I am unimpressed by these arguments as to how Night of Living Dead goes *all the way back to 1968!* & how far we have moved on since then. The sort of audience who would have gone to it then would have been well schooled in Cushing/Lee Hammer Horror which goes back to mid-50s, as well as all the 20s silents like Nosferatu with the terrifying Max Schrek, the James Whale et al 30s-40s Karloff & Lugosi Frankensteins & Draculas, from which tradition Hammer Horror had derived with additional colour & a bit more gore ~~ all of which had a frisson of effectiveness quite absent from this piece of 1968 feebleness. How on earth could those reared on all this have been scared *AS LATE AS 1968!* by those crude long-shots of a few distant figures with not-all-that funny faces standing staring in the middle-distance and not seeming to get any closer for an hour or so + a shot or two from odd angles with sudden augmented chords on the soundtrack of hunting trophies on the wall!? I can't see how it could ever have scared anybody ~~ & I always scared easy as a child [even Bob Hope's comedic The Ghost Breakers in 1940 gave me nightmares when I saw it by error as support feature to Tom Brown's Schooldays, and The Picture Of Dorian Gray nearly gave me a nervous breakdown in late-40s], and even later have been a bit sort-of-uneasy at going home to my empty house when Valerie was lecturing abroad, after the original West End production of The Woman In Black, for instance. But Night Living Dead left me simply bored & cold. I honestly can't imagine anyone with any previous experience in the genre being the slightest bit affected by it as late as nearly-1970.

~M~