Die Nacht der lebenden Toten

This landmark 1968 horror-shocker is a great example of what can be done with a limited budget, a simple idea, and some dedicated and talented participants. Very nicely shot, mostly well acted, NOTLD grabs your attention from the very beginning to the very end - and what a classic end it is.

The story begins with Barbara (Judith O'Dea) and her brother visiting the grave of a friend of their mother, and takes off almost immediately, as they are attacked by a horde of cannibalistic zombies. Narrowly escaping, but losing her emotional balance in the process, Barbara escapes to a house a bit farther down the road where she meets Ben (Duane Jones), the hero of the film. They discover a family with a sick little girl and a young couple in the basement of the house and they all get to work barricading themselves in and preparing weapons and other defenses. The rest of the story concerns the group dynamics between these survivors as the dead close in on their refuge, the story of what is going on in the rest of the USA - revealed through TV reportage and radio broadcasts, and sheer survival. The human side of this film is an interesting and accurate character study concerning what happens to people whose very lives are threatened.

The horror of this film is, unlike a lot of its recent descendants, less a matter of blood and gore than a matter of the real active horror of realistically depicted scenes of murder, death and cannibalism. Though the black and white footage involving blood and gore is certainly effective, there may not be quite enough of it for today's average horror fan. The photographic techniques of this film are innovative and powerful - showing just enough of the sheer hideousness of the film's basic concepts to disturb viewers, but not enough to allow them to detach from the film's protagonists.

I strongly recommend this film to anybody interested in the art of film making, and to those who enjoy the horror genre, though it is hard to imagine any serious horror fan who hasn't already seen this.

The budget was low.The actors were not the top of the heap,yet Night of the Living Dead is a very effective horror film.It was the film that no doubt set the standard for horror films of today.The whole idea of freshly dead corpses returning from the grave to feed on the living makes my hair stand up,even without the movie.I find myself comparing this film with 1999's The Blair Witch Project.They are similar,not in what they are about,but in how they were made.Both films took very little money to make,used no big name actors,and were very successful and effective in presenting their respective stories.Night does get rather gory and disgusting in places,but overall is worthy of the title of "classic".

The Shining, The Exorcist and The Omen are all films that owe some of their stylistic approach to this film. This is the film that re-wrote the rules of the horror genre as it went along, whilst acting as both social critique and fond homage to 'The Birds' as well.

Romero set in place a steady breakdown of all our assumptions of the horror film, which he then utilised to full effect through the rest of this film and the two superb sequels that followed.

This is perhaps one of the greatest low budget cult movies ever made, certainly one of the most influential, and in its brutally harrowing documentary style conclusion a harsh statement on American racial attitudes. A statement which is as relevant today as it was over thirty years ago.

Romero is sublime. His ability to take a small budget and turn it into a stratosphericly giant film is unparalleled. This is one of the best apocalypse films ever (along with the rest of the trilogy). The zombies represent a slow moving enemy. It is easy to escape them. You have only to fear your own mistakes. On these the zombies will capitalize. One of the best aspects of this film is the lead character. Romero has always presented intelligent non-stereotypical black characters in his films. This film was made in 1968 while civil rights tensions were high, and the most "in control" character in the whole movie is a black man. If you can get past a couple of cheesy supporting performances, this is one of the best horror films ever.

It is very rare nowadays in Hollywood that $112,000 will cover anything more than the cost of catering on most movies. And yet that was all it took for George Romero and a number of friends of his in Pittsburgh to make what is without a doubt one of the most significant horror films of all times, the 1968 shocker NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. Detested by a lot of critics in its day for several scenes of unsettling gruesomeness (though Herschell Gordon Lewis' gore films earlier in the 1960s beat him to the punch for true stomach-turning horror), the film is now understandably highly prized of its relentless, logical approach, and for being so utterly uncompromising.

Not much more needs to be said about the plot: it merely involves seven people who have barricaded themselves inside a rural Pennsylvania home after having been attacked by flesh-eating ghouls who have returned to life from the dead as the result of an exploded Venus probe bringing back a dangerous and unknown form of radiation. What Romero and his co-scenarist John Russo (who took partial inspiration for this film from Richard Matheson's classic 1954 end-of-the-world vampire novel "I Am Legend") show, however, is the strain built up by the way the characters, especially the ones portrayed by Duane Jones and the film's co-producer Karl Hardman, react to the horror that engulfs them...whether to stay on the ground floor, or to hide in the cellar, and how best to escape even as more and more of the undead surround the place. As it turns out, of course, there is no real way out, and there is no actual good end to the whole horrible situation.

Romero, who would continue his travail through the world of the undead through several sequels over the ensuing four decades, shot this film in black-and-white largely on location just outside of Pittsburgh over several weekends in the second half of 1967. NIGHT has, in many ways, the feel of a 1950s "invasion" film (think INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS), but its setting of an isolated house under siege clearly has its roots in Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 classic THE BIRDS; and the scenes of the ghouls munching on human flesh, though brief in nature, were then, and in many ways still are, shockingly contemporary. The cast of primarily amateur actors does well at being totally naturalistic, and the low budget look of the film gives it a documentary feel that hadn't been seen in horror films before, but which would be revisited in THE Texas CHAINSAW MASSACRE and THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT.

Even after four decades of parody, imitation, and sequels, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD is still not for those with weak constitutions, and for those who have seen far more graphic shockers, it will likely seem painfully old-fashioned. But for true horror connoisseurs, it is up there with the very best, and is an essential film of its kind and its era.