Night of the Living Dead (NR, 1968)

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD begins when a young woman and her brother are attacked in a cemetery by a zombie, then moves to a group of strangers seeking shelter from the ghouls in a remote house. Barricaded inside, they see TV bulletins linking the zombie plague to "radiation" from a Venus space probe contaminating the environment, and they hear the only way to stop a ghoul is to destroy the brain, with a well-aimed bullet or cranial blows. The panicked survivors split into two factions, a family called the Coopers, who want to stay barricaded indoors and wait for help, and a more pro-active bunch, led by Ben (Duane Jones), an assertive black man, who plan a dash to safety, despite the ghouls massing relentlessly in the dark outside. A famously shocking finale indicates that neither of their plans works out.

George A. Romero's cult classic brought a virtually unprecedented level of realistic gore and disturbing grotesquerie to creature-feature fans (many of them children). When it premiered in 1968, critics and commentators were outraged kids had been exposed to such a nightmare. Though it's unrated by the MPAA, some posters and ads carried an "X" rating (for gruesome violence, not sex), and that should tell you something. It's still intense today, and pushes a lot of buttons, with its well-rendered camera angles, effective jolts, claustrophobia, and the fate-worse-than-death zombie vibe.

Beware: The film is in the public domain, which means there are lots of fuzzy-looking, technically inferior copies on the market, computer-"colorized" versions, and spoof editions with completely dubbed-in gag dialogue (even with a bad-joke soundtrack, the imagery is still disturbing).