“It would be fun to be able to dismiss this as undoubtedly the best movie ever made in Pittsburgh, but it also happens to be one of the most gruesomely terrifying movies ever made — and when you leave the theatre, you may wish you could forget the whole horrible experience … The film’s grainy, banal seriousness works for it — gives it a crude realism; even the flatness of the amateurish acting and the unfunny attempts at campy comedy add, somehow, to the horror — there’s no art to transmute the ghoulishness.”
—Pauline Kael

There’s before NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and after NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. George Romero’s epochal horror film uses its low budget to its advantage. Everything has a newsreel immediacy thanks to Romero’s use of handheld cameras and real locations. The colorblind casting process he used was revolutionary as well. Here, the hero is the tall, dark, and handsome Duane Jones, the best actor Romero could afford on his low budget — and he’s very, very good. The story is: a group of people are besieged by an invasion of dead people returning to life. They barricade themselves in a farmhouse and fight back as the strains from within and without become intolerable. With one of the all-time surprise endings.