Night of the Living Dead

Terror at every turn! It’s not the 1960s as you remember them — or maybe it is. The year is 1968 and a 28-year-old director, with a budget of just a little over $100 thousand, releases a movie about race, war, and police violence, about the world literally eating itself alive. Of course, horror is just fiction, right? The previous year police brutally attacked an anti-war protest at the University of Wisconsin’s Madison campus, while bloodshed and flames consumed West Detroit during the 12th Street Race Riot. In 1968, the country’s most promising arbiters of peace, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, were shot and killed. In the following year, Henry Kissinger would begin secretly bombing Cambodia. Meanwhile in George A. Romero’s grainy, black-and-white film, a ragtag group of survivors takes sanctuary in a rural Pennsylvanian farmhouse, attempting to escape the flesh-hungry grasp of ghoulishly transformed humans. Heralded as the defining influence of what would become the zombie horror genre, “Night of The Living Dead” was also ahead of its time in casting Black actor Duane Jones as its heroic lead. Educated at the Sorbonne in France, New York City-native Jones was a director in his own right, acting as executive director of the Black Theater Alliance, as well as heading the literature department of Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. He died of cardiac arrest at the age of 51, but his performance here lives again each Halloween in the many independent screenings of this grizzly, politically-minded triumph of small budget filmmaking. If you don't know the ending, you may be shocked at how much it still echoes the headlines of today.

“Night of The Living Dead” is presented by the Boondocks Film Society on Oct. 29 at Warner Theatre in Torrington, Conn., with a cocktail party. For tickets go to www.boondocksfilmsociety.org

Duane Jones and Judith O'Dea hide out from the living dead. Photo courtesy of Image Ten, Inc.

Duane Jones and Judith O'Dea hide out from the living dead. Photo courtesy of Image Ten, Inc.

Duane Jones and Judith O'Dea hide out from the living dead. Photo courtesy of Image Ten, Inc.

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