Development and pre-production George Romero embarked upon his career in the
film industry while attending
Carnegie Mellon University in
Pittsburgh. He directed and produced television commercials and
industrial films for The Latent Image, a company he co-founded with his friend
Russell Streiner. The Latent Image started small, but after producing a high-budget
Calgon commercial spoofing
Fantastic Voyage (1966), Romero felt that the company had the experience and equipment to produce a feature film. They wanted to capitalize on the film industry's "thirst for the bizarre", according to Romero. He, Streiner, and
John A. Russo contacted Karl Hardman and Marilyn Eastman, president, and vice president respectively, of a Pittsburgh-based industrial film firm called Hardman Associates, Inc. The Latent Image pitched their idea for a then-untitled horror film. These discussions led to the creation of Image Ten, a production company chartered to produce a single feature film. The initial budget was $6,000; each member of the production company invested $600 for a share of the profits. Ten more investors contributed another $6,000, but this was still insufficient. Production stopped multiple times during filming while Romero used early footage to persuade additional investors. Image Ten eventually raised approximately $114,000 for the budget ($ today).
Writing . The script was co-written by Russo and Romero. They abandoned an early
horror comedy concept about adolescent aliens, after realizing they would not have the budget to create a convincing spaceship. Russo proposed a more constrained narrative where a young man runs away from home and discovers aliens harvesting human corpses for food in a cemetery. Romero combined this idea with an unpublished short story about flesh-eating ghouls, and they began filming with an incomplete script. According to Russo, the screenplay written prior to filming only covered events up to the emergence of the Cooper family. Russo completed the script while filming and Romero later expanded the final pages of his short story into the sequels
Dawn of the Dead (1978) and
Day of the Dead (1985). Romero drew inspiration from
Richard Matheson's
I Am Legend (1954), a
horror novel about a
plague that ravages a futuristic Los Angeles. The infected in
I Am Legend become
vampire-like creatures and prey on the uninfected. Matheson described Romero's interpretation as "kind of cornball", and more theft than homage. In an interview, Romero contrasted
Night of the Living Dead with
I Am Legend. He explained that Matheson wrote about the aftermath of a complete global upheaval; Romero wanted to explore how people would respond to that kind of disaster as it developed. Much of the dialogue was altered, rewritten, or improvised by the cast. Lead actress Judith O'Dea told an interviewer, "I don't know if there was an actual working script! We would go over what basically had to be done, then just did it the way we each felt it
should be done". One example offered by O'Dea concerns a scene where Barbra tells Ben about Johnny's death. O'Dea said that the script vaguely had Barbra talk about riding in the car with Johnny before they were attacked. She described Barbra's dialogue for the scene as entirely
improv. Eastman modified the scenes written for Helen and Harry Cooper in the cellar. Asked in 2013 if he took inspiration from the
assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in the same year that the movie was made, Romero responded in the negative, noting that he only heard about the shooting when he was on his way to find distribution for the finished film.
Props and
special effects were simple and limited by the budget. The blood, for example, was
Bosco Chocolate Syrup drizzled over cast members' bodies. The human flesh consumed by ghouls consisted of meat and
offal donated by an investor's butcher shop. Zombie makeup varied during the film. Initially, makeup was limited to white skin with blackened eyes. As filming progressed, mortician's wax simulated wounds and decaying flesh. Filming took place between July 1967 and January 1968 under various titles. Work began under the generic working title
Monster Flick, was changed to
Night of Anubis after Romero's short story that provided the basis for the script, and was completed as
Night of the Flesh Eaters, a title not used in the final release due to a potential conflict with a
similarly named film. The small budget led Romero to shoot on
35 mm black-and-white film. The completed film ultimately benefited from the decision, as film historian Joseph Maddrey describes the black-and-white filming as "
guerrilla-style", resembling "the unflinching authority of a wartime newsreel". He found the
exploitation film to resemble a documentary on social instability.
Directing Night of the Living Dead was the first feature-length film directed by George A. Romero. His initial work involved filming advertisements, industrial films, and
shorts for Pittsburgh public broadcaster
WQED's children's series ''
Mister Rogers' Neighborhood''. Romero's decision to direct
Night of the Living Dead launched his career as a horror director. He took the helm of the sequels as well as
Season of the Witch (1972),
The Crazies (1973),
Martin (1978),
Creepshow (1982) and
The Dark Half (1993). Critics saw the influence of the horror and science-fiction films of the 1950s in Romero's directorial style. Stephen Paul Miller, for instance, witnessed "a revival of fifties schlock shock ... and the army general's television discussion of military operations in the film echoes the often inevitable calling-in of the army in fifties horror films". Miller admits that "
Night of the Living Dead takes greater relish in mocking these military operations through the general's pompous demeanor" and the government's inability to source the zombie epidemic or protect the citizenry. Romero described the film's intended mood as a downward arc from near hopelessness to complete tragedy. Film historian Carl Royer praised the film's sophistication—especially considering Romero's limited experience—and noted the use of
chiaroscuro (
film noir style) lighting to create a mood of increasing alienation.
Night was visually influenced by
Golden Age horror comics. The
EC Comics books that Romero read as a child were graphic stories set in modern America. They often featured brutal deaths and reanimated corpses seeking revenge on the living. Romero said that he tried to bring into the film the "real hard shadows and weird angles and beautiful lighting that a comic book artist can create." He later collaborated with horror writer
Stephen King and former EC Comics artists on the homage
Creepshow. While some critics dismissed Romero's film because of the graphic scenes, writer
R. H. W. Dillard claimed that the "open-eyed detailing" of
taboo heightened the film's success. He asked, "What girl has not, at one time or another, wished to kill her mother? And Karen, in the film, offers a particularly vivid opportunity to commit the forbidden deed vicariously." Romero featured social taboos as key themes, especially cannibalism. Film historian Robin Wood interprets the flesh-eating scenes of
Night of the Living Dead as a late-1960s critique of American capitalism. Wood argues that the zombies' consumption of people represents the logical endpoint of human interactions under capitalism.
Post-production Members of Image Ten were involved in filming and
post-production, participating in loading
camera magazines,
gaffing, constructing props, recording sounds and editing. Production stills were shot and printed by Karl Hardman, assisted by a "production line" of other cast members.
Soundtrack The film's music consisted of existing pieces that were mixed or modified for the film. Much of the soundtrack had been used by previous films. Hardman and Eastman selected tracks from the
Hi-Q music library, which Romero narrowed down to those he felt fit certain parts of the film. Then Hardman cut them to match the scenes and augmented them with electronic effects. However, the collection did not contain the electronic effects created by Hardman. In 2020,
Waxwork Records issued a 50th Anniversary edition of the original soundtrack, produced in cooperation with the surviving members of Image Ten, that contained a fully remastered version of the complete soundtrack, including material thought to be lost.
1982 Varèse Sarabande edition track listing == Release ==