Acting and Race in Night of the Living Dead (1968)

in the extensive body of scholarship devoted to George Romero's groundbreaking film Night of the Living Dead (1968), rarely has anyone asked an obvious question: who is Duane Jones?¹ The casting of Jones, a black actor, in the lead role with an otherwise white cast has been recognized as one of the film's defining features. Many scholars have followed the lead of Richard Dyer, who argues that the film radically breaks with the power of whiteness to disguise itself through the mantle of the ordinary (46). And yet the celebration of the film's transgressive representation of race has long been framed by two paradoxes. The first is a critical consensus that the acting in the film is “bad”—so bad, in fact, that it “works.” The second paradox was posed by a New York Times reporter in the following way in an interview with filmmaker Jordan Peele: “...