Romero cast an African American in the lead, and he shifted the horror genre’s dynamic, aligning it with black-and-white anti-war documentaries like Emile de Antonio’s In the Year of the Pig, also released in 1968, and distinguishing it from the lurid color horror movies Roger Corman and Hammer Films had been turning out up till then. Those films made certain concessions to the film industry; Night of the Living Dead did not. This was an American horror movie, so it needed no English accents or familiar character actors. It was grim and unflinching, showing average citizens, played by average people, eating the arms and intestines of their fellow townspeople. Romero drove home this central point — that a zombie-infested America differed from the status quo only in degree, not in kind — by ending his film with realistic-looking fake news photos depicting his characters’ banal atrocities.

They discouraged people from seeing it, but Romero’s images proved to be indelible

In expiation for his pusillanimity in the opening reel

Tightly controlled scenes avoid the pointlessness and repetition of the nouveau zombie films, limning class struggle in unexpected ways