Look, there comes one of them now!

On October 1 1968, Night of the Living Dead premiered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, more or less 30 years later I saw it for the first time. I must have been 10 or 11 years old when I saw it for the first time. I don’t know the exact day or even month, but I know it was at night because I remember seeing the orange glow of the street lights. It wasn’t the first horror movie I had seen and I already knew what zombies were since I was always interested in the weird and unusual, but it hit me at the point in time when I began to notice that movies were more than, you know, just movies. I don’t know what really drew me in the movie, whether it was the weird music or the fact that it was in black and white on a tv station that was always in color. I was probably fucking terrified. But man oh man I could not stop watching Night of the Living Dead. To this day I tell people that NotLD is the way suspense in a horror movie should be, like a hand closing slowly around your throat. When I eventually went to bed that night I didn’t have any nightmares, but ever since then most of my nightmares have been in black and white.