Night of the Living Dead

They're coming to get you, Barbra!

56 years ago today, on October 1st, 1968, George A. Romero changed horror films forever with the release of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD.

It was a huge hit on drive-in screens across America.

In 1972 at the age of 11, I saw it as the bottom half of a double feature with "Ben", the dopey and decidedly non-scary sequel to "Willard". Romero terrified me. I'd never seen anything like it and it stuck with me.

His low budget horror flick is really almost like the first found-footage film. Shot on a shoestring in black and white, its gore was unheard of at the time.

The film opens with Barbra (Judith O'Dea) and her brother Johnny (Russell Streiner) putting flowers on their mother's grave outside Pittsburgh. Some strange news on the radio cuts in and out, nicely foreshadowing as Romero immediately introduces us to the first flesh eating zombie that comes stumbling slowly across the graveyard in their direction.

It's hard to remember just how crazy powerful the concept of the dead coming back to life with a thirst for flesh was in the late sixties. Romero single-handedly created a new genre. As an 11 year old, all I knew was this movie scared the hell out of me.

Barbra escapes the old man zombie (poor Johnny!) and holes up in a country home near the cemetery. Duane Jones soon arrives as Ben, escaping the ever growing horde outside and needing gas in his truck. He gets to work barricading every door and window.

They aren't alone in the house. Harry Cooper (Karl Hardman) and his wife Helen (Marilyn Eastman) are hiding in the basement alongside their daughter, Karen, who seems to have been bitten. Even as a kid, I knew that couldn't be good....

Young couple Tom (Keith Wayne) and Judy (Judith Riley) are also inside, working with Ben to create an escape plan to Ben's truck and the gas pumps outside.

What Romero gets so right is the claustrophobic feeling inside the barricaded farmhouse. He seems to have a chewed up casualty around every corner and a hungry zombie ready to lunge behind every window. One question, why didn't that dead body on the stairs with the chewed up face come back to life inside the house? Hmmm....11 year old me kept waiting for that to happen, hiding my eyes.

He puts these different generations and races (remember, this was 1968) inside the pressure cooker and lets them boil.

Duane Jones saw himself as a very serious stage actor and he brings power to the role, even as some of those around him seem to be more in on what genre they're playing. He was one of the first African American leads in horror film history as well.

Hardman, in addition to playing what I call the "angry Ernest Borgnine role" (think Poseidon Adventure) also served as makeup artist, electronic sound effects engineer, and took the photos in the closing credits. Romero, the actors and team would shoot what they could over about 30 days, picking up filming as money came in.

One little known piece of casting trivia: Romero originally wanted to cast Betty Aberlin from "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood"as Barbara. Fred Rogers would not allow her to do the film! "Can you say ZOMBIE boys and girls?" Rogers was a fan of both this film and the 1978 sequel "Dawn of the Dead", with Rogers calling the latter "a lot of fun." Fred Rogers gave fellow Pittsburgh citizen Romero one of his first jobs on "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood", directing a segment about Rogers undergoing a tonsillectomy.

I still laugh out loud at how bad some of the local actors cast are. Sheriff McLelland was played by George Kosana, from a small PA town. He made six movies in his lifetime, but he never equaled some of his quotable worst lines of dialogue and delivery here. As a TV reporter interviews his Sheriff, Kosana drops this straight faced line: "Yeah, they're dead. They're...all messed up." It's a huge laugh with every viewing. "If you have a gun, shoot 'em in the head. That's a sure way to kill 'em. If you don't, get yourself a club or a torch. Beat 'em or burn 'em. They go up pretty easy."

But the laughs fade in comparison to some of the most terrifying scenes. Young Karen's final scene with her mother rivals Norman Bates' basement for chills.

Made for $114,000, it has grossed over $30 million, one of the most profitable independent films ever made. It's astounding what Romero did with so little money.

He followed it up 10 years later with the sequel, "Dawn of the Dead" and completed the trilogy in 1985 with "Day of the Dead".

There would be no "The Walking Dead" without this horror classic paving the way.

The gore may be tame compared to today's films, but Romero's original still holds up as an important part of horror history, biting, chewing and moaning its path to an A.

11-year-old me still remembers pushing lower and lower into that theater seat to avoid what was splattered all over the screen in front of me.

In those moments, Romero planted the first roots that would grow into my love for the horror genre.