You can almost time it to the exact second (around 72 mins in) when audiences stopped grinning and laughing behind their hands, expecting just another safe, silly horror film, and started feeling completely and utterly terrified.
Before that moment, teenagers didn't get blown up and have their intestines eaten on screen -- it simply didn't happen; everyone always survived in the end, it was fun to be afraid because everyone would be OK when the credits rolled (and this was a period when people took what happened on the big screen a lot more seriously than we do now or ever will again).
George A. Romero's debut film doesn't just kill off the sweet innocent teenagers (in the aforementioned most gruesome fashion) -- which would become a staple of horror, along with zombies themselves -- he kills off everyone. Even the film's brave hero, a black man with a shotgun (a subversive decision in itself for the 1960s) gets shot in the head by a pack of zombie-hunting white men and tossed on a bonfire to end the film (the ending is filmed in photographic stills, which creates a somehow more disturbing, documentary-like grisly realism conclusion to the events).
What's truly scary about 'Night of the Living Dead' isn't the zombies, it is the behaviour of human beings: it doesn't matter what kind of monster or demon you survive a battle with, in the end it's the ugliness of human nature that is going to defeat you. And for that reason the film will always resonate, no matter how badly the acting and low budget effects age.
Before that moment, teenagers didn't get blown up and have their intestines eaten on screen -- it simply didn't happen; everyone always survived in the end, it was fun to be afraid because everyone would be OK when the credits rolled (and this was a period when people took what happened on the big screen a lot more seriously than we do now or ever will again).
George A. Romero's debut film doesn't just kill off the sweet innocent teenagers (in the aforementioned most gruesome fashion) -- which would become a staple of horror, along with zombies themselves -- he kills off everyone. Even the film's brave hero, a black man with a shotgun (a subversive decision in itself for the 1960s) gets shot in the head by a pack of zombie-hunting white men and tossed on a bonfire to end the film (the ending is filmed in photographic stills, which creates a somehow more disturbing, documentary-like grisly realism conclusion to the events).
What's truly scary about 'Night of the Living Dead' isn't the zombies, it is the behaviour of human beings: it doesn't matter what kind of monster or demon you survive a battle with, in the end it's the ugliness of human nature that is going to defeat you. And for that reason the film will always resonate, no matter how badly the acting and low budget effects age.