Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Seven strangers barricade themselves in a rural Pennsylvania farmhouse as the recently dead rise and attack the living, while tensions inside the house prove as deadly as the threat outside.
Romero’s debut redrew the horror map and, by accident of a missing copyright line, became one of the most-screened films in the world.
Background
George A. Romero made Night of the Living Dead in and around Pittsburgh with a group of friends who formed a company called Image Ten. The budget was small, well under two hundred thousand dollars by most accounts. Duane Jones, cast as Ben, gives the film its heroic centre, and the script did not specify his race; many viewers have read the ending in light of the year the film was released. The film never uses the word “zombie”: the creatures are called ghouls.
What to watch for
Its public-domain status is an accident. When the distributor changed the title from “Night of the Flesh Eaters”, the copyright notice was left off the new title card, which meant the film lost protection in the United States, and it spread through cinemas, television and home video without any payment to the makers. The Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 1999. Watch the way Romero uses plain black and white, handheld camera work and a sense of claustrophobia inside the farmhouse to build dread; the tension among the living is as gripping as the threat outside.
