Night of the Living Dead, directed by George Romero, is a 1968 independent black-and-white horror film. Ben (Duane Jones) and Barbra (Judith O’Dea) are the protagonists of a story about the mysterious reanimation of the recently dead, and their efforts, along with five other people, to survive the night while trapped in a rural Pennsylvania farmhouse.

George Romero completed the film on a $114,000 budget, and after a decade of cinematic re-releases, it grossed some $12 million domestically and $30 million internationally. On its release in 1968, Night of the Living Dead was strongly criticized for its explicit content. In 1999, the Library of Congress registered it to the National Film Registry as a film deemed “historically, culturally or aesthetically important”.

Night of the Living Dead had a great impact upon the culture of the Vietnam-era United States, because it is laden with critiques of late-1960s U.S. society; a historian described it as “subversive on many levels”. Although it is not the first zombie film, Night of the Living Dead is the progenitor of the contemporary “zombie apocalypse” sub-genre of horror film, and it influenced the modern pop-culture zombie archetype. Night of the Living Dead (1968), is the first of five Dead films directed by George Romero, and twice has been remade, as Night of the Living Dead (1990 film), directed by Tom Savini, and as Night of the Living Dead 3D (2006).

Influence

Director George Romero revolutionized the horror film genre with Night of the Living Dead; per Almar Haflidason, of the BBC, the film represented “a new dawn in horror film-making”. The film has also effectively redefined the use of the term Zombie. Early zombie films — Victor Halperin’s White Zombie (1932), Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie (1943) — concerned living people enslaved by a Voodoo witch doctor; many were set in the Caribbean.

The film and its successors spawned countless imitators that borrowed elements instituted by Romero: Tombs of the Blind Dead, Zombie, Hell of the Living Dead, The Evil Dead, Night of the Comet, Return of the Living Dead, Night of the Creeps, Braindead, Children of the Living Dead, and the video game series Resident Evil (later adapted as films in 2002, 2004, and 2007), Dead Rising, and House of the Dead. Night of the Living Dead is parodied in films such as Night of the Living Bread and Shaun of the Dead, and in episodes of The Simpsons (“Treehouse of Horror III”, 1992) and South Park (“Pink Eye“, 1997; “Night of the Living Homeless”, 2007). The word zombie is never used, but Romero’s film introduced the theme of zombies as reanimated, flesh-eating cannibals.

Night of the Living Dead ushered in the slasher and splatter film sub-genres. As one film historian points out, horror prior to Romero’s film had mostly involved rubber masks and costumes, cardboard sets, or mysterious figures lurking in the shadows. They were set in locations far removed from rural and suburban America. Romero revealed the power behind exploitation and setting horror in ordinary, unexceptional locations and offered a template for making an “effective and lucrative” film on a “minuscule budget”. Slasher films of the 1970s and 80s such as John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th (1980), and Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), for example, “owe much to the original Night of the Living Dead“.