While there have been better-made horror movies in the 50 years since, some even directed by Romero himself, and there have been bigger budgets, better actors and more scares, there may not be any single denouement and message more frightening than the one George Romero leaves us with at the end of Night of the Living Dead.... Since the film’s release, viewers and critics have placed their own political understanding on the film, uncovering subtext that while often unintentional is fascinating nonetheless.... Duane Jones, as the first black lead in the horror genre, is anything but secondary. Jones’ image has carried the film’s social message and become, perhaps unfairly, the surviving symbol of blackness in horror.... As a police sheriff says the final lines, “That’s another one for the fire,” we’re shown still images of Ben’s lifeless body stacked on the pile of the dead — an effigy to be burned on a lawn. Ben survived the night of the living dead but could not survive America. In the end, they got him too.

No brutalizing stone is left unturned: crowbars gash holes in the heads of the living dead, monsters are shown eating entrails, and – in a climax of unparalleled nausea – a little girl kills her mother by stabbing her a dozen times in the chest with a trowel.... The rest of the pic is amateurism of the first order. Pittsburgh-based director George A. Romero appears incapable of contriving a single graceful set-up, and his cast is uniformly poor.