Fridge / Night of the Living Dead (1990)

Fridge Horror

• Getting the truck refuelled wouldn't necessarily end the nightmare. Where they ended up may have been even worse, as this obviously was happening all over the countryside.
• Despite seeing he's a zombie, Judy Rose frantically yells at Barbara not to shoot "Mr. Magruder from The Legion Hall." Perhaps Judy Rose worked there, and he was a regular she was on good terms with: It's a chilling reminder that zombies were recently members of the community.
• Poor Sarah Cooper was doomed from the start. Even if the band found the gas pump key immediately, she would have succumbed before they reached any help (if she even COULD be helped) and would have attacked everyone. In the confines of a truck cab. She certainly would have killed several of them before they could put her down. She may have killed all of them before they realize what the hell was happening.
  • A subtle one as well, Sarah has blood on her braces while attacking Barbara. Her mother's blood.
• The girl zombie Barbara encounters after leaving the house: she's in her bedwear and holding a doll, heavily implying she was murdered by a zombie while still asleep in bed.
  • Or much worse in Fridge Horror: considering how old she looks, she was a mother and the doll she was carrying belonged to her daughter. There's two ways that this can be read, both are unpleasant.
• The next day, Zombie Ben appears and meets eyes with Barbara. Instead of attacking her instantly (as all zombies do), he regards her passively, and purses his lips, as if he is about to speak. Ben is still in there. It's moot, though, as the militia promptly puts him down.
  • This also serves a bit of an ongoing Fridge Brilliance with the previous films. Though this film serves as a remake of the first film, Romero developed a lot of the lore about his films that doing a remake would result in him establishing a lot of details sooner. That means Romero, serving as the writer of the remake's script, is already establishing the concept of the zombies having memories of who they once were as he had established in Dawn of the Dead and expanded in Day of the Dead previously.
• The Barricaded windows and doors were never going to hold, as shown when Barbara leaves, the zombies break in easily, Fridge Brilliance kicks in when you see them boarding the place up, Judy Rose is shown hammering nails into the table frame not the table top, those nails probably never even touched the window and door frames.
• At first, Tom Towles dialed up to 11 complete slimeball Cooper seems just Large Ham territory. However, it may have been an intentional choice to go that route by Towles to set up Barbara shooting him at the end. Largely, it works, and you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who didn't cheer when Barbara executes him, making Towles' acting a bit of Fridge Brilliance.