The movie hit theatres on October 1st 1968. This is significant because the MPAA rating system did not come out until November 1968. What did this mean for the movie? It meant that theatre owners weren't overly concerned about who saw the movie and sold tickets to anybody that had the money to buy them. The level of gore in this movie was unprecedented and nobody really knew what to expect. Young childern that saw the movie were blown away. The following excerpts from RogerEbert.com make this quite clear.
There were maybe two dozen people in the audience who were over 16 years old. The rest were kids, the kind you expect at a Saturday afternoon kiddie matinee. This was in a typical neighborhood theater, and the kids started filing in 15 minutes early to get good seats up front. The name of the movie was "The Night of the Living Dead."
I went to see it because it's been a long time since I saw my last horror movie. I vaguely remember some stuff from the 1950s, like "Creature from the Black Lagoon" or "Attack of the Crab Monsters." They were usually lousy, but it was fun to see them.
But that was 10 years ago. Since then, there's been a lot of talk about violence in the movies, and it seemed about time to see another horror film. The audience for horror movies is mostly drawn from children and adolescents. They usually play in drive-in or neighborhood theaters, and by tradition they're the most frankly violent kind of films. "Night of the Living Dead" seemed like a reasonable choice; it was selected by the National Association of Theater Owners as "exploitation picture of the month."
Well, the kids came early, as I said. There were a few parents, but mostly just the kids, dumped in front of the theater for the Saturday matinee (admission 40 cents). A lot of kids were racing up the aisles on urgent missions, and other kids were climbing over the backs of seats, and you'd see a gang of kids passing a box of popcorn back and forth. Occasionally some kid would get whacked by his big sister because he wouldn't shut up.
There was a cheer when the lights went down. The opening scene was set in a cemetery (lots of delighted shrieks from the kids), where a teen-age couple are placing a wreath on a grave. Suddenly a ghoul appears and attacks the boy and the girl flees to a nearby farmhouse. The ghoul looked suitably decayed, with all sorts of bloody scars on his face, and he walked in the official ghoul shuffle. More screams from the kids. Screaming is part of the fun, you'll remember.
(spoilers removed)
The kids in the audience were stunned. There was almost complete silence. The movie had stopped being delightfully scary about halfway through, and had become unexpectedly terrifying. There was a little girl across the aisle from me, maybe nine years old, who was sitting very still in her seat and crying.
I don't think the younger kids really knew what hit them. They were used to going to movies, sure, and they'd seen some horror movies before, sure, but this was something else. This was ghouls eating people up -- and you could actually see what they were eating. This was little girls killing their mothers. This was being set on fire. Worst of all, (spoiler removed).
I felt real terror in that neighborhood theater last Saturday afternoon. I saw kids who had no resources they could draw upon to protect themselves from the dread and fear they felt.
Wow! When was the last time you saw a review like that? Now do you see why I consider this one of the greatest horror movies of all time? At Google Video you can watch the movie in full as well as download a copy for your iPod/iPhone. Simply click here. Did I just say Google will let you download a copy? Yes I did! Due to a mistake made during the titling of the film the copyright notice was left off and the movie has become part of the public domain. You don't even have to go to Google to enjoy the film because I present to you: The Night Of The Living Dead!
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