NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD

Director: George A. Romero
1968

Night of the Living Dead (1968) came out of nowhere, and turned into the most influential horror film since Psycho. George Romero`s remarkably assured debut, made on a shoestring, about a group of people barricaded inside a farmhouse while an army of flesh-eating zombies roams the countryside, deflates all genre clichés. It traded the expressionistic sets of the traditional fright flick for a neorealistic style—Romero's use of natural locations and grainy black and white gave his gorefest the look and feel of a doc. And this was not Transylvania, but Pennsylvania. —this was Middle America at war, and the zombie carnage seemed a grotesque echo of the conflict then raging in Vietnam. In this first-ever subversive horror movie, the resourceful black hero survives the zombies only to be killed by a redneck posse, and a young girl nibbles ravenously on her father's severed arm—disillusionment with government and patriarchal nuclear family is total.

Almost universally panned by reviewers when released, the film gradually became a cult phenomenon, playing on the midnight movie circuit for more than a decade. Its success has spawned innumerable sequels, remakes, clones, and forgettable imitations, here and abroad, as zombies of all nations replaced vampires as the centerpiece of the world's horror movies. Romero himself made two sequels.
Night of the Living Dead is the first genuinely modern horror movie, shot more like a documentary of the apocalypse than the gothic horrors that defined the ’60s, and it bled right into the fabric of the culture. It changed the face of American horror movies: for better (it blazed the trail for the transgressive horror renaissance of the ’70s), for worse (all those crappy copycat zombie knockoffs) and forever.