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Mistakes

When they are throwing the molotov cocktails out the window to let them get to the car, they throw one in front of both sides of the vehicle. However when the 3rd and 4th cocktails land, the first two which were just burning are now gone and there's no burn marks on the ground. See more...

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Duane Jones was the first African American to play a lead in a horror film. He also taught at and became the head of the Theatre Department at Old Westbury college in Long Island, New York. He remained there until he unfortunately passed away in 1988. See more...

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Night of the Living Dead (1968) - 22 corrections

Directed by George A. Romero, starring Duane Jones, Judith O'Dea, Judith Ridley, Karl Hardman, Keith Wayne, Marilyn Eastman (add more)

Genres: Horror, Sci-fi, Thriller

Comments made in brackets are corrections from other visitors. To submit your own corrections for mistakes, just click "edit" under an entry, then choose "correct entry". You can also submit corrections for corrections, if you think a mistake has been unfairly removed.

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Shortly after showing up in the film, Ben takes on two zombies with a crowbar. He bludgeons each one six times in the head and wrestles them to the ground as he cracks open their skulls with violent swings of the crowbar. Immediately after this, he takes another one that has made its way into the house. Again, he wrestles the creature to the floor and cracks his skull open with the crowbar. He then burns the body on the porch. When these back-to-back scenes have ended, look at his clothes. His pants and white shirt look like they just came from the dry cleaners. No blood. No dirt. No tears of any sort. [He's fighting the living dead. Their hearts are not pumping blood, so it's unlikely a large amount of blood would even come out. Given the way he was striking them, any blood would be flying away from him. As for him not having any dirt on him, why would he? At no point during the confrontations is he on the ground or touching anything that would get him particularly dirty.]
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When Ben lights the log fire in the house, he uses matches that are in his shirt pocket. A few minutes later as he sits down on the sofa to light a cigarette, he uses a lighter from the same shirt pocket instead of the matches that he used earlier. Also watch out for the cigarette that magically appears in Ben's left hand in between shots as he sits down. [If you watch the previous scene when Ben takes apart the dining room table, it's obvious there is more than just a book of matches in his shirt pocket. It's likely that the cigarettes and the lighter (his personal effects) are also in the same pocket, while the matchbook was probably found in the house. Prior to lighting the cigarette, he is shown trying to remove a door from its frame. After he finishes lighting up the cigarette, he puts not only the lighter but ALSO a pack of cigarettes back in his pocket, even though he was only seen removing the lighter. This means the cigarettes had been taken out off-screen, PRIOR to him hammering on the door frame. The cigarettes would have been resting on the sofa, and this is why when he brings his left hand into view, it is holding the cigarette.]
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When Ben is moving the body at the top of the stairs, notice how the position of the body changes between shots, from when he leans over the body, to when he actually starts to move the body. [The body at the top of the stairs doesn't change position by itself. First, right after propping his rifle against the wall, Ben moves the corpse's legs. This shot is immediately followed by a jump cut where Ben is now shown holding the edges of the rug upon which the corpse is laying. Ben has basically repositioned the body on the rug so that he can more easily drag it down the hallway.]
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As Barbara coasts down hill away from the graveyard to escape the pursuing zombie, she is supposed to crash the car into the side of a tree along side the road. However, in the initial camera angle two seconds before the crash, the car is a good two feet or so away from the tree. But when the camera angle changes to show the actual impact in the crash, the same front part of the car that was 2 feet away is now running up against the tree, forcing Barbara to exit on the passenger’s side. [In the shot immediately preceding the impact, it's not possible to accurately estimate the distance between the car and tree since the angle shown is from the opposite side of the car. However, what CAN be plainly seen is that there is no more than three feet of grass between the dirt road and the tree. Just prior to impact, the right side of the car banks up several feet onto the grass leaving only the left tire on the dirt road. Even at this angle, it would be impossible to open the driver's side door even a few inches.]
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While Barbara is praying at the gravesite, Johnny is standing next to her, impatiently waiting for her to finish. At the site of lightning and sound of thunder, he reaches into his coat pockets for his gloves and puts them on. Unfortunately, he left this pair of gloves on the dashboard of their car when they first arrived at the graveyard. [This "mistake" wrongly assumes that the camera views a character's every action. For example, we also never see Johnny take the keys from the ignition, but it's obvious that he has them when Barbra flees to the car only to find there are no keys. Following their exit from the car, Johnny is in fact seen stuffing something in his pocket as he walks up to Barbra. He later retrieves the gloves from this same pocket. So although it is not explicitly shown, both the keys and gloves were put into this pocket while he held the flower arrangement with his other hand.]
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In the beginning sequence, when the first zombie attacks at our main character's car, he beats the window repeatedly. He then grabs a rock and actually shatters the window. She releases the emergency break, and rolls down the road, hitting a tree. But when she scoots out of the passenger side, the window is completely down, instead of just shattered, and no glass falls out of the car as she slides out of the seat. [The cemetery ghoul knocks all remaining glass out of the car window as he reaches through the passenger side door for Barbra; hence there is no glass visible in the passenger side window while he hangs on to the car as it rolls down the hill. It's also debatable whether or not any glass falls out of the car because both the car door and the dark shadow beneath the car do not afford a clear view of the ground in the only shot where falling glass might be seen.]
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Near the end of the film in the scene where the girl is stabbing Mrs Cooper (her mother) you can see blood on the wall, but this blood looks as if it has been painted onto the wall (it is too neat and too straight) and is not consistant with how blood splashed onto a wall should look. [The blood on the wall isn't a splatter or spray, it's a thick splotch of gore flung from the trowel blade that has hit the nearby wall intact and then begins oozing toward the floor. It's also not entirely apparent due to the wall being white, but the blood stain is being viewed at an angle (note the angled line in the lower left side of the frame where the wall meets the basement floor).]
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Cooper, you will recall, thinks that everyone should stay down the cellar, whereas Ben thinks they are better off on the first floor of the house. Cooper makes several complaints about Ben’s proposal. At one point Cooper complains to his wife that he can’t see anything through the windows because they are boarded up. What sort of an objection is this? Cooper need only exert minimal energy to walk up stairs and he has a clear view of the outside, which incidentally we get later in the film. Also, a man who complains about not being able to see through boarded windows should not be recommending that everyone hold up in a cellar with no windows! [Harry Cooper doesn't care about being able to see out the windows; he only makes a back-handed comment about it to counter a point raised earlier by Tom that "(in the cellar) with no windows, if a rescue party did show up we wouldn't even know it." Cooper's exact gripe is "And they (Tom and Ben) talk about these windows. There could be 50 million of those things outside, that's how much good these windows are." He directs this point at his wife, Helen, with whom he just had a long argument as to whether or not they should stay in the cellar.]
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Something in this film is different from the rest in the trilogy. Zombies in this one, particularly the ones Ben kills with his truck, seem to take a lot to be brought down. Ben bludgens them at least six times with a crowbar/tyre iron, and they are still moving. In other films, such as Dawn of the Dead, zombies are killed easily by being knocked over the head with a hammer. [In DAWN and DAY, the human characters are well-armed, experienced combatants - whether military, SWAT or motorcycle gang members. They have a wide variety of lethal tools at their disposal, from semi-automatic weapons to machetes and hand grenades. They also have hardened ghoul-fighting skills from having survived through the crisis much longer than the characters in NIGHT. Even so, it still takes a direct hit to the brain to kill a ghoul, as demonstrated in scenes from all three films where severe damage to the chest and body fail to stop an advancing zombie.]
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After Bill Cardille (the reporter) interviews the Sheriff McC, the screen cuts to his ending, where he says "This is Bill Cardille, reporting...". However, look at the angle of the car and lake behind him. It is clear that the film did not cut to another camera, but Bill simply turned to face the same one. Although this is suppose to be a live interview (there is no such thing as taped news), it is clear that Bill's interview and closing were filmed at two separate times. [Bill Cardille's coverage of the "search and destroy" operation in Butler County, PA is not supposed to be live. It's a location news report filmed on 16mm film, as was common practice in the 1960s. At approximately 1:30 into the film, Cardille is shown with his cameraman who holds a 16mm hand-cranked field camera (the type of camera that might be used to photograph combat).]
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All the action takes place in the eastern third of the United States, yet in the live news broadcasts its is broad daylight, while at the farmhouse it is the dead of night. [The daytime footage shown in the various news broadcasts is noted as having been filmed earlier that day ("our news cameras have just returned" reports the anchorman in reference to the "search-and-destroy" operation from Butler County, PA). It would have also taken time to edit the 16mm location footage prior to broadcast. The only live portions of the news program consist of the anchorman's in-studio reports and his interview with Dr. Grimes at approximately 1 hour into the film.]
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After Ben kills the zombie that made it into the house the eyes are closed. In the shot after Barbara is looking at the zombie the eyes are open and they glance over at the camera and back again. [The ghoul's eyes were made to open (a sometimes occurrence in real corpses) and twitch so that Barbara is uncertain whether or not it's dead. It's obvious this was intentional as the camera slowly zooms into the ghoul's face while a strip of shadow strategically obscures the eyes from view. The scene ends with a "stinger" - Ben's voiceover saying "don't look at it." - which is designed to make the audience jump.]
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At the cemetery, while in the car, Barbara says daylight savings time started that day, which would make it April. But later in the farmhouse, the wall calendar shows December. [The farmhouse was abandoned, which could mean the owners left the farmhouse in December, or maybe the owners never bothered to take the calendar down.]
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just before the lorry/van explodes, a couple of the zombies look to their right a couple of times. as though they're waiting for a cue. [Yes, the zombies were looking to their right, but they weren't watching for a cue, they were looking for any more scraps of food.]
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The main zombies may have killed Johnny, but the zombie didn't bite Johnny. Johnny killed himself by banging his head the the flat headstone. So the mysterious virus shouldn't have gotten into Johnny's system. The only way of becoming a zombie is when the zombie itself bites you. [That's not true, any person that died for any reason became a zombie, unless of course the brain was damaged too much. After all the first zombies did not get bitten.]
Edit Corrected by pross79
The newscaster on the television said that all bodies should be burned within minutes or the corpses will come back to life. However, the corpse of the owner of the house didn't reanimate. [First, the newscaster is not a expert on zombies (no one in the movie really understands what is happening). Second, since in this movie the zombies themselves can be killed, it is possible that some bodies are damaged (internally, invisibly) and do not reanimate.]
Edit Corrected by Myridon
When Mrs Cooper first comes up from the cellar, Tom says to her (referring to Barbara) "Her brother was killed". How does Tom know this? There was no direct reference to this either from Barbara or anyone else in the house. Ben did say to Barbara earlier in the film that her brother was dead, but that was well before the people in the cellar first appeared in the film. [This happens after Tom had been upstairs for some time and the film was following the Coopers in the basement. Ben could have told Tom about it at any time during that interval.]
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When the zombies come up the house and start reaching through the barriers, Ben takes the rifle and shoots through the window at one of them. The zombie stumbles back, looks up at Ben and comes shambling back. The same exact scene occurs until he shoots it in the head. [That is because Ben shoots the zombie a second time. Later in the movie it is revealed that zombies can only be brought down with a shot (or other severe trauma) to the head. In other words, Ben could have shot the zombie a hundred times, but it would have been useless unless one of those shots hit him in the head.]
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The sheriff has a belt of ammo over his shoulder with huge calibre bullets (.50?) but he's carrying a small rifle. There's no way those bullets fit that gun. [If you look more closely, you will see that the Police Chief (not Sheriff) is carrying something like .30-06 rounds, which are exactly what you would expect a rifle like that to use. The cartridges are quite long (as military cartridges designed in the early 20th century usually were), but if you look at the actual bullets, they are nowhere near .50.]
Edit Corrected by J I Cohen
Shortly after getting into a farmhouse to escape the pursuing zombie, Barbara looks out windows several times to check on the zombie&146;s location. When she enters the house it is light outside. When she first looks outside we get a shot of the zombie along the side of the house, and it is still light outside. About a minute later, she looks out another window. When we get a shot of the zombie outside, it is now fully dark. When the camera angle changes to show Barbara looking at the window, it is light outside, as is clear from the light on her face coming through the window. Similarly, the sunlight from outside is presumably responsible for the dim lighting in the house, but when Barbara runs outside and first encounters Ben, it is fully dark. [Debatable. If you remember in the graveyard, Johnny was startled by the sudden flash of lightning and thunder. Its possible that clouds were moving in. As she made it to the farmhouse it already appeared to be getting dark.]
Edit Corrected by furious1116

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