Shot in black and white over seven months on a shoe string budget, George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) is in many ways the first modern horror film. The zombie had appeared on screen previously, in films like White Zombie and I Walked with a Zombie, but these were almost unrecognisable from the modern zombie movie as they were often set in South America and concerned people who had had been enslaved by a Voodoo witchdoctor. Night of the Living Dead introduced zombies in their current form as mindless flesh eating cannibals and created the idea of the zombie apocalypse, the subsequent disintegration of society following a zombie outbreak.
The plot is fairly simple: a group of rag tag survivors of an unexplained zombie outbreak hole up in an abandoned farmhouse and are frequently attacked by the flesh-hungry ghouls. These survivors include an older middle class couple who are stuck in their ways and unable to cope with the rapid and drastic changes to their society, a young and attractive heroine who (in a piece of plotting that is frequently criticised by feminist film historians) is catatonic for much of the film’s running time and an African American man (Duane Jones) who is calm and collected throughout. This last piece of casting has been rightly praised and represents one of the first instances of a man of colour being cast in the lead role of a film which is otherwise dominated by white actors.
Terrifying but with a rich vein of social commentary, Night of the Living Dead is an undeniably great film with an important legacy. It completely changed the face of horror and went some way to alter the face of Hollywood and her actors. If you’re planning a night in with a DVD this Halloween, you could do a lot worse.