The corpses of Pennsylvania rise from the dead and eat people in George A. Romero‘s cannibalistic classic. Let’s call it The Pittsburgh Body-Stealers.

Probably the most important Horror movie of all time, Night of the Living Dead is responsible for entire genres and film industries; not just zombie features but slashers, splatter flicks and found footage exist because of this shoestring shocker from 1968. Inspired by Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, it depicts America in the throes of a doomed cultural revolution, the horrors of the Vietnam War and Civil Rights struggles rendered in the stark black and white of newsreel footage.

Until Romero’s movie, sci-fi cinema was largely fanciful and far from home; think outer space, Transylvania or Elstree Studios. Here the horror was realistic for the first time, shot guerrilla-style (not to be confused with Night of the Bloody Apes) and packed with news broadcasts played straighter than actual American news today. The characters also behave realistically, either turning on each other or shutting themselves away. The monsters are not aliens or Eastern Europeans, but ourselves.

It is funny then that the film opens in such an old-school manner, with Barbara and Johnny (Judith O’Dea and Russell Streiner) goofing around a cemetery. The intro lulls you into a brief sense of security before people immediately start dying, and continue dying right up until the ironic, politically charged ending. Like Sigourney Weaver in Alien, Duane Jones is of those pieces of unplanned casting that redefines the movie and cinema generally. Having an African-American hero lends a haunting potency to the ghoulish zombie-hunting posses and the uncanny climax.

If Ben is one of the most progressive characters in the genre then Barbara is disappointingly sexist, instantly becoming catatonic and remaining useless for the rest of the picture. Her muteness does however bring an almost silent-movie quality to the exploitation flick, amplified by expressionist lighting and camera angles. There is constant motion and relentless action, even when Ben is just fixing and moving furniture to keep the cannibal apocalypse at bay; a combination of carpentry and brutality we would not see again until The Passion of the Christ.

That violence also predates the MPAA’s rating system by a couple of weeks, meaning unsuspecting children were admitted by imprudent cinemas; surely the scariest way to experience the film, with the possible exception of when George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic accidentally drove onto set while tripping on acid.

A revolution not only for horror but independent film, Night of the Living Dead remains unkillable, still burning with anger and intense political imagery; society eating itself, children attacking their parents, the past coming back to bite us.