Netflix pick for 7/21/14 – ‘Night of the Living Dead’

This zombie craze had to start somewhere. And it can be traced, cinematically speaking, to George Romero’s 1968 classic “Night of the Living Dead,” the very first movie to portray zombies as flesh-consuming reanimated corpses who can only be taken down by head shots and destroying their brains. Inspired by Richard Metheson’s vampire classic “I Am Legend” (itself made into THREE movies), Romero literally wrote the rules of the zombie genre, and with minor variations here and there, these rules have remained firmly intact, to the point of becoming cultural canon. Now that is a cultural feat to behold.

Filmed in black and white on a budget of about three dollars and a bucket of red dye and corn syrup, “Night of the Living Dead” is the story of the very beginning of a zombie outbreak and how a group of strangers manage to hole up together in a house overnight in an attempt to simply survive. And of course this movie is effective and a classic not just because it features people as monsters stumbling around in the dark, but because it is really the story of these people, and how they struggle to get along, even when their own lives are at stake. George Romero went on to make a number of zombie movies, all of them more bleak and down on humanity than the last, and all I can say is, thank goodness for this man’s anger, because he’s made some pretty sweet movies.

So watch “The Night of the Living Dead” right here on the ole Netflix Instant and enjoy the black and white bloody zombie madness!