Few movies have had more impact than George A. Romero’s debut feature, Night of the Living Dead. When it was unleashed on the world in 1968, it scandalized some and was dismissed by others, but it clearly struck a chord. Night invented a new kind of smart, savage horror, and it’s been watched, loved, and imitated as much as any movie ever made. And its influence continues to be felt across the culture, from zombie properties like The Walking Dead and The Last of Us to “elevated” horror films like Get Out and Midsommar. But, once upon a time, it was just a low-budget movie from Pittsburgh made by a Carnegie Tech dropout and his pals. This talk, taken from the new book Raising the Dead: The Work of George A. Romero, traces Romero’s creative life throughout the decade leading up to Night to show how and why a zombie movie could change the cinema.

Adam Charles Hart is a scholar and archivist, and the curator for Media Burn, an independent video archive based in Chicago. He is the author of Monstrous Forms: Moving Image Horror Across Media as well as Raising the Dead: The Work of George A. Romero, which was published this month by Oxford University Press.