Five Screenwriting Lessons from Night of the Living Dead

George A. Romero’s 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead had a curious start.

There’s little reason to suspect if would become one of the most influential horror films ever made and a staple of midnight television horror (back when such things actually existed).

The film was shot on a shoestring budget, used unknown actors, and had a raw, documentary-style look (that, quite honestly, bordered on amateurish).

Nevertheless, more than half a century later, Night of the Living Dead remains a touchstone for horror filmmaking and genre storytelling.

Of course we know that all of the Walking Dead and so forth wouldn’t exist without Romero’s worldbuilding (although perhaps these are more influenced by NOLD’s formidable sequels Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead).

What might not be so immediately obvious is that Night of the Living Dead offers tight, teachable lessons for screenwriters. Shockingly, not everything needs to be CGI monsters or (CGI) torture porn (yawn).

I mean shit, NOLD hardly has any jump scares! Rather, Romero’s debut feature shows how craft, economy, and human insight can create lasting impact. Let’s dive in deeper.

1. Minimal Scenes and Cramped Locations

Most of Night of the Living Dead takes place in a single farmhouse. That’s it. No backlot sets, no fancy non-local locations. Naturally, Romero set his story in one location because he was working with a limited budget.

Outside a few exterior shots in a cemetery and the fields near the house, everything else is within the house. This makes the film feel intensely claustrophobic, intimate, and urgent.

For screenwriters, the lesson is clear: you don’t need multiple locations to tell a compelling story. You just need a location that provides:

Dramatic pressure (cramped spaces, limited exits)
Emotional stakes (who’s in the room? who controls it?)
Opportunities for tension (locked doors, boarded windows, flickering lights)

The house in Night of the Living Dead acts as a pressure cooker, each scene pushing the characters closer to a boiling point.

Notably, this is not because there are zombies outside (although perhaps that helps), but crucially the live human beings fail because of the social fractures and psychological unraveling inside.

If you’re writing on a budget (or want your story to feel intense), consider:

One primary location
One or two entrances
A limited cast of characters
A problem that grows more urgent by the minute

This is a feature of the movie, not a bug. Consider your constraints to be strategies.

2. Horror is About People’s Reactions—Not the Monsters

What separates Night of the Living Dead from many modern horror films is that the zombies aren’t really the stars. They’re slow, clumsy, largely unexplained.

(We only get confused news reports stating the facts of the matter. Obviously, given that no one expected a zombie apocalypse, no one on the radio knows what the hell is going on.)

The actual horror comes from the characters’ individual reactions:

Barbara freezes and spirals into shock.
Harry, the little asshole in the basement, refuses to cooperate.
Ben tries to impose order but is constantly undermined.
Tom and Judy make a doomed attempt to escape that ends in literal (not figurative) flames.

Each reaction is grounded: fear, pride, denial, protectiveness, frustration. These reactions conflict with each other, generating drama. The zombies may be outside, but the threat inside is, if anything, more dangerous.

Well-written horror is rarely about the monster itself—it’s about the characters’ responses to that monster:

Give each character a different coping mechanism—fight, flight, freeze, appease.
Let those reactions clash under pressure.
Show how fear alters behavior, often in revealing or contradictory ways.
Use the monster as a mirror—what does it reveal about the people it threatens?

Night of the Living Dead is terrifying because the humans fall apart under pressure.

3. Characters Don’t Need to Speak to Be Effective

Romero makes is to limit the dialogue among his characters.

Barbara, the protagonist for the first 15 minutes of the film, spends most of the movie in silence or near-catatonia after her brother’s death. Still, her presence is always felt.

Ben, the film’s ultimate protagonist, has long stretches of non-verbal action—barricading doors, dragging corpses around, pacing, observing.

Harry and Helen’s marriage disintegrates mostly through body language and tone, not speeches.

This restraint gives the film a documentary realism. It trusts the audience to understand emotion through action and silence.

Dialogue often becomes a default–justifying, expressing—but silence is, if anything, more powerful. Remember that dialogue often reduces tension. Play with silence to allow:

Suspense to build
The audience to project their own fears
The actors to embody internal conflict

Try this in your own script:

Replace one page of dialogue with pure behavior.
Let the environment or situation reveal character.
Use silence as a form of resistance—a refusal to respond, a moment of reflection.

Think of Barbara frozen at the window, or Ben checking the rifle. Consider the meaning of these moments.

4. The Radio: Intelligent Information Delivery

How to explain the world: Why are there zombies? How widespread is the crisis? What’s the government doing?

Romero’s solution is elegant: the radio.

Early in the film, the survivors discover a working radio. It becomes a lifeline—for the audience as well as the characters. A diegetic broadcast tells us:

The dead are rising nationwide.
Emergency services are overwhelmed.
Scientists argue about causes.
The president is considering martial law.

Still–and note this carefully– the radio is never simple exposition. It functions as a:

Plot device (it affects character decisions)
Source of hope (characters cling to updates)
Mood enhancer (the voice is calm, but the content is terrifying)
Tension escalator (as the news grows worse, so does the dread)

Romero later uses television to the same effect. And again, it’s not just “info dump”—it’s layered into the emotional rhythm of the story.

So if you’re struggling with exposition in your script:

Use in-world media (TV, radio, podcasts, social media).
Let characters react emotionally to the information.
Make the delivery part of the scene’s conflict or stakes.

Key point: don’t let people talk over the news broadcasts; focus on how they hear and respond to the world collapsing around them.

5. Make a Minority Character the Hero—And Let Conflict Arise Naturally

Perhaps the most groundbreaking aspect of Night of the Living Dead was casting Duane Jones, a Black actor, as the lead—at a time when Hollywood rarely gave such roles to minorities outside of caricature.

Even more radical: the film never makes a point of his race.

Ben is simply the most competent, level-headed, morally grounded person in the story. He takes charge not because he’s anointed by the script, but because he acts decisively while others flail. His authority is earned, not granted.

But Romero doesn’t ignore racial dynamics. The tension between Ben and Harry has an unmistakable subtext—power, distrust, and fragile masculinity.

It’s even more chilling in the context of the film’s finale, where Ben survives the night only to be shot dead by a white posse, mistaken for a zombie.

Romero claimed that he wasn’t making any sort of racial commentary, at least deliberately. However the proof is in the pudding: the film plays as one—intensely and painfully.

The film doesn’t need to lecture the audience about racism; it dramatizes the consequences.

For screenwriters today, this is a blueprint for progressive storytelling:

Don’t make a minority character a “lesson.”
Don’t explain how to treat them.
Don’t make them passive objects of sympathy or scold those who act against them.
Make them active protagonists. Let them lead. Let them fail. Let them be human.

The conflicts that emerge are shaped by a broader context, whether that’s 1968 Pennsylvania (the film’s setting) or 2025 Los Angeles.

Crucially, Night of the Living Dead doesn’t preach. It is not obnoxious about its progressiveness.

Rather, the film observes–with brutal clarity–what happens when people bring prejudice into a survival scenario.

Low-Budget, High-Impact Writing

What makes Night of the Living Dead so enduring isn’t zombies, its social subtext, or its place in horror history.

The main point is that Romero, with virtually no money and zero big-name talent, wrote a story that feels visceral, modern, and chillingly plausible.

As a screenwriter, you can take this to heart: