About Night of the Living Dead (1968)
The story behind the film
Night of the Living Dead was made by a group of friends in and around Pittsburgh who had been producing TV commercials and industrial films through their company, The Latent Image. George A. Romero, John Russo and Russell Streiner decided a horror movie was the most realistic way to break into features. Romero and Russo wrote the script, drawing on Richard Matheson's 1954 novel I Am Legend, and the film was shot between mid-1967 and early 1968, largely around Evans City, Pennsylvania, on a budget of roughly $100,000.
The premise is simple: the recently dead have begun to rise and attack the living, and a handful of strangers barricade themselves inside a rural farmhouse to survive the night. The film never fully explains why it is happening — radio and TV reports offer theories, including radiation from a returning space probe — which only makes it more unsettling.
Cast & crew
- Directed, photographed and edited by George A. Romero
- Written by Romero and John Russo; produced by Russell W. Streiner and Karl Hardman
- Duane Jones as Ben
- Judith O'Dea as Barbra
- Karl Hardman and Marilyn Eastman as Harry and Helen Cooper
- Keith Wayne and Judith Ridley as Tom and Judy
Why it's worth watching
This is the film that created the modern zombie: slow, relentless, flesh-eating corpses that can be stopped only by destroying the brain. (In the film they're mostly called "ghouls".) Nearly every zombie movie, TV series and video game since has built on Romero's rules.
It also still works as a tense, claustrophobic thriller. The real drama is inside the house, as the survivors argue about whether to hide in the cellar or hold the ground floor. Duane Jones gives a commanding performance as Ben, the resourceful man who takes charge — and casting a Black actor as the hero, without the script ever commenting on it, was striking in 1968. The ending is one of the bleakest in American film, and it hits especially hard knowing the film was released in the year of the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.
Fun facts
- The blood is Bosco chocolate syrup; on black-and-white film it reads perfectly as blood.
- The flesh the ghouls eat was meat and offal donated by a butcher-shop investor.
- The farmhouse used for filming was condemned, and the crew was allowed to damage it as the story required.
- The film premiered in Pittsburgh on October 1, 1968, and went on to earn many times its budget.
- In 1999 the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry.
Public-domain status
When the film was first released, the copyright notice was left off the prints. Under US law at the time, that meant the film entered the public domain on release, which is why it is so widely available and so often remade. It is listed among public-domain films in the United States; see "Rights & source" below.