| Kyra Schon | |
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Kyra Schon as Karen Cooper in Night of the Living Dead |
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| Born | October 4, 1957 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania |
Kyra Schon (born October 4, 1957) is an American actress known for her role in the George A. Romero film Night of the Living Dead (1968) as Karen Cooper, the trowel-wielding zombie girl. She is a regular contributor to Dread Central, an online magazine dedicated to horror entertainment. She is the daughter of Karl Hardman who played her father in the movie.
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In 1968, when she was just a girl, she was selected to play Karen Cooper, the daughter of the bickering couple consisting of soft-spoken Helen, and the stubborn Harry Cooper in Night of the Living Dead, which would later become a classic film. She was depicted as unconscious and only said two words for her entire role, which were: "I hurt". Since cast members consisted of Pittsburgh residents rather than big name actors, the daughter of Karl Hardman, an investor and actor in the film, was selected to play Karen Cooper because of the film's tight budget. In the film, Karen was bitten by a zombie, which apparently infected her bloodstream with bacteria and caused her to be unconscious for much of the film. She soon dies and reanimates and eats her dead father's corpse and stabs her mother to death with a cement trowel. She is presumably shot and killed during the posse's raid on the farmhouse.
Kyra's performance as the zombified child frightened many people in 1968, and she is thought of today as one of the most recognizable zombies in film history. In fact, on many editions of Night of the Living Dead, an iconic snapshot featuring a zombified Karen is on the cover. Kyra Schon was listed on Entertainment Weekly as "Best Zombie" for the movie in the magazine's Halloween 2005 edition.[1]