Night of the Living Dead (1968)
“They won't stay dead!”
Streamed free from the Internet Archive · no signup, no cost — this film is in the public domain.
Synopsis
Siblings Barbra and Johnny are attacked while visiting their father's grave in rural Pennsylvania, and Barbra flees to an isolated farmhouse. There she joins a resourceful stranger named Ben and a handful of others who barricade themselves in as a growing horde of reanimated, flesh-eating corpses lays siege to the house. As radio and television bulletins reveal the dead are rising across the eastern United States, the trapped survivors battle the ghouls outside and their own panic within — building toward one of the bleakest dawns in horror.
Cast
About the Director
George A. Romero — George A. Romero (1940–2017) was a Pittsburgh advertising-and-industrial filmmaker — he had even shot segments for "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" — making his feature debut here as director, cinematographer, editor and co-writer. The film launched him as the defining figure of modern zombie cinema, and he followed it with 'Dawn of the Dead' (1978) and four more entries in the series.
Why It’s Free: The Public-Domain Story
A clerical slip dropped the film into the public domain. The original prints carried a proper copyright notice under the title "Night of the Flesh Eaters," but when distributor the Walter Reade Organization changed the title to "Night of the Living Dead," it failed to carry that notice onto the new prints. Under the 1909 Copyright Act, publishing a work without the required notice forfeited its federal copyright — so the film was unprotected from the day it opened, and its makers never collected royalties on the countless copies that followed.
Behind the Scenes
Image Ten, a band of Pittsburgh ad-men and investors, shot the film for roughly $114,000, largely in and around a condemned farmhouse near Evans City, Pennsylvania. The crew improvised effects on the cheap, using Bosco chocolate syrup for blood and donated butcher-shop meat for the ghouls' grisly feast. It cycled through working titles — "Monster Flick," "Night of Anubis," "Night of the Flesh Eaters" — before premiering in Pittsburgh on October 1, 1968.
Did You Know?
- The word "zombie" is never spoken — the undead are only ever called "ghouls," yet the film defined the modern pop-culture zombie.
- The on-screen blood was Bosco chocolate syrup, and the flesh the ghouls devour was real meat donated by an investor's butcher shop.
- Romero never rewrote a line after casting Black actor Duane Jones as the hero — he said Jones simply gave the best audition, a rarity in 1968.
- The lost copyright is one of the costliest clerical errors in film history: the filmmakers earned almost nothing from decades of home-video and broadcast reissues.
Reception & Legacy
Its unprecedented gore stirred controversy on release — Roger Ebert famously scolded theaters for letting unprepared children watch — but it became a runaway hit and a cult phenomenon. Today it is regarded as a landmark of American horror and the blueprint for the entire zombie genre, and in 1999 the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry.
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