Night of the Living Dead (1968, George A. Romero)

🏆 🪦🧟‍♂️🏃‍♀️🏠🔨🛻🔥🧟‍♂️🧟‍♂️🧟‍♂️🧐🙂 After seeing Shaun of the Dead, I wanted to see the other George A. Romero zombie mythos-defining movies. I was going to work backwards from Day of the Dead, which I’d seen a few weeks ago, but I couldn’t find Dawn of the Dead anywhere, so it was Night of the Living Dead then. I think I’ve seen this movie before, but I don’t remember it. I believe Max’s version of this film is the Criterion/MoMA remastered 4K version. It occurs to me that these older horror movies could be considerably improved for a modern audience if they simply remixed the sound. Leave the dialog, augment the badly-recorded, sparse foley sound effects, but most importantly rescore the music. It’s mainly the old-fashioned midrange-heavy music score blaring frantically over the long and slow action scenes that make old horror movies so cheesy. Also the foley work from before they made flesh hits sound like Hollywood rather than reality. Judith O’Dea looks a little like Kim Raver from 24. A surprisingly large portion of the runtime is hammering things on doors and windows. Wait it took him an hour to look upstairs? These two dudes just appeared from the basement? The balding father dude looks like Rob Corddry. Showing this television report must have been a technical challenge–I don’t think you could just film a television screen in 1968? (I’m not sure you can today, either, actually.) I imagine they either had to composite it and/or put some kind of cut-out facade of a television panel in front of a projection screen. Feels like this movie is about six hours long. The rifle sounds like a pellet gun. Overall, surprisingly watchable with some surprising twists. But others have done this story better. (Including George A. Romero.) I wish it didn’t feel like it takes six hours to tell a 20-minute story though. (Max.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Living_Dead