BookBrowse Reviews Partially Devoured by Daniel Kraus

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Daniel Kraus takes a new look at a classic horror movie and its influence on his life and career.

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Daniel Kraus first saw George A. Romero's culturally influential 1968 zombie movie Night of the Living Dead in 1980. He remembers watching it at just five years old with his mom in their rural Idaho home. The film instantly became important to him, and over ensuing years and many viewings (about 300, by his estimate), he came to realize that the movie had a profound influence not only on his career in the arts, but also on his maturation to adulthood. Fascinated by this connection, he authored his first nonfiction book, Partially Devoured, to explore why he finds the picture so important.

The book starts out as if it will be an academic critique of the film. Each chapter begins with a timestamp that correlates to a part of Night of the Living Dead, followed by Kraus's commentary on the scene as it unfolds. (Note: readers may want to stream a copy of the film while reading these sections.) Kraus effectively conveys the dread invoked by the movie's cinematography, pointing out the easily overlooked artistry involved in this low-budget production. He describes the overall landscape and the effect it creates, as well as what he believes was the director's intent behind the image. Going on to describe the background music, he adds that when combined with the photography, the result is magic ("mundanity tweaked just enough to be unsettling"). Kraus's writing is mesmerizing as he compels us to look at the movie frame by frame and appreciate the deliberate care with which each is composed.

Kraus liberally sprinkles trivia throughout the book. Because the film was so low budget, for example, actors had to play multiple roles. Chuck Craig, a friend of one of the film's producers and a real-life newscaster, plays a reporter in a few scenes. Later, he takes on the role of zombie and can be found munching on a rope of intestines. The guts were supplied by Ross Harris, who ran a meat-packing company and can be seen in the newsroom behind Craig answering phones. Kraus includes a ton of fun tidbits like these.

Another interesting feature is the work's mini-biographies—each just a few pages long—about many of the cast and crew members. Romero, who wrote, edited, and directed Night of the Living Dead, receives the most robust treatment, but we also get snapshots of the lives of others involved in the film, such as producer and actor Russell Steiner (Johnny) and actress Judith O'Dea (Barbra).

Kraus goes on to discuss how the movie took on some of the social issues of the day. Night of the Living Dead's casting was remarkable because of its approach to race at the time. Romero not only cast a Black actor, Duane Jones, as the star of the movie, but at one point in the script he had the man deck a hysterical white woman, knocking her out cold. Kraus argues that Romero's choices were an intentional commentary on race in the country.

Likewise, in Kraus's analysis, the movie was also a reflection on the Vietnam War. He states that it "vibrates with the mood of the Vietnam era," and likens the attacking zombie horde to mobs of soldiers overrunning a front line. He goes on to write about how as the war raged on, "the U.S. government learned to hide their dead," no longer showing pictures of coffins returning stateside. He later ties this to how the death toll from COVID-19 was downplayed early in the pandemic, with few images on the news of overcrowded morgues or refrigerated trucks packed with bodies. "Night of the Living Dead…asks us to look at our dead in all its avoidable barbarity and ugly decay, in the hopes we'll ask ourselves the necessary questions," he writes. "Is it wrong to be shown images of death? Or is it wrong not to be shown them?"

Unlike typical book-length works of film criticism, Kraus doesn't just focus on the movie's artistry and cultural context—he also inserts elements of memoir into his narrative. The book purports to include how the movie helped Kraus with childhood trauma, and it's here the narrative falls short. Although we do get some information about his youth and his early attempts at filmmaking and writing, I kept waiting for more revealing details, and overall the personal content doesn't rise to the level I'd expected given the setup.

You don't have to be a horror fan or even to have seen Night of the Living Dead to enjoy Partially Devoured. Although it may seem like a niche book, its appeal is strikingly broad, and I find it hard to imagine a reader who wouldn't find Kraus's style entertaining. It's a fun look at an influential movie and those who made it, set against a formative period in American history. I highly recommend it to all audiences.

This review first ran in the March 11, 2026 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.