Night of the Living Dead, 1968: Watch it here in your browser
10:51 PM Thu, Sep 11, 2008 | Permalink
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Legendary New Yorker film reviewer Pauline Kael found it terrifying, too. She didn't like it much, though. From an online collection of her reviews, Night of the Living Dead: It would be fun to be able to dismiss this as undoubtedly the best movie ever made in Pittsburgh, but it also happens to be one of the most gruesomely terrifying movies ever made--and when you leave the theatre you may wish you could forget the whole horrible experience. It's about a night when the dead rise and eat the living; seven people (the most resourceful one is played by Duane Jones) take refuge in a farm house, and we watch as the relentlessly marching, hungry corpses come in and tear at them--and we see, in closeup, the devouring of hearts, lungs, entrails. Made by George A. Romero, who photographed and directed on a budget of $114,000. The film's grainy, banal seriousness works for it--gives it a crude realism; even the flatness of the amateurish acting and the unfunny attempts at campy comedy add, somehow, to the horror--there's no art to transmute the ghoulishness. (The dead also rise and come toward us at the climax of Abel Gance's pacifist film J'ACCUSE, but the effect there goes far beyond the grisly-scary; the horror has grandeur.) At first this film received almost no attention, but in two or three years it became a hit at midnight showings after the regularly scheduled feature--and not just in the U.S. but in Tokyo, Paris, and other centers.
You can, btw, watch this full screen -- click the second icon from right at the bottom of the video player -- but it's like viewing it underwater. This 560x455 size seems a good compromise. This and many other films and cartoons are also available at the Internet Archive's Moving Image Archive. 
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