Zombie movies, love ‘em or hate ‘em
Source: http://news10now.com/
When it comes to zombie movies, opinions are pretty binary; there’s no middle ground. You either love them or revel in all of their bloody, undead gruesome goodness, or you can’t stomach them. Or, maybe you can stomach them but hate them anyway. Either way, there’s no arguing this point: without Night of the Living Dead they wouldn’t exist at all.
Now out in a 40th anniversary special edition, George A. Romero’s low-budget black-and-white fright fest is the granddaddy of the ghoul genre. And even after all the Day of the Deads, Dawn of the Deads, and Shaun of the Deads, it still holds up as being as terrifying as it is influential. There’s no need to go too deeply into the plot because that’s really not the point here. Essentially, the dead have come back to life and they are roaming the earth looking for brains to snack on. Meanwhile, a group of strangers hole up in a house in the middle of nowhere, board up the windows, lock the doors, and pray. Some of them fight back too.
Claustrophobic as heck and shot so gorgeously you’d never guess it cost as little as it did to make, Night of the Living Dead was also ahead of its time in other ways too. Made in 1968, at the height of the country’s Civil Rights struggles, Romero cast an African American actor-Duane Jones-as the movie’s most heroic character. Jones keeps his cool, battling zombies with gusto while everyone else around him either loses their marbles, or worse, intentionally doesn’t tell the other survivors that they’ve been bitten and will soon be going all pasty and cannibalistic too.
If you’ve never been a fan of zombie flicks, this is unquestionably the place to start to see what all the fuss is about. And if you are a fan, you don’t need me telling you to go out and rent this thing. You’re probably already on your way to the store.
