Daniel Kraus is saved by being Partially Devoured

Cover Photo Courtesy of Counterpoint Press

I have loved Night of the Living Dead since I first saw it when I was in middle school.  I didn’t mind the black and white scenes, the slow action sequences, or even (what I perceived anyways) the weak female characters.  Instead, I loved the idea that the film took place in a rural community located about two hours from my home in rural Pennsylvania. To me, nothing exciting ever happened in rural Pennsylvania, but here was Night of the Living Dead, filled with zombies! Everything in this film was familiar: the back roads, the secluded cemetery, even the country farmhouse where most of the characters hid for the duration of the film.

 It wasn’t until years later that I really understood the impact of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.  Simply stated, this film is often credited with popularizing the zombie figure in contemporary films (although, it should be noted that the word zombie is never mentioned in the movie; instead, the zombie-like figures are called ghouls).   Its legacy is the focus of Daniel Kraus’s book, Partially Devoured: How Night of the Living Dead Saved My Life and Changed the World.

Kraus’s exploration of Night of the Living Dead is unique and relatively complex as he seeks to explore the film frame by frame. Yes, he takes the reader through the movie moment by moment, offering an analysis of what the film is doing. After each moment of analysis, he carefully meanders away from the movie to explore an actor’s background, a film setting, or some unique fact about the film. No detail is left unexamined.  For instance, he studies the appearance of Zombie # 1 in the film and then notes that this particular figure is one of the most popular Night of the Living Dead products citing eBay prices.  Kraus also goes on to explain that the actor who played this role, Bill Hinzman, was inspired by Boris Karloff in 1936’s Walking Dead. Again and again throughout this book, Kraus looks a movie moment and then launches into another piece of background material about the film.

It might seem as if this particular approach would make this book tedious and inaccessible. On the contrary, Kraus somehow effortlessly intertwines film and background facts. There are also several places in the book where Kraus explores his own life in relation to this film. He admires the sibling bickering between Johnny and Barbara at the start of the film because of his own relationship with his sisters.  He talks about what images in the film end up on horror posters and how his own love of horror posters started.  He discusses his favorite parodies of Night of the Living Dead. He even includes childhood memories about strategies he used to watch forbidden movies.

For anyone who loves Night of the Living Dead, this book is a must read. Indeed, this book is also a must read for anyone who loves any horror movies, but especially those which feature zombies, or in this case, ghouls. As I have already noted, this film is often considered the movie that gave birth to the zombie in today’s horror films. This book shows you why.