Birth of the genre

"Night of the Living Dead" can serve as an excellent example for beginning filmmakers around the world, and once again proves: nothing can stop the idea, the time of which has come. The fact that the black and white tape category "B" with a miserable budget has become a cult classic, has already acquired legends. The film, the cost of which did not amount to two hundred thousand dollars, overnight got an army of fans, and among the directors a whole wave of imitators arose. Only remakes were removed at least three.

They say the idea of ​​creating a movie about the dead came to George Romero, when he accidentally saw crippled in Vietnam, soldiers affected by the explosion. Their faces were so disfigured that they really looked like "living dead". Romero, who had previously filmed only short films, and who was by and large amateur, was so fired up with the idea that he immediately borrowed money and made a film on his own money, which opened the whole world in the horror genre. And although the very term "zombie" was introduced into the cinema much later, the pioneer in this direction was precisely "Night of the Living Dead".

Following the release of the film, deafening success brought Romero fame and solid profits, but ... in fact deprived him of his creative choice. The fact is that all the subsequent work of the director is not about zombies, viewers categorically did not accept, although among them there were much more highly artistic tapes than the debut one. In any case, pomyavshis a little on the expanses of the genre variety, Romero eventually spit on everything and focused exclusively on a different sort of corpse.

Speaking of the film itself is not as interesting as it is about the history of its creation. To frighten it in our time is unlikely to be able to someone, and low-budgetity is sometimes visible to the naked eye. A rare change of personnel and a small number of camera angles indicates that the cameras were used at a minimum. Actors sometimes play not very convincingly, and makeup on the dead is not as sophisticated as will be in some films on this subject in the future. But strangely enough, all this is not annoying at all, but, perhaps, even on the contrary - it adds to what is happening on the screen of a unique color. And another undoubted advantage of the classic version of "Night of the Living Dead" is the atmosphere of oppressive horror, which unfortunately was lost in many subsequent zombie films, sometimes more like militants and not inspiring anything but boredom.