The Cavalry Is on Its Way, Right?

A Primer on Survive-the-Night Movies

 

A group of strangers find themselves besieged by an outside force. To survive until help arrives, they must band together despite clashing personalities and differing ideologies. You know the vibe.

This idea is not endemic to the horror genre. The recounting of sieges throughout history often use this narrative contrivance. The idea is so entrenched within the Western genre that it spawned the idiom to wait for the cavalry (e.g., She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), The Comancheros (1961)). Military thrillers often place a unit behind enemy lines awaiting rescue (e.g., Hunter Killer (2018), Clear and Present Danger (1994)). Ghost stories often use this idea, although they are usually not about awaiting rescue.

However, surviving the night is perfectly suited to the horror genre because it has two ingredients essential to a good thriller: 1) a sense of hope, no matter how faint or false, and 2) an unknowable force with its own logic which the group must decipher if they want to survive.

Oh, the beast fears fire! Let’s surround ourselves in torches.

Oh, they can’t go through water! Let’s swim out to that island.

Oh, they key off of sound! You know the drill.

I feel the need to mention that not every monster movie fits within our parameters. The Friday the 13th series (1980 to 2009) has an unknowable force wreaking havoc, but there is no logic nor suvivability within the film (metatextual arguments aside, Randy). Jaws (1975) features a third act where the characters are isolated on a boat but 1)they deliberately put themselves in harm’s way to catch the animal, 2)there is no expectation that the cavalry will arrive… in fact, the characters are the ones who plan to remove the threat from the residents of Amity Island, and 3)the only people who are in danger of the shark are those who travel into the water where the shark lives and feeds. There is no isolation.

 

And one last thing before we move on. These are almost all horror movies, and most of them zombie movies. If that sounds unappealing, you might want to stop reading here. 

 

 

The Grading System

As with our other Connective Tissue features, here is our scientific and well-reasoned rubric.

 

1 to 10 of the Living Dead

As with so much that I do on this site, I find myself acknowledging that George A. Romero’s influence stands a mile high. Every horror film on this list released after 1968 may be directly and indirectly indebted to Romero, especially within our subgenre here. So rather than spend every single description comparing Night of the Living Dead to the movie in question, we’ll confine this to a simple value on a 1 to 10 scale.

This is in no way a judgment on the films here. Rather, I am giving a reference point for how much each film hits the same tropes, plot points, and vibes of Romero’s work.

 

1 to 10 November 2016 Thanksgiving Dinners
(a.k.a. Volatile Group Dynamics)

Let’s confine a bunch of people with nothing in common save circumstance. I’m sure they’ll be fine. This scale quantifies the amount of interpersonal drama within the movie. A low value indicates that the group try to seek the common good and are willing to trust in others. A higher value usually means some member sabotages the others, someone draws a gun on another person, or maybe someone has to be confined after an incident. High tension, to put it simply, like a family Thanksgiving after a divisive election season.

 

1 to 10 Ears in Custard

Is the movie so disgusting that it becomes funny (intentionally or otherwise)? This criterion is not exclusive to the survive-the-night genre. But I think it is helpful to let viewers know if the movie features run-of-the-mill gore, Evil Dead gore, Evil Dead 2 gore, Braindead gore, or Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 gore (in order of increasing squishiness).

 

The Movies!

Here are some of my favorite examples of our subgenre. I tried to keep us within the horror / thriller arena. Examples outside of those genres are below in the Honorable Mention section.

I’ve sorted these films by chronology. If the entry represents a series of films, it is sorted by the release date of the first entry in the series.

 

House on Haunted Hill (1959)

House on Haunted Hill (1999)

Return to House on Haunted Hill (2007)

A group of people are lured to a millionaire’s house over the promise of money. The catch: they must spend an entire night within the house with the doors locked. Are there murders? Of course. Ghosts? Maybe.

House is closer to an Agatha Christie story than it is to the other entries on our list, but it hits all of the notes that we want. We have the hope of reprieve after a certain amount of time. We have some spooky force causing problems. We have friction between characters. And obviously we have Vincent Price here to dial up the camp and the spookiness.

I recall seeing the 1999 remake in the theater but have never revisited it. I found it annoying and aggro. I can’t speak of the sequel but its highest rating among Letterboxd reviewers I follow is 2/5 stars. Yikes.

2/10 Living Deads. As mentioned above, this has more in common with an Agatha Christie cozy mystery. (The original House predates Living Dead by 9 years.) But it does have the idea that surviving the night will provide a measure of safety.

6/10 2016 Thanksgivings. Rich guy invites a bunch of people to his house who all have secrets and questionable ties to each other. What is his ulterior motive? Is he the killer? Tense setup!

1/10 Ears in Custard. 0 for the original film. The 1999 remake had some relatively gory deaths from what I recall, but tame in comparison to the rest of this list.

 

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Dawn of the Dead (1978)

Day of the Dead (1985)

Night of the Living Dead (1990)

Land of the Dead (2005)

Diary of the Dead (2007)

Survival of the Dead (2009)

(deep breath):

• Night: A woman and her brother visit the graves of their parents and are attacked by a shambling man. The woman escapes to a nearby farmhouse where she is joined by a family who hide in the basement, a local teen couple, and a guy who tries to unify these strangers so that they may all survive the night.
• Dawn: A couple of soldiers and some news reporters flee Philadelphia in a helicopter, but run out of fuel in Monroeville, where they land on the roof of a mall. They survive off of the bounty of the mall but are surrounded by the living dead and by humans who covet their resources and security.
• Day: A team of scientists study the living dead within a bunker in Florida. Tensions run high as the military squad that provides protection has lost so many members that those remaining are overworked and at their breaking points. One error on anyone’s part could cause annihilation.
• Night (remake): A woman and her brother visit the graves of their parents and are attacked by a shambling man. The woman escapes to a nearby farmhouse where she is joined by a family who hide in the basement, a local teen couple, and a guy who tries to unify these strangers so that they may all survive the night. This time it is directed by Tom Savini, is shot with color film, and is more gory. (Still good, though!)
• Land: Humans have found a facsimile of stability within the peninsula of downtown Pittsburgh, albeit at a cost of their personal freedom. Bands of armed troops scavenge the surrounding boroughs and townships for supplies, but the living dead are everywhere. How long can the people survive?
• Diary: Film students document their experiences as the dead rise. They find themselves trapped within a hospital but must flee when it is breached. They take an RV, bound for somewhere safe. Anywhere.
• Survival: An island off the Atlantic coast of the United States or Canada (the geography is quite blurry in this one) is isolated enough that the people continue their lives despite the mainland being lost to zombie apocalypse. However, two families hold multigenerational grudges and it is a matter of time before this feud destroys their way of life.

Romero revisits his basic themes within each iteration of this series to varying success. For my money, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead are the best in the series, with the two Nights next and Land a distant but enjoyable fifth place. (Diary and Survival are only for Romero completionists.) In these stories, we see a group of strangers put into a scene of intense stress and we see how their best efforts at unity are doomed from the start. The venal, the self-preservationists, the lazy, the myopic, these figures disrupt plans, inject sloppiness into routine, and sometimes outright sabotage the rest of the group.

10/10 Living Deads. I’m not explaining this.

9/10 2016 Thanksgivings. Isolationists, people who refuse to believe what their eyes are seeing. The idle rich in their steel tower. The military who think none of this is worth the cost of their lives. The bikers who just want to piss in someone else’s cheerios. This series has every manner of friction within its group dynamics.

10/10 Ears in Custard. The most tame of the group is the original film, but it is still brutal and shocking, its black and white photography only increasing the dread. The most gory is likely Day of the Dead, where Tom Savini’s makeup effects are horrifying: amputations and vivisections that will make you gag, squishy guts and popped heads and everything you don’t want to see and will never forget.

 

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)

Ghosts of Mars (2001)

This is not the first time we’ve talked about these John Carpenter movies. Our Rio Bravo feature talked about Carpenter’s homage and his indebtedness to Howard Hawks. But hell, I am happy to shill for Carpenter’s debut film. A prisoner transport makes an emergency stop at a police precinct in the suburbs of LA. Unfortunate choice, as the precinct has a skeleton crew for its final night of use before it is closed down. And compounding the probelms is a man who crosses a murderous gang before stumbling into the police station.

Soon this disparate group are surrounded by a wordless, murderous gang intent on killing everyone inside. The people must work together if they want to survive the night, as they know that police will be checking in the next morning.

Carpenter provides one of his most minimalist scripts and one of his more iconic film scores.

He returns to basically the same plot with Ghosts but positions it within a colony on Mars that has unearthed some native species that can possess human bodies. The interpersonal friction is dialed up to annoying levels and there are several questionable cast decisions. But the idea is similar: police and a notorious prisoner must team up to survive the night when surrounded by a force intent on their deaths.

6/10 Living Deads. Living Dead adjacent but with some Hawksian conviviality among the survivors. Assault is the far better of the two films but both are quite tense and the body count is high.

2/10 (Assault), 10/10 (Ghosts) 2016 Thanksgivings. Assault has the survivors working together pretty well other than a few hiccups. Ghosts of Mars has everyone yelling at everyone else at every moment.

2/10 Ears in Custard. Assault has one moment of all-time shocking violence, but is not funny. Ghosts is gorier but still not especially gory or funny.

 

Shock Waves (1977)

A tour boat (yeah, like that one) wrecks against a cargo ship. The tourists and some crew evacuate onto a nearby island that turns out to be lousy with zombies. An old hermit may also be hiding secrets.

This is a weird and sleepy horror movie. There are many scenes of figures wading through water and the only sound is the lap of waves. This makes it unique among this list, as I struggle to think of a more serene zombie film.

4/10 Living Deads. A group of people are stranded on an island and hope to escape on a boat. However, the waters are full of zombie Nazis, so the group argue about their options. Should they risk death by leaving the island or find somewhere to hole up until the Coast Guard locates their tour boat?

4/10 2016 Thanksgivings. There is some argument but not as much as you’d think.

4/10 Ears in Custard. A few great gross-out moments.

 

Evil Dead (1981)

Evil Dead II (1987)

Army of Darkness (1992)

Evil Dead Rise (2023)

Dutch angles, high camp, bug eyes, terror, gore, and Looney Tunes anarchy. The Evil Dead series is all you want and more. Ash and his college friends take a trip to a cabin in the woods where they find the creepiest book of all time and some recordings by a mad archaeologist. You know where it goes from there. Army of Darkness takes our hero back in the past where he must again face the Deadites, this time in a Ray Harryhausen-esque setting replete with miniatures and stop-motion.

Evil Dead Rise is a sequel with new characters but the same ol’ Deadites. This is the best late-franchise sequel that I can think of since Prey (2022) became only the third good Predator film. Evil Dead Rise is disgusting in all of the right ways and gushy and horrible and gleeful. It has the spirit and sound design that you want, and an amazing array of characters.

9/10 Living Deads. There is no suggestion of rescue, which is really all that keeps this from a 10/10. Otherwise it is an isolated cabin surrounded by evil, with unknown logic and infinite gore.

2/10 (1, 2, Rise) and 10/10 (Army) 2016 Thanksgivings. The first two films are just “don’t die” while Army spends most of its runtime with Ash arguing with everyone else about the best way to survive.

9/10 Ears in Custard. You know you are in for a treat when there are multiple types of blood for different gore effects.

 

Demons (1985)

People on the street in Berlin get flyers for an indie film at a movie theater they thought was derelict. Things take a turn as attendees are slowly turned into dripping, gooey demons. Much shouting and many strategies are employed. They feel, though, that they are safe as long as they can get out of the theater. That may prove easier said than done.

7/10 Living Deads. The survivors barricade hallways, climb through heating ducts, think through plans, and create makeshift weapons. This has major Dead vibes, but with the horror and gore dialed up and the terror dialed way down.

9/10 2016 Thanksgivings. Are we safe in the balcony? What about if we get into the projector room? Surely the police can help us?

9/10 Ears in Custard. So much popping and pulsing flesh.

 

The Return of the Living Dead (1985)

A medical supply company accidentally receives an order of barrels meant for the military. A barrel is broken and soon a zombie outbreak takes over a quiet corner of LA. No punk nor weirdo is safe unless they stick together and wait for the army to save them.

9/10 Living Deads. Produced by the cowriter of Night of the Living Dead and centered around a couple of buildings and a graveyard, you can feel the influence here even though this one ultimately is more like a gross-out episode of The Twilight Zone.

9/10 2016 Thanksgivings. The punks don’t trust the cops, the mortician doesn’t trust the punks, Clu Gulager doesn’t trust anyone, and everyone is dead meat when they flee the safety of the group.

8/10 Ears in Custard. Gore and tone at the humorous end of the scale, but still revolting. This movie rules.

 

Chopping Mall (1986)

A group of teenagers decide to party in a furniture store after hours. (first off, eww –Ed.) They made the mistake of doing this on the night that the mall has implemented a new security system to deter thieves: multiple murderous robots patrol the mall and every exit is sealed with blast doors until the mall opens in the morning.

The horny teens must find a way to survive the night and avoid the robots, which resemble Daleks if they were actually scary.

7/10 Living Deads. Big Dawn of the Dead vibes but more humor and less pathos.

4/10 2016 Thanksgivings. Some arguments about the best course of action but it is pretty clear that “be silent and wait for dawn” is the best course of action.

6/10 Ears in Custard. A couple of over-the-top kills.

 

Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight (1995)

A demon chases a guardian of a valuable artifact. He traps the guardian within a desert hotel. The hotel is full of colorful locals and the guardian wards the place so that the demon and its minions cannot enter. However, the police think the guardian is a thief and the locals have no interest in staying in the hotel nor do they believe the words of the guardian. Much chaos ensues.

This movie rules.

6/10 Living Deads. This is more an homage to Assault on Precinct 13, but the guardian knows that the sunrise will bring temporary safety, so he just needs to make it through the night. And there are clear rules that the survivors learn as to how to survive.

9/10 2016 Thanksgivings. One of the best movies if you want a house full of selfish people working to preserve themselves and sabotage others. And what a terrific cast to showcase this friction (Jada Pinkett, Thomas Haden Church, CCH Pounder, Charles Fleischer, William Sadler, Billy Zane).

7/10 Ears in Custard. A person’s head is punched through. People are melted, dismembered, and consumed. The movie is gross and winking in equla parts.

From Dusk Till Dawn (1996)

Two total scumbags murder a bunch of people and flee for Mexico. They kidnap a priest and his children in order to get over the border, and then head for an isolated bar where they plan to hang out until a local gangster arrives to aid the scumbags in their escape. Unfortunately, the place turns out to be a vampire bar that lures in bikers and road trash, and now the protagonists must stay alive until the morning.

8/10 Living Deads. The characters know that they only have to survive until dawn in order to get away from the vampires.

5/10 2016 Thanksgivings. There is infinite arguing early in the film before the vampires reveal themselves but the survivors work together for the second half of the film with little argument. So 10/10 aggro friction and then 0/10 = 5/10.

8/10 Ears in Custard. Tito & Tarantula perform songs in the second half of the film using body parts of people as instruments. People’s heads are torn off, gore covers everything, vampires dissolve and burn. It is so over the top that it densensitizes the viewer and starts to become incidentally amusing.

 

Pitch Black (2000)

A ship crash-lands on a planet where the group of commuters and a violent criminal must band together. Oversized murder bugs hatch during an eclipse and lay waste to the people. The only protection seems to be light, so the survivors realize they must find means of creating light and must survive through the end of the eclipse. Pretty good movie overall, and the sequels (which have no relation to our subgenre here) are each worse than the last.

8/10 Living Deads. We have a group of strangers stuck in an isolated location. We have an otherworldly threat that surrounds them, and we have the people infighting and struggling to make sense of what is happening. There is also a fatalism in this movie that really resonates with Romero’s work.

8/10 2016 Thanksgivings. Everyone mistrusts each other and it takes multiple deaths before they realize what they should do.

3/10 Ears in Custard. Lotta deaths but CGI and mostly bloodless.

Open Water (2003)

This is a tense one. A couple are on a tour boat that goes out to explore a reef. Through a simple math error, they are left behind in the water without the staff realizing it. The couple must stay afloat and stay alive until someone realizes the error and comes to rescue them.

Shot with handheld cameras and with nary a moment of relief, Open Water is a tense shark movie with perhaps too much realism to be rewatchable.

3/10 Living Deads. Isolation? Check. Surrounded? Check. Friction? Check. But the tension is more a product of simple human error than anything.

6/10 2016 Thanksgivings. You’d definitely get in arguments if you and another person were stuck treading water for an unknown amount of time.

1/10 Ears in Custard. Not applicable.

 

Feast (2005)

One of the Project Greenlight films, this is a gross-out and trashy survive-the-night film in a redneck bar. Directed by the great Clu Gulager’s son, this one has some mutated monsters harrassing people stuck inside a bar. The people find various means to survive, including no shortage of guns, but the monsters are brutally strong and gross, so even a locked door and a barricade don’t really feel safe.

6/10 Living Deads. Boilerplate survive-the-night premise, but enhanced by its cheeky, nihilist tone.

10/10 2016 Thanksgivings. People offer up other people to the monsters as a sacrifice. Characters use other characters as bait, routinely harrass other characters, and mostly act (to humorous levels) only for themselves.

7/10 Ears in Custard. Super gross movie with tons of carnage. It’s a hoot.

 

Don’t Breathe (2016)

This one inverts the formula to great success. Some criminals break into the wrong house to steal stuff, and find themselves being hunted around the house by a blind veteran (the great Stephen Lang). They must find ways to stay alive until they can get out of the house. This will not be easy (nor pleasant).

1/10 Living Deads. The characters try to survive and escape, but they put themselves into the situation and uncover further horrors that could have been prevented by not entering the house. The threat is also human (albeit terrifying) and there is nothing supernatural preventing them from leaving the house… just their earned fear at how deadly this man is.

2/10 2016 Thanksgivings. Not really enough time to argue once things get moving.

4/10 Ears in Custard. Gory kills but nothing like the rest of this list.

 

The Shallows (2016)

Another shark survival movie. This time a surfer finds herself trapped on a buoy as a shark circles. It hits a lot of the themes that you want in this kind of movie: isolation despite safety being within sight, a threat that has its own logic and perhaps even a means to outwit it, lots of tension. This is one of Lively’s best performances (A Simple Favor remains my favorite of hers) and is great.

1/10 Living Deads. Not that kind of movie, but fits the bill if you want a movie where you find yourself holding your breath every few scenes.

1/10 2016 Thanksgivings. Not that kind of movie.

2/10 Ears in Custard. Rotten whale 🙁

 

Werewolves Within (2021)

An upstate New York mountain town gets a new sheriff. He gets to town and settles into the hotel just in time for a blizzard to rock the town. The residents all head for the hotel because it has a generator. However, bodies start piling up and the locals immediately begin infighting. Lotta secrets in small towns. Who knew? (Everyone –Ed.)

This movie is funny and gross and a great time. There are suitable twists and plenty of the themes that you want: the monster is scary, the people feel that they will be safe once they wait out the storm, the squabbling hits and doesn’t stop.

Filling the movie with likeable performances like Milana Vayntrub and Sam Richardson goes a long way toward keeping this one lively.

6/10 Living Deads. We’re stuck in a house and something is killing us. We have to work together if we want to survive until help arrives.

9/10 2016 Thanksgivings. People point fingers, bring up past infidelities, accuse people of being shills for the local oil pipeline company. Everyone at some point is accused of being the killer, even the policeman who just arrived in town.

4/10 Ears in Custard. A couple of gnarly kills but it isn’t really that kind of movie.

 

 

Honorable Mentions

 

We’ll send off the honorable mentions with a sentence per movie. These don’t fit our criteria for various reasons but are still worth watching when you’ve exhausted the ones above.

• Key Largo (1948): A gangster and some tourists are stranged in a hotel during a hurricane as tensions run high.
• Zulu (1964): A fascinating military drama about the Battle of Rorke’s Drift, suffering only in not giving enough characterization to the Zulu.
• Game of Death (1972): A martial artist must navigate to the top of a building filled with dangers in order to rescue his siblings.
• The Poseidon Adventure (1972): A cruise ship slowly sinks and survivors must work together to get to the surface before it is too late.
• The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974): A van full of teenagers get murdered in the foothills of Texas after they pick up the wrong hitchhiker.
• Jaws (1975): A Great White Shark stalks the waters of the tourist town of Amity Island, Massachusetts.
• The Thing (1982): You need a possibility of rescue to survive the night.
• Alien 3 (1992): Can convicts, guards, and a shellshocked Ripley survive until the Weyland-Yutani rescue ship arrives?
• Speed (1994): Commuters on a public bus find themselves trapped when a bomber forces the bus to maintain a speed of 55 miles per hour or else it will explode.
• Daylight (1996): Decent thriller where commuters are stuck within a collapsed tunnel and must work together to survive.
• Mimic (1997): A large portion of this film is a group of biologists and subway workers stuck in a subway station that is two levels below the other subway while bug monsters chop them up.
• Deep Blue Sea (1999): Scientists in a sinking sealab await rescue as they are stalked by genetically enhanced sharks.
• Identity (2003): A twisty thriller where strangers are stuck in a motel during a rainstorm as someone slowly kills them off.
• The Village (2004): An isolated village in colonial Pennsylvania is surrounded by monsters and a blind girl must brave the woods to get medicine for an injured villager.
• The Strangers (2008): A couple in a summer home find themselves besieged by murderous strangers “because you were home.”
• The Raid (2011): An Indonesian police force raid a building but must survive when they are trapped within it.
• Ironclad (2011): A handful of Knights Templar must survive an assault of Rochester Castle where they are drastically outnumbered and outgunned.
• Dredd (2012): Two judge-jury-executioner-police are trapped within a skyscraper controlled by a deadly gang and await rescue as their cohorts attempt to breach the building’s blast doors.
• Green Room (2015): A punk band take the wrong gig and must survive against murderous skinheads.
• The Hateful Eight (2015): Tarantino remaking The Thing as a western.
• The Last Matinee (2020): Moviegoers must survive the night with a killer among them.
• Nope (2022): What if Jaws but in the clouds?
• X (2022): So much a ripoff of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre that Tobe Hooper should be given a story credit.
• Knock at the Cabin (2023): A family on vacation are invaded by a group who claim that they are only there to stave off the apocalypse of the human race.
• Plane (2023): A plane makes an emergency landing on an island that turns out to be full of druglords and the passengers must try to survive until the Air Force can rescue them.

 

The Sun Is Shining

 

Look! The sun is up! Is that a rescue helicopter? We’re saved!

I’m only one person. If there was a movie that should be here but isn’t, feel free to comment on our Facebook or Instagram post. We’ll update the list accordingly.

 

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Connective Tissue is a series that takes a particular genre, storytelling trope, or iconic story and highlights its descendents and predecessors across history. Some past entries include a focus on Jean-Pierre Melville’s crime masterpiece and feel-good spy movies.