Night of the Living Dead ★★★★★

Let them stay upstairs. Let them. Too many ways those monsters can get in up there. We’ll see who’s right. We’ll see when they come begging me to let them in down here.

A lot of people make the point that Cooper was right, but Cooper was only right about one thing: That the door would hold. A door that would not have been enough to save them. He wanted to shut out the rest of the world and blind himself to any understanding of what was happening in it so that he could be in charge of his own little fiefdom. He is white flight. If they had followed his plan they would not have sat safe and sound in the basement overnight till they were rescued (a rescue that was in no way guaranteed), they would have locked themselves in with no radio, no television, no contact with or knowledge of the outside world, with a dying girl they had no idea could possibly rise from the dead and threaten them from inside, with no knowledge of how to stop it.

Ben throughout the movie is proactive. He wants to bring everyone together, to work together to hold a larger space, not to confine himself to the smallest domain that he can control and shrink away from the world. When he is forced to flee the to basement he understands immediately what has happened and knows how to deal with it and it is only by other’s ignorance that he is killed in the end.

I think this cut may have been longer than versions I have seen before. I certainly didn’t remember quite so many of the television segments, though perhaps I had merely forgotten them. They are oddly out of time with the rest of the film. While the events in the house happen over the course of a single night, it the news reports make it seem like this has been ongoing for at least a few days, with segments that are clearly during the day and a shot of the posse that is about to kill Ben seemingly beamed in from the future. It’s an odd aspect of the film.