Who directed the original Night of the Living Dead?
Night of the Living Dead is a 1968 independent black-and-white zombie film directed by George A. Romero. Ben (Duane Jones) and Barbra (Judith O’Dea) are the protagonists of a story about the mysterious reanimation of the recently dead, and their efforts, along with five other people, to survive the night while trapped in a rural Pennsylvania farmhouse. George Romero completed the film on a $114,000 budget, and after a decade of cinematic re-releases, it grossed some $12 million domestically and $30 million internationally.[1][2] On its release in 1968, Night of the Living Dead was strongly criticized for its explicit content, but in 1999, the Library of Congress placed it on the National Film Registry as a film deemed “historically, culturally or aesthetically important”.[3] Night of the Living Dead was cited by many as being a groundbreaking film, given its release during the Vietnam-era, due to perceived critiques of late-1960s U.S. society; a historian described it as “subversive on
As a big fan of horror movies and the zombie sub-genre, I really wanted to like George A. Romero’s Survival of the Dead and was prepared to give it the benefit of the doubt as much as possible. Although, my expectations were pretty low after Romero’s last two zombie movie efforts Land of the Dead and Diary of the Dead. Sadly, this film didn’t even manage to rise up to the level of my lowered expectations and is, instead, a heavily flawed and often very bad addition to Romero’s body of work. Still, this is the man who basically invented the zombie film genre, so attention must be paid and respect given for his enduring legacy as one of this country’s innovative artists. But something has obviously gone a bit off kilter and the writer/director seems to have lost his way. I’m not sure how this phenomenon works exactly, but somewhere along the way a director seems to lose his vision. After several great and innovative films the later films start to get worse and worse. Unfortunately, Georg
