Screening Dates
  • November 10, 2017 6:30
  • November 11, 2017 8:15
New Restoration

“One of the three most important and influential horror films ever made.”

Kim Newman, Sight and Sound

A radical, game-changing work of savage social-commentary-cum-horror, the landmark first film by splatter icon George E. Romero—who died in July in his adopted hometown of Toronto—established the rules of the zombie playbook we’ve stuck to ever since. A drive-in cash cow that ushered in an entire generation of American indies, Romero’s DIY cheapie, shot outside Pittsburgh with a cast of unknowns, tells the smart, slyly-simple story of a group of strangers barricaded inside a farmhouse besieged by a horde of lumbering, flesh-eating ghouls. (“Zombie” isn’t even uttered.) Romero, bucking convention, casts a black actor (Duane Jones) as the hero, offs the assumed white hero in the first reel, and delivers a shock ending that still unsettles. Though the film caused a furor for its amped-up gore, it’s the Trojan-horsing of ​’60s protest issues—Vietnam. American racism—that proved what the genre was truly capable of.

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