Author: Matt Gilligan / Source: did you know?
George A. Romero’s 1968 film Night of the Living Dead stands as a landmark in modern cinema. The movie was a cultural touchstone and most critics point to it as the birth of the modern horror film.
Night of the Living Dead turns 50 this year, and in honor of the low-budget masterpiece that changed the face of horror films, here are some facts about the film.
1. The original ideas were quite different
Imagine this: the original idea for Night of the Living Dead was for the film to be an alien comedy. In 1967, Romero, writer John A. Russo, and actor Rudy Rucci all worked at a commercial film company in Pittsburgh called Latent Image. The three men thought they should try their hand at making a feature film.
Russo suggested a film about hot-rodding teenage aliens that visit Earth and cause trouble with the help of a pet from outer space. That idea wouldn’t work due to budget constraints, so Russo came up with an idea about a runaway boy who stumbles upon a field of corpses under glass that were rotting and would be consumed by aliens. Romero liked the flesh-eating angle but ditched the rest.
2. Romero was heavily inspired by I Am Legend
Romero admitted that he basically “ripped off” Richard Matheson’s horror novel I Am Legend, combining it with the flesh-eating angle that Russo had come up with. Romero came up with about 40 pages that Russo loved, including the opening in the cemetery, and then went to work on the script that would eventually become Night of the Living Dead.
3. Everything, including the blood, was made on the cheap
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