Disregarding the fact that Night of the Living Dead has nothing to do with zombies—and was never intended to have anything to do with zombies—its single greatest legacy is the influence it has had on the zombie. Prior to the film’s release, the zombie as a very specific entity, both in folklore and in cinematic terms. A zombie was a living human being whose will falls under the control of another through the practices of ritualistic voodoo. Plain and simple. That was it.
Thanks to never fully explained semi-mystical process of unintended consequences, somehow how the ghouls of the film became conflated with the legend of zombies in a way that forever altered the horror movie genre. Thanks to one very specific and intended choice made by George Romero and his co-screenwriter, however, the zombie was unleashed from its rather limited restrictions as a symbol to become a metaphor with even greater malleability than the vampire.
The zombie in its original incarnation as the victim of witch doctor’s spell was limited in its capacity for metaphorical use by its singularity. The decision by the filmmakers to make locate the horror of their movie monster not in any individual threat but as the threat of implied by their sheer number. Ben and Cooper even have an argument about this when Ben suggests that the living dead are individually weak and easy to kill to which Cooper responds that while that may be true, when working together they have the power to overturn a car.
Almost overnight the zombie became a fully functioning allegorical symbol that could be engaged to represent just about ideological point of view as a symbol of any threat posed by the collective. As the zombie movie genre became influenced by Night of the Living Dead to the point that it bore absolute no similarity to the zombie films which preceded Romero’s movie, the “horde” it presented as a new monster to be feared has become an allegory applicable for a vast range of things to inspire fear.
Zombie hordes can become symbols for fear of immigrant caravans trying to get into the country. Zombie hordes can represent the fear of viral infection. They can represent the generation threat of the young displacing the old. Zombies take the form of the fascist ideology of resurrected Nazis. Or even—in the film’s first sequel—the mindless consumerism of mall shoppers.
Thanks to a movie that never features the word “zombie” and was never intended to be considered a movie about zombies, the concept of the zombie has transformed into one of the most useful and wide-ranging metaphors ever inspired by characters in a film. Seen in this light, George Romero’s little $100,000 black and white movie featuring not a single actor who was a star before or after its release can rightly be judged one of the most influential films ever made.
