Night of The living dead

OUT 19 February / CERT Tbc / 96 Mins

In 1968, just outside Pittsburgh, at the bargainbasement cost of $114,000, George A. Romero gave birth to the modern zombie genre. Yet, in Night Of The Living Dead, the shambling instruments of Romero’s cadaverous apocalypse are only ever called “ghouls”; they can jog, use tools and are afraid of light. Back then, zombies were a voodoo thing; these festering revenants are the result of some space-probe-transmitted Venusian radiation. Still, Romero’s debut changed popular culture and lives up to its rep all these years later, with a chilling, newsreel-meets-noir style and some claustrophobic chamber dramatics as its farmhouse-trapped survivors fumble and fragment. Bold for casting an African-american in a lead role written for a white man (Duane Jones simply gave the best audition, said Romero), envelope-pushing for its depictions of gore and delivering a truly devastating ending, it’s a landmark movie in more ways than one.