Night Of The Living Dead:. Joe Kane

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      RAVES FOR GEORGE A. ROMERO’S

       Night of the Living Dead

      George A. Romero’s debut set the template for the zombie film, and features tight editing, realistic gore, and a sly political undercurrent.

      —Rotten Tomatoes

      Romero’s grainy black-and-white cinematography and casting of locals emphasize the terror lurking in ordinary life; as in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), Romero’s victims are not attacked because they did anything wrong, and the randomness makes the attacks all the more horrifying.

      —American Movie Classics

      I saw Night of the Living Dead first-run at a drive-in. Night of the Living Dead was scary.

      —John Waters

      There’s never been anything quite like it…. Night of the Living Dead establishes savagery as a necessary condition of life. Marked by fatality and a grim humor, the film gnaws through to the bone, then proceeds on to the marrow.

      —Jim Gay, Amazon.com

      If you want to see what turns a B movie into a classic, don’t miss Night of the Living Dead.

      —Rex Reed

      Since this was twenty years before CNN would be showing body parts during prime-time television, I was totally blown away by how graphic Romero’s movie was.

      —Lloyd Kaufman, president of Troma Entertainment

      Over its short, furious course, the picture violates so many strong taboos—cannibalism, incest, necrophilia—that it leaves audiences giddy and hysterical.

      —Village Voice

      One of the best films ever made, and possibly the most influential horror movie of all time.

      —Time Out

      There’s a brute force in Night of the Living Dead that catches one in the throat.

      —Lucius Gore, ESplatter

      A doozie.

      —Emanuel Levy, EmanuelLevy.com

      Graphically gruesome!

      —Fandango.com

      At AM, we love a good zombie movie, and we are eternally grateful for this classic piece of celluloid. It’s true horror, plain and simple.

      —AskMen.com

      If the American Film Institute’s list of the classic movie quotes had been voted on by Pittsburghers, somewhere among those one hundred would have been “They’re coming to get you, Barbara.”

      —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

      Second only to Psycho among influential horror films.

      —Entertainment Weekly

      The best thing is that Night of the Living Dead isn’t over-composed—it just hurtles ahead with all its gruesomeness.

      —Los Angeles Times

      Minted in chilling black-and-white, George A. Romero’s indie classic manages to be scary as hell, funny, and political all at once.

      —Premiere

      It’s rare when a movie transcends pop culture’s usual fifteen minutes of fame and becomes a time-tested classic. Night of the Living Dead redefined a lackluster monster and gave rise to both a new genre in horror and a new image in the public consciousness. There’s no denying it, Night of the Living Dead is THE archetypal zombie film…a bona fide classic, inspirational, thought-provoking, and most important, still very scary after all these years. Thanks for the nightmares, George!

      —Classic-Horror.com

      Night of the Living Dead is one of my first favorite movies. Every week, for the first six years of my life, I watched Night of the Living Dead.…It was the first film that I had memorized. It scared me away from wanting to ever frequent cemeteries. I DECLARE NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD IS ONE OF THE GREATEST HORROR MOVIES OF ALL TIME!!

      —Harry Knowles, Ain’t It Cool News

      Night of the Living Dead establishes savagery as a necessary condition of life. Marked by fatality and a grim humor, the film gnaws through to the bone, then proceeds on to the marrow.

      —Amazon.com

      One of the best and most influential horror films ever made. George Romero packed Night of the Living Dead with shocking horror, brilliant filmmaking, complex themes, and a controversial social commentary of the times.

      —Bloody Disgusting.com

      With its radical rewriting of a genre in which good had always triumphed over evil, Romero’s first feature shattered the conventions of horror and paved the way for the subversive visions of directors like David Cronenberg, Tobe Hooper, and Sam Raimi.

      —Time Out

      Nobody could have imagined when Night of the Living Dead was playing off unheralded second feature drive-in dates in 1968 that going on fifty years later it would have become a cultural touchstone every bit as potent as the most famous mainstream movies of the era. It’s partly the lack of slickness, the newsreelish presentation with unknown actors that still gives it its power. It’s like a documentary about the end of the world.

      —Joe Dante

      NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD

      BEHIND THE SCENES OF THE MOST TERRIFYING ZOMBIE MOVIE EVER

      JOE KANE

      THE PHANTOM OF THE MOVIES^®

      CITADEL PRESS

      Kensingon Publishing Corp.

       www.kensingtonbooks.com

      For Nancy Naglin,

      Without whose indefatigable love,

      assistance, and support—

      Fughedaboudit!

      Welcome to a night of total terror!

      —Trailer, Night of the Living Dead

      One thing that seems clear to me, looking back at the ten or a dozen films that truly scared me, is that most really good horror films are low-budget affairs with special effects cooked up in someone's basement or garage. Among those that truly work are Carnival of Souls, Halloween, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Night of the Living Dead, and The Blair Witch Project.

      —Stephen King

      We made it a good film. The fans made it a classic.

      —Night of the Living Dead producer Russell Streiner

      CONTENTS

      Foreword: A Night to Remember by Wes Craven

      Acknowledgments

      1.