Among the hundreds of critics who’ve written on the visceral and intellectual impact of George Romero’s 1968 cult classic Night of the Living Dead, more than one have mentioned the film’s nightmarish quality, and when they do, I think they’re talking mainly about its unrelenting tone and the action which spirals from unhappiness to hopelessness, from illogic to downright chaos and confusion.

None of these critics, to my knowledge, however, have ever noted just how closely the film follows the trajectory of these dreams and the experience itself of the mind dissolving into sleep, though director Romero and his screenwriter, John Russo, have described them to painstaking detail. Beginning with the retreat from the outside world and the pressing in of the anarchic hordes of the unconscious, the filmmakers demonstrate how this confusion escalates until reaching crisis point and then subsides, the survivor falling into a dreamless oblivion just before the coming of day. This daylight brings with it the forces of mundane reality to which we return – confused, disturbed, and with the sensation of having had an inscrutable emotional upheaval while our rational defenses were down.

Using Freud’s THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS, then, as a guide, as well as Robert Eberwein’s FILM AND THE DREAM

SCREEN: A Sleep and a Forgetting (Princeton University Press, 1984), we can see how Romero’s film unravels in this half-world and use these texts for an analysis of the deeper psychological material hidden there, adding a few twists, at the same time, to the whole concept of film as communal dream experience and the way we relate to it. For it’s precisely this dream-connection which has ensured the film a lasting place in the popular as well as critical canon, and may even be a key to the powerful personal response even the most frequent viewer has to its traumatic content: Not only is it the allegory of a society that can’t get its act together in a crisis anymore, it’s also the shared drama of one person caught in her own personal apocalypse and of life itself as an inescapable dream.

Proceeding from the understanding that such dreams incorporate information from the previous day into their complex psychodramas involving issues carried with us from our childhood, we can then interpret the opening action of the film as a key to the dream-material within and a clue to what drives the cannibalistic hunger of the ghouls. Studying Night’s

What we have, then, besides a fiercely engaging first ten minutes, is a graphic description of the mind’s descent into sleep. Barbara and Johnny’s flight from the city signifies a retreat from the conscious, social world, the car sliding down the road a falling asleep and the withdrawal into the house the shutting off of the mind from the outside, real world. The dead father represents the loss of the governing faculties of reason and order, his absence practically a staple of the modern fantasy film with roots at least as far back as Hamlet and extending through The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T and Robot Monster in 1953, Carrie in 1976, Blue Velvet in 1984, and on up to Edward Scissorhands in 1990. All serve to set the scene for a relaxation of the consciousness necessary for the unraveling of the dream. The cemetery is a traditional double for this sleep, too: Zeffirelli’s Hamlet begins there, as does Persona (actually, it’s a morgue); Orpheus traffics between life and death in his

poetic quest, and Cocteau makes the sleep-connection clear in his 1949 film adaptation, also throwing in the image of the radio as a communication device to the underworld: its gifts of poetry are the utterances of the unconscious speaking to the conscious mind. This absence signals a deeper loss, however, "sleep," as Freud tells us (quoting Barduch), signifiying "an end to the authority of the self."

The ghoul, then, represents the coming of this sleep. Pressing in on the house – suggesting, as it does in so much Gothic and Romantic literature, the individual mind – his numbers increase as the night progresses, until mysteriously dispersing at the breaking of day. The car which Barbara can’t control figures as the body, which "goes on automatic" during sleep, as does the music box she discovers in the house and the apparently brainless, only instinctual living dead outside. Johnny, as her brother, suggests the conscious self, replaced almost immediately by the darkly complexioned antithesis to his blond whiteness, Ben, her dream-protector and imaginary brother. Ben’s boarding up of the house signifies the mind’s withdrawal

Ben’s breaking up of the furniture to board up the house parallels the way dreams rummage items from waking life to use as

Inevitably, Ben and Barbara – their mutuality expressed in their shared initials – clash when she becomes hysterical at the unreality of the situation and her sudden loss, and he strikes her across the face. She then withdraws for the rest of the

picture and at this point begins reconstructing the actions of the day into the dream-world which, by now, envelops her. Her withdrawal constitutes a falling into a deeper level of sleep, allowing for Ben’s ascendancy in the drama, much as Hitchcock’s Psycho transfers its focus of identification partway through from its female main character to its male in a similarly isolated location. (Like Psycho, too, Night’s dramatic arc is concave, beginning in a graveyard and ending in the basement, which is where Hitchcock – again, as do so many others – climaxes his film.)

While Ben is away upstairs, then, Romero introduces two new characters, who emerge from the cellar, indicating the actual starting of the dream, the subconscious releasing its contents into the conscious mind.

THE CONTENT OF THE DREAM
If we’re to assume some relation between the activity in the opening sequences and this dream, it’s important, then, to regard the new characters

in the beginning of the picture. Still below are Harry’s wife Helen and their ailing daughter Karen, in addition to Tom’s girlfriend, Judy – three facets of the repressed dreamer Barbara, still sublimated: woman, child, and lover.

The Coopers are your stereotypical middle-class sixties couple, unhappy with each other but staying together for the sake of their child, who lies on a table in a coma similar to Barbara’s condition upstairs, suggesting the frozen girlish state the latter has been in for some time. As parents brooding over their moribund child, they’re reciprocal to Barbara’s situation in the beginning, the daughter mourning her lost father; Tom and Judy, on the other hand, represent the hopefulness of love and the possibility of goodness and comfort in the world. (They are doomed.) By comparing these various and seemingly unrelated relationships with the opening exchanges between Johnny and Barbara, we can begin to develop an understanding of the Harry’s wife Helen and their ailing daughter Karen, in addition to

Tom’s girlfriend, Judy – three facets of the particular nature of Barbara’s nightmare and the reason for the apocalypse to follow.

THE MEANING OF THE DREAM
From their bickering in the cemetery and on the drive in, we recognize Johnny as a rake and an atheist, considerably distanced from the rest of his family and the tradition they represent. Barbara, on the other hand, is homely, pious, withdrawn, and clinging to the memory of her dead father, whose absence implies not only a mental anarchy but a spiritual one as well, there being apparently no God to explain what will come later or to help out.

Many have commented on Night’s debt to The Birds, especially as it relates to the unexplained attack on a small gathering of people in an isolated house (its primary influence, however, seems to have been the 1964 adaptation of Richard Matheson’s novel I AM LEGEND, The Last Man on Earth, and also possibly the 1959 feature, The Killer Shrews), but I think its real antecedent is Shirley Jackson and her often introverted, occasionally psychotic or neurotic and highly suggestible heroines – especially the central character from her best-known novel, THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, which Robert Wise and Jan de Bont have each filmed as, simply, The Haunting. Barbara is the spinsterish, no doubt virginal daughter we see in

Jackson’s Eleanor Vance, afraid of sex (she describes the ghoul’s attack on her in hysterical, sexually suggestive terms) and the world, and dreaming of romance but constricted by her desperate family ties. Like Eleanor, her resolution is in the obliteration of her own personality, which Eleanor also sees reflected in the besieged house she inhabits with several other characters. She is, in her homeliness and childishness, hanging on to the family she sees crumbling all around her, having nothing else to anchor her in the inhuman world; so she displaces her feelings, confusing desire for sexual union with family feeling, and translating these incestuous yearnings into the cannibalistic hungers of the undead.

"Johnny has the key," she rambles at one point, indicating jealousy over her brother’s mobility and extroversion and indicating his "key" role in the drama. (Tom has a key, too, but it’s the wrong one.) The car is also a bone of contention between Eleanor and her sister in HILL HOUSE and furthers the parallel between Johnny and Ben, who was able to appropriate someone else’s truck on his first encounter with the living dead and drive it to the

house. (He earlier recounts the terror of seeing a trucker unable to control his vehicle, suggesting an existential view of the world, where one’s survival depends on an ability to propel oneself through the meaningless anarchic hordes.) If dreams, as Freud propounds, represent wish-fulfillment, then Barbara gets hers every time a zombie is shot or bashed in the head (the only way, we learn, to kill the things), for it’s a reenactment of her judgment on Johnny for being so free-living: he died – originally – we recall, by a blow to the head.

Eleanor fetishizes her house and the society she establishes there and exerts her psychic powers to keep them together until ultimately immolating herself in her car, thinking she’ll be made one with her friends and the house. Barbara’s efforts to maintain the new society and surrogate family she creates but is too withdrawn to appreciate also fails, when she goes down

into the cellar – signifying deeper retreat and a descent into another layer of sleep – while the men stay aboveground to make a daring escape attempt.

In this adventure, Tom and Ben try to get the truck to a nearby gas pump, the key to which Tom has found earlier, figuring to use it as a means of escape; Judy, however, insists on accompanying them. When this truck blows up with the lovers inside as the result of a tragic mistake, it signifies the failure of romance as a "vehicle" out of Barbara’s cannibalistic family nightmare. At the same time, it serves as a fulfillment of her own desire to perpetuate the withdrawn and apathetic world of sleep, for the real-life discovery of sexual love would have served to remove her from the womb-like comfort of her family. The fire which consumes the truck and Tom and Judy inside carries through a running theme in Night, from the half-light which opens the action to the daylight and fire at the ending. This fire, which repels the zombies, represents the light and reason which would naturally keep

Russo and Romero, however, distinguish between natural light and the artificial electric light of dreams and the imagination. Ben, who arrives in the blaze of his truck’s headlights, also switches on the electricity and finds the television set which brings everyone together, suggesting artificial light as symbolic of unity and community in the dream-world; the half-light below, however, in the basement where Harry and Helen hold vigil over the half-dead Karen, indicates the tenuous nature of that community. When the lights go out upstairs at the height of the hysteria, it signifies both the onset of an even deeper, dreamless and private sleep and the sudden, concurrent evacuation of any even false ray of hope for the survivors.

Once inside after his aborted escape attempt, Ben is reduced to his own basest level when he murders Harry for getting in the way once too often, a reenactment of the brother’s essential patricide in the beginning. It also recalls the climax of the 1946 omnibus feature Dead of Night, each of whose stories carried the viewer past successive layers of reality until, in the final

episode, all hell broke loose and all order shattered following a similarly irreversible action, the killing of a psychoanalyst, representing the death of sense and reason in the world. No matter how unhelpful or even downright dangerous this father may have been, Romero suggests, his murder is unforgivable even in the ambiguous nightmare the title, though not Romero’s own, suggests. Soon after, the electricity goes out, and all that remains is for the Plague of Darkness to run its course.

Helen, who had abandoned her daughter temporarily to comfort Barbara upstairs, is nearly claimed by the living dead who’ve begun to assault the house in earnest. Barbara snaps out of her stasis long enough to rescue her at the same instant Karen, below, awakens from her sleep to feast on the newly dead father – both, essentially, trying to re-incorporate the family – and Helen shows her gratitude by retreating to the cellar and trying to reunite with her own, dead, daughter. At the same time this reunion takes place downstairs, Johnny appears at the broken-in door to finally spirit his sister away into the masses of undead, just as Karen stabs her mother to

death with a trowel. In this way, Barbara’s desire for communion with the family is fulfilled – especially as her brother carries her away in a seeming embrace – and she finally abdicates her own "authority of the self." Our identification shifts entirely to Ben for the final few minutes, then, though somehow we know something irreversible has taken place.

THE APPROPRIATION OF THE DREAM SCREEN
In Eberwein’s text, we’re reminded of the "oral world of the infant" and how the child’s connection to the mother’s

breast signifies unity with the outside world. The cannibalism in Romero (the idea of suckling drawn to its nightmarish extreme) signifies a similar unity with one’s own, the ghouls returning to life only to feed on the living as a baby awakens only to nurse off its mother; the dream similarly serves to perpetuate sleep while the mind feeds off its private store of memories. When Johnny carries Barbara away in the end to devour her, the scene is reciprocated in the basement, the origin of her dreams, with the newly reanimated Karen munching on her own dead father, suggesting the little girl in Barbara’s mind trying to incorporate the departed daddy via this backward oral method.

Eberwein theorizes on the idea of the infant’s relation to the breast as analogous to the viewer’s relation to the screen, as the breast is frequently the last thing seen by the child before falling asleep, thereby serving as the "screen" on which its dreams are projected. For us, this dream screen, as Eberwein puts it, is represented by Barbara herself, whose passivity, pale features and blonde hair provide the kind of

When the house is finally overrun by ghouls – in a shot equating their intrusion with the emergence of Harry and Tom from below – Ben, with whom we now associate, is defeated and must retreat to the basement where he barricades himself. He’s all that’s left of the governing personality, and his withdrawal, along with the invasion by the ghouls, signals the descent

of the mind into deepest sleep and its own figurative grave. Before he can sleep, however, he has to kill the daughter, re-kill Harry (who has now risen from the dead), and eliminate the just-revived Helen.

This monotonous repeating of action suggests the mind’s own cannibalization of events from the previous day in constructing its dream scenarios, and anticipates the assertion in Romero’s sequel, Dawn of the Dead,that the dead are drawn to the places they habituated in life to reiterate the behavior that once characterized them. Just as parody usually

signals the end of a genre cycle, the reiteration of action here indicates a narrative that’s run its course and is now feeding on, or systematically eliminating, itself.

Dawn brings the forces of reason and order (ironic, in that the posse clearing away the few remaining dead are little more than trigger-happy, thrill-seeking rednecks, not exactly the wise and industrious vampire-killers of old). Ben emerges from his cellar/grave like one of the dead himself, and within moments is unceremoniously shot through the head, finalizing Barbara’s desire for oblivion. As can only happen to the dream-self on the coming of day, he’s swept away with the debris of the night, and dropped on the bonfire.

At this point all attempts at flow break down, for our narrator has finally been obliviated, and like Ben and Barbara the film itself dies, continuing on only in moribund documentary-style stills – random details telegraphing action, as in a dream. When the men dump Ben

Hitchcock used this device to similar effect in Psycho, where our attachment to the doomed Marion Crane was meant to evoke Norman Bates’ own attachment to his mother, snatched away; it might also take us back to the connection we felt to our own mothers, where we first established a sense of the world as a place of nourishment and unity. And maybe in some way, too, Barbara is the mother to a new generation of lost souls, in a daze until very recently, still unable to discern the dream from reality or even feel capable of effecting any change in the now anarchic landscape. Pulled in to the drama by the homely woman’s psychic crisis, nothing really lets us out; having been forced to share her loneliness, helplessness and confusion, the destruction of her ego leaves us, in turn, desolated. Because of the way the film weaves its spell upon us, drawing us in to the universal experience of dreaming and sleep and playing on our unconscious relation to the screen

This is perhaps the real reason Night has remained so effective through the years despite the changing fashions of the gore