Broadly, the mise-en-scene the films mostly featured is in rural Penneylvania, where the audience are allowed to get where the story is happening. The purpose of this mise-en-scene is to convey the message about where the story was told. The woods, the rural landscape, and the graveyard were framed facilitate the emotions and tone of the whole story.
The most important stage was acquired in the early twentieth century. It becomes a kind of language with which the director speaks with the audience. Actors must stand on the stage in accordance with the scenery, as well as the plot, which at the moment should be played on the stage. In addition, theatrical lighting begins to play a role in staging. It contributes to the creation of a certain artistic effect, and also helps the actors to get used to the role and more realistically transmit the events of the dramatic work.
Lighting: Throughout the movie, the lightning gives the zombies a low-key lighting that isn’t as intense and is sifter in order to make the zombies look darker and portrayed as negative and the true monster. Whenever another character was killed off, the lighting on them would also become softer and less intense with more shadows to represent that they transformed into a zombie.
Costumes: zombies wore raggedy clothes to represent how they had risen from the dead and the fact that they wore old corpses. Those who were alive wore clothes that represented middle class ordinary citizens.
Setting: The setting takes place in a cemetery which is where the dead arise from as well as a barn where the protagonists take shelter from the living dead.
Thus, the Mise-En-Scene is intended to serve as a connecting chain between the actors, the spectator and the plot of the production.
If mise-en-scene frames the narrative of the film in a vacuum, then George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead encapsulates the tone and theme of it in the introductory scene of Barbra and Johnny visiting their father’s grave. Immediately, the audience arrives at a graveyard introducing the central motif of death. The two are alone yet not quite—assuming that the bodies around them count. Throughout the film, Romero teases the audience of solitude and desolation, only to be surprised that the characters are not so alone after all. The graveyard captures this recurrence—what is below and above ground is alive or dead.
As they walk around in the graveyard, a shot at the four-minute mark displays them alone, only to be accompanied by the gravestones. A wide shot gives the audience a full perspective of the vastness of the graveyard with silence consuming the scene only to be disturbed by the rustling leaves. Romero’s choice of camera position to display the two introductory characters extends the tone of loneliness throughout the film.
https://www.whitelight.ltd.uk/white-light-brings-night-of-the-living-dead-to-life/