Night Of The Living Dead:. Joe Kane
for her honest behavior in the ‘evolution of women in horror’ then I’ll be thrilled.”
Today O’Dea notes: “I believe everyone was too much involved with the ‘present’ and all its challenges to think that movie magic was being made. I honestly had no idea it would have such lasting impact on our culture. People treat you differently. [I’m] hohum Judy O’Dea until they realize [I’m] Barbara from Night of the Living Dead. All of a sudden [I’m] not so hohum anymore. I’ve had several decades of families come up to me and say, ‘You scared me to death when I was a little kid.’ The first thing out of my mouth is, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry’…And then I stop myself and say, ‘Well, I guess that’s what we were supposed to do.’”
“I believe everyone was too much involved with the ‘present’ and all its challenges to think that movie magic was being made.”
—Judith O’Dea
In addition to working at The Latent Image, Russ Streiner had been an actor at the Pittsburgh Playhouse, so he seemed a natural to play Barbara’s bored, mocking brother, Johnny. Besides, as Russo points out, “Russ kind of got pressed into service because we could save money by casting ourselves in various roles.”
As for Johnny’s trademark gloves, Romero explains, “Since Russ was not Robert Redford, we figured that we would need some way to recognize him and that’s why we used the driving gloves, to recognize him later when he returns from the dead.” Streiner was very conscious of the props and made sure to milk them to the max. “You might remember me putting on the driving glove in the cemetery. I was being very blatant about it. When I burst in through the door, my hand with the glove slapped on the door jamb in direct view of the audience.” And the nerdy pens poking from Johnny’s shirt pocket? Per Karl Hardman, “We thought he looked like an accountant or CPA and they always have pens in their pockets.”
Johnny’s teasing relationship with Barbara still strikes a chord with modern audiences. “I think underneath it typifies the kind of sibling relationship that a lot of brothers and sisters have,” Russ Streiner interprets the scene’s credibility. “Brothers especially get into taunting and tormenting their younger sisters. And I think that comes through to the fans, and a lot of people comment on it. ‘Oh, that’s how my brother used to treat me,’ and so forth. So I wanted to keep it realistic on that level. That plus the fact that we as actors knew what was coming, we knew that this was going to be the very first onset of the living dead things, and I just wanted to set the stage for the gloomy things to come.”
In fact, the pair’s increasingly juvenile behavior reinforces the film’s dark fairy-tale flavor, as the two young adults regress into a veritable Hansel and Gretel, ripe, edible prey for the creatures of the forest—or the graveyard. “Russ and I had a great time doing that scene,” O’Dea recalls. “It amazed me how it took me back, warp speed, to when I was a little girl visiting the cemetery with my mother. Those visits always scared me…Death scared me back then. So being upset with Johnny in our cemetery scene was pretty easy to do.”
To portray the quarreling Coopers, Harry and Helen, the filmmakers chose close cohorts Karl Hardman (born Karl Hardman Schon) and Marilyn Eastman. In addition to running Hardman Associates, Karl had performed in commercials like The Latent Image’s The Calgon Story and, before that, like Judith O’Dea, had tried his luck in Los Angeles. Karl’s on- and off-screen daughter, Kyra Schon, remembers, “He did study acting out there. He did some theater. But he didn’t get anything permanent, so he moved back to Pittsburgh.” Marilyn Eastman had worked extensively in regional theater as well as TV, performing such varied roles as a live commercials model and weather girl to a lady vampire on local horror host Bill “Chilly Billy” Cardille’s Chiller Theater.
Both Karl and Marilyn were also well-known figures in the Pittsburgh radio orbit, with Hardman logging in several years on a mega-popular comedy show called Cordic and Company, for which he wrote skits and voiced some fifteen characters. The two also recorded and sold routines for radio syndication before that market dried up in the mid-’60s. The highly verbal, versatile pair improvised much of their Night dialogue, with Eastman coining the oft-quoted line, “We may not enjoy living together, but dying together isn’t going to solve anything!”
A receptionist at Hardman Associates, the then-nineteen-year-old Judith Ridley was originally considered for the part of Barbara before being assigned the somewhat less demanding Judy role. Judith O’Dea affirms, “They originally considered Ridley over me because she was a hell of a lot prettier than I was! I have one of those character faces.” In fact, on Night’s iconic original poster, Ridley’s face is weirdly superimposed over O’Dea’s body. But the ultimate casting choice proved the correct one. “I was dreadful when I read for Barbara,” Ridley confesses. “I’d never done any acting. I think they took pity on me. They liked me. They made a little spot for me. But I was not prepared to be Barbara. I couldn’t have done that role.”
Keith Wayne (born Ronald Keith Hartman), cast as Judy’s earnest young beau Tom, was, likewise, completely new to acting, though not to performing—he led the busy local band Ronnie and the Jesters and would later front such musical aggregates as Keith Wayne and the Unyted Brass Works. He spent much of the Night shoot commuting between Pittsburgh and a steady weekend gig in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Romero, for one, was quite impressed by the lad: “Of all the people in the cast, I thought he was the celebrity. He was the showbiz cat. He was our Frankie Avalon.”
“Of all the people in the cast, I thought he was the celebrity. He was the showbiz cat. He was our Frankie Avalon.”
—George Romero, on Keith Wayne
No Night performer would go on to enjoy a more devoted cult following than 9-year-old killer kiddie Kyra Schon, who commits the most transgressive acts of all in a movie packed with them—she kills her mom and devours her dad (!). She was literally fed up with him. For many ’60s youths and later punks and headbangers who proudly bore her image emblazoned on T-shirts or tattooed on their bodies, Kyra represented the ultimate in rebelliousness. Her only two words of dialogue in the film—“I hurt”—spoke volumes about the failure of her bickering parents and their misguided values—and, by extension, the entire social system—to nurture her.
A schoolteacher today, Kyra looks back fondly at her time as a cannibal kid. “The role had originally been written for a boy but since there was a boy shortage that year, they settled for the nearest young, warm body they could find. That was me. I was already a horror-movie junkie at that point in my life, watching Chiller Theater every Saturday. The Crawling Eye and The Wasp Woman were my favorite movies. I just couldn’t believe my good fortune that I was gonna get to play a little monster and kill people. What could be better?”
Kyra certainly made the most of her limited screen time. “I don’t do a whole lot in the movie! For most of it, I’m lying there on a table, and that was one night. Then there was the struggle with Duane Jones. That was kind of funny. I was sure he was going to miss the couch completely and throw me through the wall. But he didn’t. Then there was the trowel thing…. Shooting the scene wasn’t nearly as dramatic as watching it. I was stabbing into a pillow with the trowel. And then someone was behind me throwing chocolate syrup against the wall to make it look like the blood was splattering. I had a great time doing it. I didn’t feel that way so much when I was really young, because I took a lot of teasing as a result of it. Maybe it was just their way of paying attention. But I never liked being the center of attention.”
“I just couldn’t believe my good fortune that I was gonna get to play a little monster and kill people. What could be better?”
—Kyra Schon
Today Kyra doesn’t shy away from her association with Karen—nor do her students. “[They] always ask me, ‘Which one were you in? Oh, you were in that old black-and-white one!’ And I say, ‘Yeah, the real one.’”
Like most of Night’s participants, Kyra ended up doing double-duty on the film. “I was used as the upstairs body because they needed someone to drag away. I guess of all of the people there, I was probably the smallest.” Still, the most traumatic moment for Kyra occurred watching rather than appearing