"One can only imagine the impact that Night on the Living Dead had on unprepared audiences of 1968. Here was a film that began with a semi-comic scene in a graveyard in broad daylight -- which was suddenly interrupted by the homicidal appearance of a seeming lunatic. Gradually the audience comes to the horrible realization that the attacking looney is a zombie, one of several ""living dead"" recently arisen from their graves -- and that they roam the earth in order to chow down on human flesh. Seven people with whom the audience identifies barricade themselves against the zombie invasion. The only way to destroy the attackers is to set them afire; the trick is to get the zombies before the zombies get them. Filmed in Pittsburgh on a $150,000 budget by former industrial filmmaker George Romero, Night of the Living Dead was denied a release by Columbia on the grounds that it was shot in black-and-white, and was turned down by American-International because of the film's bleak, unhappy ending. Romero turned to Walter Reade Associates, which unceremoniously dumped the film onto the kiddie matinee circuit. After attending a screening with an audience of scared-witless youngsters, a mortified Readers Digest journalist printed a scathing condemnation of Night of the Living Dead -- an article that had the immediate effect of arousing the interest of moviegoers who might otherwise have ignored the film. One of the first of the ""midnight movies,"" Night of the Living Dead still packs a wallop today, even in the light of the more-convincing special effects indigenous to the Halloween, Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street flicks of the 1980s. That the threadbare, amateurish production values of the original Night of the Living Dead added to its authenticity was proven by Romero's 1990 remake, which despite its bigger budget, color photography, explicit violence and superb makeup work, was nowhere near as frightening as the 1968 version."