Halloween 2K26 - Night of the Living Dead

By the time I reached the age of thirteen, I had horror fever. I was renting every film I could get my hands on and had even begun buying VHS tapes. I knew the classics like Halloween, Friday the 13th, and A Nightmare on Elm Street. I was familiar with some of the more popular box art, like Dead Alive, Ghost Story, and Evil Dead 2, and I was beginning to learn about even more classic titles thanks to the now defunct website House of Horrors.

It was at House of Horrors that I learned Night of the Living Dead was related to Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead. I had no idea they were connected in their own Romero universe, and that immediately made them must see movies for me.

I spent the summer of 1996 in the foothills of North Carolina at my grandmother’s house. She lived on a secluded dirt road. Across the street was a massive chicken house, and scattered throughout the cow pastures were old, abandoned homes that had once belonged to distant relatives and had been left to rot.

It was the country, and it was quiet. The only people who turned down my grandmother's road were people you knew, which meant that at night all you heard were crickets or the occasional cow.

My grandmother took me to the local Movie Gallery, where I picked up a copy of Night of the Living Dead to rent. On the way home, we stopped by Kmart, where I found a copy of Dawn of the Dead on VHS. She graciously bought that for me as well. I decided that once she went to bed, I would stay up late and watch Night of the Living Dead, then save Dawn of the Dead for the following evening.

My grandmother always went to bed after The Tonight Show, so once Jay Leno had signed off for the evening, I said good night and popped in the tape. I was nervous about the film being in black and white because I sometimes struggled with the pacing of older movies, but I was surprised by how modern it felt. Still, the movie did not seem all that scary. It just created this strange atmosphere that lingered throughout the entire film and, as I would soon discover, long after it was over.

Once the credits rolled, I stopped the tape, hit rewind, and decided it was time for bed. I was disappointed. I had heard that Night of the Living Dead was one of the scariest movies of all time, and yet I had not jumped once. I chalked it up to the movie being remembered differently by people who had lived through its original release and crawled into bed.

I was tired, and I remember wanting to go to sleep, but something did not feel right. Something felt… uneasy. As I rolled over and tried to close my eyes, I realized that I did not want to.

Something was wrong.

I got out of bed and walked over to the window. I stood there with my hand on the curtain, wanting to pull it aside and look outside for just a moment, but I was frozen in panic. I could picture the cow pasture across the street and the side yard filled with slow moving zombies. I could see them descending on the house like moths to a light, and my imagination completely got the best of me.

That was when I realized this silly black and white movie had actually gotten to me.

I took a deep breath, opened the curtains, and saw nothing but the dark, quiet countryside. I breathed a sigh of relief and laughed at myself as I crawled back into bed.

Night of the Living Dead was a scary movie. It just was not scary in the way I had expected it to be in 1996. It was scary in a way that lingered. It made the familiar world outside my grandmother’s window feel slightly different, as if something could be waiting just beyond the safety of those four walls.