"They're coming to get you, Barbara!"

Zombies have become one of the most popular monsters in horror films over the last decade.  One need look no farther than the horror section of their local video store to see just how man films feature the walking dead.  From the new television series based off of Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead to the much lighter Shaun of the Dead, zombies have become a part of pop culture.  All of these films, video games, comic books, music videos, etc. owe a great amount of respect to one man and one film.  The man, George A. Romero.  The film, Night of the Living Dead. 

Although the special effects, and more importantly acting are somewhat laughable today, the idea of the story is still effective in it's simplicity.  The undead come to life, no one really knows why.  What they do know is that anyone they bite will die, come back to life, and be hungry for human flesh.  In this day and age the idea sounds familiar enough and it's really nothing to get excited about, but in 1968 the idea was horrifying.  Those who saw the film in 68 were divided by those who found it groundbreaking and those who found it offensively sadistic.  If those people were to watch a film like Zach Snyder's remake of Dawn of they Dead they would probably suffer a major heart attack, but at the time a film about slow moving flesh hungry ghouls was enough to create controversy.  Rather than convey a sort of cartoonish horror Night of the Living Dead displayed a brutal realism to it's monsters.  The camera did not cut away from the monsters devouring flesh or even portray such events in shadows cast in the background.  This made the tone of the film very dark and dragged the audience through moments of loss, chaos, and terror.  The zombies were creeping death.  They did not run as they do in some modern zombie tales, they simply gathered in large numbers and attacked in swarms, they're only weakness being destruction of the brain.

Personally the film stands as one of the greats.  While it was shot on a very modest budget with amateur actors all is forgiven due to the master storytelling by George A. Romero.  This is not a film with a happy ending.  There is no solution to the zombie problem, and at the end the human race seems just as doomed as they were at the beginning of the story.  Shamefully I must admit I did not view this movie until later on in my teens.  At this point I had already watched many zombie films and although their budgets were much bigger and the actors were more professional, Night of the Living Dead still hit me hard.  I believe part of this is due to the film being in black and white.  The lack of color adds to the dark tone of the film making everything seem like a nightmare, a quality that lead to my discovery of the undead actually being scary.  Where slasher films have a group of teens being terrified by a man in a mask, Night had the whole world facing the danger of an army of the dead, the worst part being that all of them had been normal human beings beforehand. 

Aside from Night being the first film to set up today's zombie mythology, it also set up rules still used in films about the undead.  The first being that a single zombie bite will kill and then transform one into a zombie there self.  Second being that zombies hunger for living human flesh and will stop at nothing to get it, and last of all, but most importantly, the only way to kill the ghoul is to kill the brain.  The modern zombie films that do not follow this formula are few and far between and that is because it is a formula that works very well in creating great zombie films.  Love them or hate them, zombie seem to be here to stay largely due to George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead.