On this day: the premiere of ‘Night of the Living Dead’

On October 1, 1968, the Fulton theater in Pittsburgh hosted the first screening of 'Night of the Living Dead'. It was George Romero's debut feature film, made by a small team of people who came out of advertising and industrial film.

The budget was around $114,000, and it was shot on black-and-white 35mm film from July 1967 to January 1968 near Evans City, Pennsylvania. Instead of sets, they rented a farmhouse that was slated for demolition. The script drew partly on Richard Matheson's 1954 novel 'I Am Legend', and it was still being finished during the shoot, so the actors came up with some of the lines themselves.

The lead role, Ben, went to Duane Jones. In the late 1960s a Black actor was almost never made the hero of an American film with a mostly white cast, and the choice was bold; according to Romero, Jones gave the best audition. The part was originally written for a white actor, but the director chose not to rewrite the text for him.

In the film the dead are called ghouls, and the word 'zombie' is never spoken. Romero insisted that his hungry dead were something new compared with the voodoo zombies of Haitian folklore controlled by a sorcerer. It was precisely this image, with no puppet master and no hope of restoring the monsters to human form, that took hold in popular culture.

An accidental loss of rights

The rights to the film came down to an accident. The distributor changed the title from 'Night of the Flesh Eaters' to 'Night of the Living Dead' and also removed the copyright notice from the credits. Under American law at the time, without such a notice the film lost its protection and immediately fell into the public domain. The authors only learned about it four years later and spent years in court, without success. Hence more than two hundred different cassette releases and free copies on numerous websites.

From controversy to recognition

On release the film stirred controversy: the amount of blood and the bleak ending unsettled viewers and critics. Roger Ebert recalled a screening where children first screamed and then fell silent as the characters died one after another. Attitudes later changed: today the film holds 95% on Rotten Tomatoes and 89 out of 100 on Metacritic, and in 1999 the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry. Romero made five more films about the living dead, and modern zombie cinema is traced back to this debut.

Image: nicolas genin CC BY-SA 2.0 · License

Translation editor: Ловушкин А.