With its radical rewriting of a genre in which good had always triumphed over evil, George Romero’s first feature shattered the conventions of the horror movie. The film’s opening scene immediately signals its own subversiveness. In broad daylight, a brother and sister visit their father’s grave; seeing a tall man lumbering towards them, Johnny tries to frighten Barbara with a daft Boris Karloff impersonation; suddenly the figures lurches forward and kills him. With the presumed hero dead within the first few minutes, the inexorable logic of the modern ‘nightmare movie’ is set in motion, and from this moment on the terror never lets up. Together with a small group of fellow survivors, Barbara holes up in a nearby farmhouse, besieged by an ever-swelling tide of flesh-eating zombies. Trapped inside the house, they fight for their lives, but nothing works out as it should.