Cannibalism
The scenes of cannibalism are really the meat of the movie’s imagery, pun intended. The unburied dead—“unburied”—have come back to life and are feasting on the living. The symbolism of the living dead has been used to make a number of different points, but ultimately when you link the important points—the dead are distinctly limited to the “unburied” and their only purpose seems to be cannibalism—the symbolic foundation become clear: the choices and decisions of past which have not been successful buried are coming back to feast on the present.
Ben
Ben is in a house filled with people whom the living dead are attacking and he notably stands out from them all. Most obviously, he is black. Beyond being black, he is alone; everyone else in the house is connected to someone else, be it brother, wife or sister. Ben, however, remains a singular individual—heroic in his selflessness and willingness to endanger himself to protect the others. And even so, in the end he dies at the hand of the zombie posse. In doing so, he effectively achieves a connection at last: he is one of them. This imagery suggests that in order to restore civilization and society, not only do the monstrous ghouls need to be eliminated, but so do threats to the social order that don’t conform to the societal expectations.
The Death of Ben
The film makes a sudden and shocking transformation in the presentation of its narrative following the killing of Ben. The switch to freeze frame images that show how Ben’s corpse is handled and winds up dying among the ghouls is extremely resonant of the 1960’s black and white TV images of white authoritarian law enforcement brutally violating the civil rights of blacks. While not overtly political to that point, that imagery becomes inescapably political within the context of 1960’s social upheaval.
Eating Daddy, Killing Mommy
For many, the singular imagery from Night of the Living Dead that marked a transformative shift in the horror genre and make the film the demarcation line between suggestive horror and explicit horror is the sequence showing the little Cooper girl first eating her father’s flesh and then quickly setting upon her mother in a murderous rampage. Nothing is held back; what happens in the basement is not revealed through implication, but made quite clear in ways the audience sees rather than imagines they see. Even more so than the images of the living dead gnawing on bones and handling intestines, these are the images that essentially rewrote the rules of making horror films. Those images of the little girl cannibalizing her father and murdering her mother set the foundation for The Exorcist and Halloween and every horror film—not just zombie movies—to come.
