1. Zombies - Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Night of the Living Dead was not the first film to feature zombies. However, earlier zombie flicks had portrayed zombies as the result of voodoo - creatures to exploit and enslave (I Walked With A Zombie, Plague of the Zombies). George Romero in this 1968 cult classic, establishes the modern blueprint for zombies - flesh eating ghouls who will stop at nothing to procure fresh human meat. It was shocking, it was subversive and it was upsetting. It turned cinema on its head. There were no heroes. There were no happy endings. And there were zombies - oodles of them, brainless, lumbering morons who packed a mean bite. This was bad. It wasn't just a madman chasing a few teenagers. This was the apocalypse, the end of the world. We were the enemy. Each of us was a zombie in waiting - a fate worse than death. No monster could achieve the scale of destruction of the zombie. Obviously Night of the Living Dead gave license for film makers to run riot with the zombie theme. Romero managed to go one better himself with Dawn of the Dead in 1978 - which was possibly even more influential than its predecessor - heavily influencing the likes of Zombie Flesh Eaters and a lot of cheap imitations, The Resident Evil video games and films as well as Shaun of the Dead to name but a few.
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