17. Night of the Living Dead - Child Kills Mother (1968)
Night of the Living Dead is a chilling, morbid tale about several disparate people holed up in a country house trying to fend off attacks from the Walking Dead. Everyone has a theory on how to survive and combat the zombies. This inability to reach a consensus set a blue print for the zombie film - the survivors will argue amongst themselves and pose just as much danger to each other as the zombies. Also established was the blue print that someone you love will get bitten/ infected somehow and you will be forced into killing them when they reanimate as a zombie. The shocking controversial scene in Night of the Living Dead shows the young infected girl Karen chewing down on her father's corpse. Her mother comes down and witnesses this but cannot accept that her little girl is a zombie. Karen kills her mother with a gardening tool and feasts upon her body. There is no recognition or love in her eyes. Only a vacant, maniacal desire to eat human flesh. This consumption of parents must have been very shocking back in the late 1960s.