28 March 2024
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
95 min.
Directed by George Romero.
With Judith O'Dea, Duane Jones, Russell Streiner, Karl Hardman, Marilyn Eastman, Keith Wayne, Judith Ridley, Krya Schon.
George Romero's 1968 classic remains his definitive statement on the living dead.

The country is under siege. A mass epidemic is taking place the likes of which has never been seen before.

Dead corpses are rising from their graves and roaming the countryside, with only one goal on their minds: finding fresh human flesh to feast upon!

Seems a NASA satellite might be to blame. Some theorize the satellite - just having returned from Venus - brought back tons of radiation, causing the brains of the dead to reanimate and the stiffs to walk again!

Meanwhile, an unlikely group of strangers find themselves trapped together in a secluded farmhouse besieged by a horde of the walking dead.

Can they overcome their differences long enough to survive? Or are they beyond outnumbered, and doomed to become zombie fodder?

Captivating from its opening frames in the cemetery to its downbeat finale, Night is a superlative journey of suspense and terror.

The original low budget drive-in movie, Romero's masterpiece features great bits of ooze-dripping, entrail-munching, bone-crunching gore.

Suprisingly, it also boasts some pretty good performances. Jones and O'Dea expertly carry most of the integral action, providing much of Night's skeletal structure.

It's no secret how harrowing Night was upon its initial release. But it also revived (ahem) the zombie subgenre, and spawned countless hordes of imitators over the next decade.

Followed by the stellar sequel Dawn of the Dead in 1978.

After that, there would be four subsequent entries in the franchise: Day of the Dead (1985), Land of the Dead (2005), Diary of the Dead (2008), and Survival of the Dead (2010).

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