There were zombies in the movies before this, but they were typically robot-like ciphers that did the bidding of some voodoo witch doctor. It wasn’t until this film in 1968 that zombies ate your face off and gobbled your intestines. The undead flesh eater that horror fans know and love today was born here—this film’s closest cinematic predecessor isn’t a zombie movie at all, but rather is Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds—and forty years later, some say that Night of the Living Dead still hasn’t been topped for pure terror and suspense in the genre. I’ve shown it to young people who were resistant at first to watching an old black & white movie only to see them become completely absorbed by it within ten minutes.
No one knows why the dead are rising and ravenous for human meat here. They just are. Director/co-writer George Romero, making his debut feature, wisely doesn’t bother with the typical sci-fi monster movie convention of the time where one of the main characters is a scientist who traces the cause of the problem and then has some bullshit scene where he breaks out charts and graphs to explain it to us before he builds his special anti-zombie raygun. Romero sticks with the human drama as it happens in a Pennsylvania farmhouse where a group of regular people huddle for survival. That’s one of many reasons why this has aged so well.
It was a huge success in its day. Its great sequel, Dawn of the Dead, would come out about ten years later.