The movie most shown in other movies

"They're coming to get you, Barbra."

There are a lot of quotes we throw around from movies -- "I see dead people," "We're gonna need a bigger boat," etc. -- but steadily gaining on those, building up its cultural currency over the course of 56 years, is the most recognizable line of dialogue from 1968's Night of the Living Dead. 

The familiarity of the quote is not due to any higher number of people seeing the movie than have ever seen it, though I would argue that it's required viewing for any cinephile, and horror fans in particular. In fact, I would argue that I don't even need to argue that, because it is self evident.

No, we all know this quote now because of just how many other movies it appears in. 

A movie showing footage from another movie should be the ultimate sign of respect for that second movie, but it also depends on the context of why the movie is being watched by the characters. For example, Citizen Kane may be the greatest movie of all time, but there are not a lot of scripts that require the characters to be watching it for narrative purposes. And though there are plenty of contexts where we see a small snippet of a familiar movie playing in the real world of a different movie, the most common, by far, is characters watching a scary movie on TV when something scary is about to happen to them in their real lives. (Seven times out of ten, maybe more than that, that scary thing is their death.)

By overwhelming consensus in the filmmaking community, the most likely film to be used in this context is George Romero's seminal zombie film, the one that launched a genre that today has over 1,937 entries. (Note: Number may not be accurate.)

I started thinking about this topic early last month when characters in one of the movies I watched were watching Night of the Living Dead. Doing a quick google search now, I find that this movie was the original Halloween II from 1981, when NOTLD was 13 years old and was already firmly established as a cultural touchstone. To round out the month, the characters in All Hallows' Eve -- which I did watch late on Halloween night after bypassing it the night before in favor of Oddity -- can also briefly be seen watching it. I can't remember if the Barbra line made its appearance in the Halloween II footage, but it definitely does not in All Hallows' Eve -- perhaps considered too on-the-nose by 2013.

What prompted me to actually write this post was watching Borderlands on Amazon Prime last night. The Eli Roth film -- which started off terribly before salvaging itself into merely misguided -- has nothing to do, as far as I could tell, with zombies, though there are some mindless masked characters that sort of resemble war boys from Mad Max: Fury Road. Whatever the reason, Amazon delivered Night of the Living Dead as the next film up in my queue, and because I did not stop it, the movie started to play. 

It's been a long time since I've seen Night of the Living Dead. Or I thought it had been -- my notes now tell me I saw it in 2015, which I don't really remember. In any case, given that it had been on my mind, I was tempted to sit there and watch it. And might have, had it not been 1 a.m., which is actually on the early side for when I've been finishing movies recently. (I try to tell myself that the naps on my too-comfortable couch contribute to my total amount of sleep that night, but I'm not sure it works that way.) And now that I think of it, there's another reason it was on my mind in October, since I saw Ganja & Hess, which stars NOTLD lead Duane Jones.

Sense won out, but I couldn't turn it off without watching the "They're coming to get you, Barbra" line. So I forwarded through the opening few minutes of chit chat between Barbra (Judith O'Dea) and Johnny (Russell Streiner) before getting to that line I'd heard uttered in so many other movies. Hearing it felt almost surreal, the way your mind snaps to a different sort of attention when you're listening to a famous speech from history, and then the part that always gets quoted suddenly arrives.

I watched a few more minutes to see Johnny's immediate comeuppance for his mischievous torturing of his sister, and then forced myself to turn it off.

I wanted to see if there was a way to get a definitive list of the other movies where NOTLD gets watched, but even Google's AI -- which takes over in any search situation whether you want it to or not -- could not give me more than a few titles. But given the age of those titles, and the fact that I haven't seen some of them, this is just the tip of the iceberg on the true results list.

Here was what the AI said:

There isn't much info about movies where characters watch Night of the Living Dead, but here are some other movies that reference the 1968 film:

• Christiane F. (1981)
• Halloween II: (1981)
• Terror in the Aisles: (1984)
• I Drink Your Blood: (1971)
• Let's Scare Jessica to Death: (1971)
• Dracula vs. Frankenstein: (1971)

I can't be sure those are characters watching the movie, and in some cases they likely wouldn't be. But I've seen only two of those movies, Halloween II and Let's Scare Jessica to Death, and I feel I have seen this trope -- it's common enough that we can upgrade it to a trope -- in probably a dozen films.

Oooh, I did a slightly different search and got a slightly different result. Check it out:

Here are some films that feature characters watching Night of the Living Dead:

• Fade to Black (1980): Eric watches this movie during a night out
• Halloween II (1981): The Elrods and a security guard watch this movie
• Document of the Dead (1980): This film features Night of the Living Dead
• Christiane F. (1981): This movie features Night of the Living Dead in a cinema room at a "sound" club
• Terror in the Aisles (1984): This film features Night of the Living Dead

You can see the AI teething here, as in some cases it is able to give specific information about what's happening in the movie, and in others it just notes a positive hit. Also it's now clear that the search is in some way limited by the age of the film, or forcing itself to only show a subsection of the results given that an AI search may not have been what I wanted in the first place. But this search gives us another two films that didn't come up in the previous search, neither of which I've seen.

I won't continue with slight alterations of these search terms to see what else I can get.

But you know it to be true. If a screenwriter is trying to prime a character to suffer an "ironic" death -- if it's by an actual zombie in the movie, even better -- then he or she will have the character watch Night of the Living Dead, and more likely than not include Russell Streiner's iconic line.

Now that I'm primed to watch this movie, and I know it's on Amazon, I may have to select my own late-night rewatch in the next few days, despite having missed Halloween. I'll just have to hope there isn't some sort of reanimated rotting corpse outside my window ready to get me.