Night of the Living Dead (1968)

“Over its short, furious course, the picture violates so many strong taboos—cannibalism, incest, necrophilia—that it leaves audiences giddy and hysterical. Romero’s sequel, Dawn of the Dead, displays a much-matured technique and greater thematic complexity, but Night retains its raw power.” — Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

SYNOPSIS

In 1968, Pittsburgh-based industrial filmmaker George A. Romero set out to make a low-budget shocker and instead changed the course of independent horror cinema forever. Pushing the zombie out of Haitian folklore and into the heart of the American middle class, Night of the Living Dead follows a desperate group of strangers who barricade themselves inside a rural farmhouse as the dead inexplicably begin to rise. Made for little more than $100,000, Romero’s stark black-and-white nightmare shattered genre conventions with its graphic violence, unflinching social commentary, and bleak worldview, offering, in the words of critics J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum, “the most literal possible depiction of America devouring itself.” Eschewing Gothic stylization for grainy immediacy and matter-of-fact brutality, Romero created a horror film whose unsettling realism has scarcely diminished in more than half a century.