NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD - ACT ONE: "They're Coming to Get You, Barbara"

Table Read

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13d ago 36:30

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They say legends never die. Turns out, neither do their zombies.

In this special Table Read Podcast event, featuring a foreword by New York Times bestselling horror author Scott Sigler, we crack open the original 1968 Night of the Living Dead script, the one George A. Romero actually wrote before the edits, the rewrites, the budget, and the chaos. This is Romero raw and unfiltered. Every word, every stage direction, every creeping dread exactly as it hit the page before it hit the lens.

You think you’ve seen Night of the Living Dead? You haven’t. You’ve seen the movie. This is the mind behind the movie. The blueprint that split horror wide open and rewired the genre forever.

ACT ONE: “They’re Coming to Get You, Barbara”

It starts quiet. Too quiet.

A car grinds up a lonely Pennsylvania hill into a cemetery where the dead are supposed to stay dead. Barbara and her brother Johnny, bickering, restless, too human for their own good, walk straight into the kind of dusk where nothing bad has happened yet.

Romero takes his time. He paints dread with daylight. Every cricket, every whisper of grass feels like a countdown. Johnny cracks the line that changed horror forever:

“They’re coming to get you, Barbara.”

And then they do.

The attack is ugly, real, and raw. No slick cuts or Hollywood screams. Just human panic meeting human decay. Barbara’s brother goes down, and the world tilts off its axis. She runs barefoot through the graveyard, through the dark, through the sound of her own heartbeat losing the race.

She stumbles into a farmhouse, the kind of place that used to mean safety in old movies, and finds only silence, blood, and memory. The phone’s dead. The air hums wrong. And in that silence, Romero builds the first true church of modern horror.

Then Ben arrives, played with fire by Zeke Alton, a man caught between survival and sanity. He’s no superhero. He’s sweat, breath, and motion. While Barbara, brought to life by Olivia Graham, unravels, Ben fights back, board by board, nail by nail, until the walls themselves start to shake.

By the end of Act One, the flames are rising, the dead are circling, and two strangers are clinging to the last illusion of safety. The world outside isn’t ending. It already ended.

Romero didn’t just write a horror story.

He wrote America’s bad dream, and we just woke it up.

CAST

Narrator: Jack Daniel

Ben / Truck Driver: Zeke Alton

Barbara: Olivia Graham

Harry Tinsdale: Jim Connor

Helen Cooper: Wendy Shapero

Tom: Charlie Bodin

Sheriff McClelland: Rob Fitzgerald

TV Commentator: Adam Pilver

Zombies / Ghouls: Natalia Castellanos & Josh Sterling

Light a match. Lock the door. Press play.

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