Headscratchers / Night of the Living Dead (1968)

• Where did the meme "Cooper was right" come from?
  As Ben, Tom, and The Zombie Survival Guide explain, locking yourself in a downstairs room with no way out is the worst possible way to protect yourself from zombies. Go up, not down, is one of the most fundamental rules of protecting yourself from the undead. Cooper would understandably be too Genre Blind to get this (his genre didn't even exist yet), but increased knowledge from the past forty plus years of zombie attacks has completely discredited his "the cellar is the safest place to be" stance, so why is he remembered as being right all along?
  • Because he was right. Ben ends up in the cellar at the end of the movie and survives the night, only to be shot by the hunting party that shows up in the morning.
  • He was only right because a posse turned up and killed all the zombies. He couldn't possibly have known that would happen. Had it not, they would all have starved to death (or more likely murdered each other) trapped in the cellar. Going up, and blocking, or destroying, the stairs behind them was definitely the best option, as they still would have had multiple escape routes. Plus access to a bathroom.
    • Also, how about the fact that Henry's daughter was bitten and was slowly turning into a zombie? If they had gone downstairs and locked the door, one or more of the others would have gotten bitten by the zombie child. Harry also would have had caused most conflict by trying to be the leader in addition to his child becoming one of the living dead.
    • Plus, they might not have been able to run the radio or the TV in the basement. And then they wouldn’t actually know that the dead rise within minutes, and when the Coopers’ daughter died, they’d have no idea what was happening. In fact, if Ben hadn’t arrived, the Coopers, Tom and Judy would probably have died when their daughter turned because they would never have gone upstairs, found the radio or seen the newscast. They would probably have died without ever coming upstairs, as one infected another.
  • What is this "past forty years of zombie attacks" nonsense? You mean the forty years of invented story lines that work how the writer wanted them to work? It doesn't matter what might have happened, all that matters is what did happen. Even if they'd managed to blockade the stairs, there were more than enough zombies for them to start climbing on each other to reach the second floor. With the loss of truck, the survivors wouldn't be able to escape. Both going upstairs or in the basement was a death trap, but the basement death trap saved Ben's life. So, yes, Cooper was right. Remember, no guide is an absolute. That was even lampshaded in World War Z.
    • There's also a factor that not many people have taken into account: If Tom and Judy hadn't died outside in the truck and Barbra hadn't been pulled out into the horde by zombie Johnny, there would have more than likely been more zombies inside the house. Their bodies are more than likely drawing most of the dead away from the house, the dead fighting over the scraps, and a small number enter the house instead. The combination of that fact and the basement being somewhat secure may have been enough to keep Ben alive. It was the set of circumstances that made Harry right, not the fact that the basement was the most secured place (Ben could have been right if Tom, Judy, and Barbra hadn't died upstairs and their bodies left to draw some away from the house.
  • "Cooper was right" comes from the fact that, well, Cooper was right. You can spend all the time from now till the sun turns supernova picking apart the basement plan for all the reasons that it's flawed, but what ultimately settles the debate is that flawed or not, it still worked. Cooper may have turned out to be Right for the Wrong Reasons, but that doesn't change the fact that he was still right; flawed his reasoning may have been, throughout the movie he consistently argued that it was safest for them all to lock themselves in the basement, and ultimately Ben's life was saved because he locked himself in the basement. Nitpicking why it shouldn't have worked ain't gonna change the fact that, within the movie, it demonstrably did. Saying that "Cooper was right" is just acknowledging the irony that Romero is going for.
  • Just because Cooper was right, it doesn't mean Ben was wrong. His plan was very solid - head for the nearest aid station once it was identified by the authorities. The only variables he didn't account for was the key being wrong and Judy getting her jacket caught in the truck. If that minor accident hadn't happened, she and Tom would have survived. The reason Ben's plan didn't work was sheer bad luck.
    • Sheer bad luck, but also, in some ways, Ben's plan itself was flawed. Don't get me wrong, I'd have supported it too, in that situation. However, the zombies are attracted to noise, Ben spent who knows how many hours nailing up boards around the house, which ultimately drew many around the house and made the trip to the gas pump all the more risky. Also, while I agree with his plan, Cooper was proven right with his insistence that the wood barrier was not enough. At the end, they break through a lot of Ben's boarded-up barriers, which Cooper criticized all along.
    • Again though, but for a few moments of bad luck the number of zombies wouldn't matter, they'd just need to drive away from them, perfectly safe. They stay in the cellar they all die to Karen Cooper zombifying.
  • Maybe Ben's survival was based around the fact that he was by himself in the cellar. With just one person to go after, and a strong barrier between them and their food, the zombies figured it was too much hassle and went off to find prey that was easier to catch. If they were aware of seven people down in the cellar, they'd probably become more aggressive and possibly break through the barrier - leaving the protagonists with nowhere to run to and nothing to do once the shotgun ammo ran out.
    • Thing is Zombies don't figure (at least until the fourth film) they just mindlessly go after sources of noise or sight, if they had all gone down into the basement, kept quiet, the zombies' attention span would go, and they would either have just left or hung around, most zombie media shows that's what zombies do when they don't see someone, they just kind of wander aimlessly, only following a sound or sight, one or seven, if the people had kept making noise, the zombies would keep coming, if they were quiet zombies get bored and a lion's share might wander away.
    • They do figure in this movie. The utterly mindless zombie was an Unbuilt Trope at this point. The zombies here use tools, flinch from fire and otherwise show some degree of intelligence not seen in later movies.

• What's with the mutilated corpse Barbra finds upstairs? Assuming the person was attacked by a zombie, why isn't said zombie in the (closed) house when Barbra arrives? And why didn't said corpse become a zombie itself?
  • It was the woman who owned the house. She was presumably killed by a zombie, which then left the house. The reason the door is closed when Barbra arrives is presumably because the people hiding in the basement closed it when they came in.
  • If you watch closely during one of the kitchen scenes, you can see a calendar on the wall showing "December 1966". Since it's already been established that the film takes place in the spring (during the start of Daylight Savings Time), perhaps the homeowner had died months earlier and her corpse had just been rotting there ever since?
    • There's a chance the calendar is old, and the owner never updated it.
  • If you're wondering why the woman didn't become a zombie herself, presumably whatever killed her damaged her brain enough that she couldn't come back. We don't see her in too great detail but perhaps there was a fatal head wound we just didn't see.
    • Although no mention is made of this, there's also a possibility that she did turn and Cooper and/or Tom managed to dispatch her when they showed up.

• How do so many zombies manage to turn up in such a short amount of time, in an isolated rural area?
  • The nature of the movie's rules suggest that the zombies are in-fact reanimated buried people, especially considering they first appear in the cemetery. Hell, the first zombie that appears is in a suit, something at a cemetery you'd only wear if you were visiting (like Johnny) or were buried in.
    • Except that during the news reports, they make a specific point of mentioning that it's only the recent, unburied dead that are reanimating. So the cemetery's out. (That first ghoul who attacks Barbra and Johnny must have just been wandering around there by coincidence.) Granted, there could be a nearby hospital or mortuary (possibly evidenced by the naked female zombie, with the nametag on her wrist), but even then it seems unlikely that a rural area like that would have so many loose cadavers around to rise in the first place (or a dense enough population of the living to get bitten/turned) and then amass so quickly.
  • Alternatively, the horde that assaulted the house aren't actually from the area at all, but actually a herd of ghouls that have been wandering across the country since the phenomena started, building up their numbers along the way and stumbling upon the house by sheer chance. They might even have been fleeing from the organized militia that systematically hunted their stragglers down (notice how in the ending, none of the ghouls tried to attack the militia behind them but was trying to get away from them by walking in the opposite direction) and got distracted by the house long enough that it ended up losing more stragglers than usual once the herd decided to move on and flee again before morning arrived.
    • Except there's no way for a large pack, traveling by foot, to make it across country. The news report had reports coming in from all across the country. If anything, the group is composed of recently dead in the area, with some of them maybe freshly turned from being humans who had the unfortunate enough to either be eaten or bitten by the dead.
    • In that case, it is just a matter of people not realizing how populated these kind of areas are in the US (For reference, a small town in general has a population of 5,000 on average. The tiny horde outside the farmhouse? Not a fraction of that, yet large enough to pose a threat to the ones inside of it.)
• Why did Ben slowly approach the window instead of barreling through the front door shouting that he's alive? He's seen how the zombies move, he heard the gunshots so he knew that help had arrived, so what was the reason behind slowly approaching the window like a zombie would?
• Also, why didn't Ben duck or at least shout while at the window? He must have seen the sheriff pointing at him and the other guy aiming his gun and getting ready to fire.
  • The above two questions have the same answer: after what he’s just been through, Ben is physically, mentally and emotionally exhausted. He’s not thinking clearly, if at all.

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