10 Mean Films For Mean Times

Promising gore and ghouls aplenty (“They won’t stay dead!” screamed the tagline), Night Of The Living Dead didn’t look particularly subversive when it first appeared in America’s Drive-ins. With its dysfunctional family, doomed African-American hero and downbeat ending, however, NOTLD was anything but traditional horror fare.

Every generation finds its own father of modern horror, and if Hitchcock’s Psycho brought the horror movie out of medieval castles, then NOTLD established a world where authority, religion and even the family unit are all useless in the face of the encroaching apocalypse.

Described by John Landis as “powerful sh*t”, the movie not only pioneered the modern zombie film but also provided a more bleakly realistic apocalypse than, say, The Last Man On Earth (1964). Brought to you in grainy newsreel grey, this was a world where the family unit disintegrated instead of pulling through, and if a young girl could kill and eat her mother, then nothing was beyond the pale.

Ever since, filmmakers have foregone traditional zombies in favour of Romero’s flesh-eating cadavers and opted for his sense of isolation and claustrophobia. The zombie films that owe him a debt but stage their narrative on a grander scale (Resident Evil, World War Z) are best enjoyed as action movies, but the best are the pictures that retain NOTLD’s isolated locale and sense of hopelessness.