Night of the Living Dead is a 1968 American independent horror film directed by George A. Romero, starring Duane Jones, Judith O'Dea and Karl Hardman. It premiered on October 1, 1968, and was completed on a US$114,000 budget. The film became a financial success, grossing $12 million domestically and $18 million internationally. Night of the Living Dead was heavily criticized at its release owing to explicit content, but eventually garnered critical acclaim and has been selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry as a film deemed "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant."
It essentially launched the zombie movie genre as we know it today and nudged horror movies out of creepy-but-family-friendly into adult films featuring gruesome violence and nihilistic overtones about the end of mankind, or at least a certain section of it.
Yes, there were zombie movies before 1968. But they tended to only have one or two or, at most, a handful of undead walking around, and voodoo or some other black magic usually played a role. Romero’s film, which he co-wrote with John A. Russo, was the first to portray massive hordes of the creatures threatening to overtake all of humanity, with victims falling into their clutches turning into zombies themselves.
The fact that the zombies in this movie, and pretty much all subsequent zombie flicks, were cannibals added to the cloud of paranoia that hangs over all of the undead oeuvre. It’s notable that it’s usually some technological man-made disaster that causes the dead to rise — nuclear waste, scientific experiments or, in this film, radiation brought back from space by an American satellite — which adds a layer of parable to the proceedings: Humanity brought this on itself.
