Night of the Living Dead — The Film That Changed Horror Forever

The Making of a Revolution

George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) was made in Pittsburgh on a budget of $114,000 by a group of filmmakers who had no expectation of making anything other than a regional horror film. What they made instead was a film that fundamentally changed what horror cinema was, what it was allowed to say, and how it could be made. Shot in black and white because colour film was too expensive, using non-professional actors alongside its small professional cast, with special effects achieved through genuinely cheap materials (offal from a butcher shop for the zombie feast scenes), Night of the Living Dead achieved a documentary realism that the polished Hollywood horror films of the time entirely lacked.

Legacy and Influence

The film's cultural significance extends well beyond horror cinema. Its casting of Duane Jones — a Black actor — as the film's central competent hero in 1968, without the film making race its explicit subject, was quietly revolutionary. Its ending — ambiguous in print, devastating in the film — refused the Hollywood horror formula's demand for heroic survival and moral resolution. And its metaphorical richness — the shambling, consuming horde readable as commentary on Vietnam, consumerism, racism, or social conformity depending on the viewer's concerns — has made it one of the most academically discussed horror films ever made.

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