediately takes charge with his actions and knowledge of the ghouls’ fears is a great refresher given Barbara’s *cough* incompetence, and this first impression the viewers get is particularly important given the fact that Ben is a Black character; he’s not the antagonist, a jokester, or merely a character for the development of his other white peers, but a decisive and clever leader. This is further demonstrated through his arguments with Harry Cooper, where he (famously) exclaims “I don’t wanna hear any more from you, Mister. If you stay up here, you take orders from me!” (or when he devises the plan to obtain medical supplies and fill up the truck with gas to transport the group to a rescue centre, using Molotov cocktails to scare the ghouls away (though this plan fails, and results in the death of the young couple Judy and Tom).

Yet, things take a dark turn in the end, even given his fortune in being the sole survivor after the ghouls take over the rest of the farmhouse. As he wakes up in the morning, he hears police dogs and gunshots approaching the house, rescuers shooting remaining ghouls dead. As Ben emerges from the cellar, optimistic, he is almost immediately shot dead by the rescuers. If this were any other character, it would be at most a horribly sudden and shocking death; however, the fact that Ben is a Black character almost gives his death another layer of significance. The rescuers did absolutely nothing to determine whether or not Ben was a ghoul or a human, and their complete disregard for his humanity, in conjunction with his survival through the night of the attack, leaves an even more bitter taste on our tongues. The imagery of a group of white, armed men with barking German Shepherd dogs, slowly enclosing the farmhouse and Ben, strikes a clear resemblance to many civil rights protests in the 60s, where peaceful Black protestors were met with police brutality and police dogs attacking them (Parry). The after-movie credits even show snapshots of Ben’s body being dragged out by the so-called “rescuers” with hooks, and many shots feature an upwards shot of the “rescuers” raising these hooks above their heads, evoking a sense of powerlessness and fear in the viewers.

This ending, although extremely cruel, drives home an indisputably important message. After an hour and a half of us being sure that Ben would survive, Romero brings the fantasy world of a ghoul-infested apocalyptic world crashing back down to reality, to the Civil Rights Movement, to society’s anti-Blackness, to police brutality. The ending is a harsh reminder that we cannot escape the injustices of the current times, and although it may have been equally as powerful to depict Ben surviving, if not more powerful, I believe Romero’s decision in incorporating the grim realities of the world into the ending was a political power move possessing incredible weight, whether the film was seen at its release at the height of the Civil Rights era, and when he was one of the few Black directors in a white Hollywood, or in the present day in the 21st century, where the Black Lives Matter movement still rebels against an inherently racist system.

Word count: 693 (incl. title)

Works cited:

Jones, Alan. The Rough Guide to Horror Movies. Rough Guides, 2005. www.libgen.lc.pdf .

Accessed 11/8/2020.

Romero, George A. “Night of the Living Dead HD, FULL MOVIE, 1968.” YouTube, uploaded by

Kurbel TV, 6 June 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYCaob7MDA8.

Parry, Tyler. “Police Dogs and Anti-Black Violence.” AAIHS, 2 Aug. 2017,

www.aaihs.org/police-dogs-and-anti-black-violence/ . Accessed 11/8/2020.