Night Of The Living Dead:. Joe Kane
proved a childhood high point: “It was fascinating to watch ordinary people transformed into flesh-eating ghouls. I loved seeing zombies stand around the barbecue grills waiting for their hot dogs, zombies smoking cigarettes, zombies driving cars. There was a surreal quality to that scene that could only be truly appreciated by the mind of a child.”
Another key to Image Ten’s successful secondary casting: hiring people to essentially play themselves. William Schallertesque Charles Craig, a radio and TV veteran who’d worked as Alan Freed’s newsman on the pioneering rock deejay’s Moondog Show in Cleveland and served as an actor and writer at Hardman Associates, portrayed the television newscaster who relayed the breaking bad news regarding the ongoing ghoul epidemic.
“It was pure happenstance I was on the scene at that time as an experienced newsman,” Craig later related. He even wrote his own news copy and added a turn as an intestine-chomping zombie. Craig could also be heard as the eponymous character in the local morning radio comedy series The Teahouse of Jason Flake, produced by and featuring Hardman and Eastman.
Similarly, Chiller Theater host and all-around WIIC-TV front-man Bill Cardille agreed to play the television field reporter—and had to wait some twelve hours on-set before his turn arrived, after a full night working at the station. “When you see me in that movie, that’s after no sleep for about two days.”
Local news cameraman Steve Hutsko signed on to appear as Bill’s cameraman. His story is typical of Night’s naturalistic casting. He’d earlier accompanied Cardille to the set to shoot a local TV story about the filming in progress: “We went to the old farmhouse and they were setting up things. That’s how we got involved. Bill Cardille asked me, ‘Do you want to be in the film? I’m gonna be a reporter and they need a cameraman.’”
Hutsko took a week’s vacation to make sure he could fit the filming into his schedule. “[There] didn’t seem like there was a script for anybody,” he recalls. “I never saw one. The director said, ‘When you go on a news assignment, what do you normally do?’ I said, ‘If we got an assignment like this, and we’re out there half a day, you call into the office and let ’em know what’s going on.’ So I told Bill, ‘What if I tell you I’m gonna call the office?’ And he said, ‘Go ahead, Steve.’” The moment plays completely smoothly on screen.
Production manager George Kosana contributed a memorable bit as Sheriff McClelland, ad-libbing his lines, including the deathless, “They’re dead. They’re…all messed up.” (Which ranks right up there with Streiner’s scripted, “They’re coming to get you, Barbara!”) Posse member Vince Survinski, meanwhile, became the unwitting villain of the piece—it was his perfect shot that nailed Ben. “I shot the hero without knowing it,” he later revealed. “I didn’t know what I was shooting at in that scene until I saw the picture. The first time I saw it with an audience of kids at a matinee, I was afraid to leave the theater! I waited until they all left and snuck out a back door!”
Rounding up the requisite zombies posed far less of a challenge than initially anticipated. According to Russo, “We were worried that we did not have enough money to pay a sufficient number of extras. But we got plenty of volunteers, including people from in and around Evans City, who jumped at the chance to be in a movie. We let them be posse members or made them up as ghouls. They were patient and enthusiastic. They gave the movie a ‘real people’ look that probably added to the believability.”
Casting a wide zombie net, Image Ten likewise looked to their immediate peers for assistance. Romero recalls, “We had a company doing commercials and industrial films, so there were a lot of people from the advertising game who all wanted to come out and be zombies.”
Sometimes, the filmmakers resorted to more aggressive recruitment tactics. Evans City cabinet shop owner Ella Mae Smith remembers, “We were sitting in our yard and a car pulled up in front. A girl got out and she said, ‘Hi, we’re from the movie back there that we’re making. How would you and your husband like to be in it?’ And of course my husband said, ‘No.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I think that that would be lots of fun.’ So I kind of pleaded and begged and he said, ‘Okay, I’ll go back and see what’s going on.’ But we had no idea what the film was about. So we went back and they started putting this goop all over our faces and we were ghouls. I was thrilled to death our names were up there! Maybe it was because they paid us $25.” In all, some 250 zombies showed up for the shoot.
Naturally, those zombies wouldn’t have much impact without a convincing living dead look. Just as she’d once been considered to play Barbara, Judith Ridley had been picked as a possible candidate to apply the greasepaint. “I was asked at Latent Image to take a makeup course,” she remembers. “They thought that in the production work, if I could do the makeup, then that would be one less freelancer that they would have to hire.” After doing a full makeover, complete with false eyelashes, on volunteer John Russo, Ridley surrendered the assignment to Marilyn Eastman.
With another projected prospect, Tom Savini, serving in Vietnam, Eastman, who had done her own makeup as a regional theater actress, now seemed the logical choice, even though her zombie-making approach proved a work in progress. “You’ll see in the beginning everyone looks like a raccoon. Gradually, they got a little more sophisticated.” With the help of a mortician’s friend called derma wax, Eastman says, “We tried to make variations in the wounds and costumes of the flesh-eaters, to indicate that they must have died in the midst of different normal activities. These were supposed to be the recently dead brought back to life.”
Since the zombies had only newly departed this mortal coil, Russo points out, “They, logically, would not be especially decayed or deformed, so this made the makeups easier. I played the part of one of the first zombies we filmed—the Tire Iron Zombie. My idea was that I would have a certain amount of rigor mortis, so I purposely twisted my face out of shape and moved stiffly, albeit with ‘deadly intentions.’”
As for that notorious nude pin-up ghoul who would adorn the movie’s poster (though often wearing airbrushed bra and panties, presumably to discourage the necrophiliac trade), Eastman says, “I just dusted her down with gray makeup to make her look kind of gray and dead.” Russo relates, “We used an artist’s model for this scene. We figured that some of the dead bodies in morgues would have risen, and we wanted to illustrate this point. It was another ‘believability’ factor. We also didn’t mind any word of mouth that might accrue regarding one of the few nudes to appear in horror movies at this time.”
Word of mouth apparently spread quickly—long before the film was completed. According to Judith Ridley, “The night they filmed the nude ghoul, all of Evans City found out about it. They had their lawn chairs set up around the edges of the property. It was funny to see the rest of the zombies trying to keep their eyes elsewhere instead of looking down at the obvious places on the nude one.” Meanwhile, going many of her cohorts one better, Marilyn Eastman did triple-duty on the film, also contributing a cameo as the infamous insecteating zombie.
“It was funny to see the rest of the zombies trying to keep their eyes elsewhere instead of looking down at the obvious places on the nude one.”
—Judith Ridley
What may be most remarkable, in a pre-reality TV/YouTube/and generally camera-savvy culture, is how Night’s zombies are never caught looking at the lens or deviating from their living-dead personas. Gary Streiner attests to the undead extras’ extraordinary discipline: “The acting experience level of our cast was limited, to say the least, but still everyone was always totally in character. I don’t remember there being abnormal amounts of retakes being done.”
From the get-go, the filmmakers took care to establish fairly strict guidelines to set the parameters for appropriate zombie behavior. Says Russo, “We reasoned that they would move slowly; in fact, they had to move slowly, or else the script would not have worked; it would not have been believable that our hero Ben could elude them after the failed escape attempt.”
The iconic role of the opening cemetery zombie was originally reserved for Russo. “I was going to be the cemetery zombie because nobody else was around to do it. I got into makeup and then Hinzman showed up. We said, ‘Oh good, he can