Partially Devoured: How ‘Night of the Living Dead’ Changed My Life and Saved the World

Novelist Kraus (Whalefall) offers an entertaining deep dive into George A. Romero’s classic horror film. The author’s first encounter with Night of the Living Dead on TV at five years old inspired a lifelong passion for horror, low-budget filmmaking, and Romero’s movies (the author collaborated posthumously with Romero on a novel, The Living Dead). The book is structured around a frame-by-frame reexamination of the film, with copious detours exploring related angles, including the film’s ragtag production, the infamous copyright snafu that gave the production company “no power to stop Joe Schmoe from screening it,” and Fred Rogers’s humble request that Romero refrain from casting Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood’s Betty Aberlin “in his movie about flesh-eaters.” Kraus’s close critical analysis of the film, however, is where the book really pops, as he makes a convincing argument for understanding the film as representative of the U.S. in the late 1960s—suffused with the mangled carnage of the Vietnam War and the violent backlash against the civil rights movement. (Regarding the first zombie that appears in the film, Kraus writes: “This sounds histrionic, but he’s Vietnam. He comes out of nowhere. He’s doesn’t fight how we think fights are fought. He looks unthreatening until abruptly he’s killing us. He’s a terrorist you can’t blame for his terrorism.”) Romero devotees will be enamored. (Mar.)