When anyone says the word zombie the immediate picture that comes to mind is a shuffling, mindless corpse bent on eating the flesh of the living.
Obviously, by now we’ve seen every iteration of the bags of flesh from The Walking Dead to Resident Evil, but what about the singular point where all those ideas got their start?
The answer lies in a small horror production in 1968 by a still-growing filmmaker named George A. Romero.
The idea of a zombie itself was nothing new, with the creatures previously existing in Haitian folklore for centuries before Romero had the idea to make the dead rise from their graves and hunger for the living.
Originally conceived under the name Night of the Flesh Eaters, the film would instead undergo a last-minute name change to the one it’s best known for, Night of the Living Dead.
Now seen as a cultural juggernaut and the point where the zombie mania we know today began, Night of the Living Dead was relatively panned by mainstream critics of the day and even helped to rush the United States government to create the MPAA even faster than it had already been on track to, all as a response to the violence and gore of a black and white movie.
Citing the extreme violence and terror of the creatures, in the film still able to use weapons and tools, along with the visceral gore of zombies chowing down on human flesh (actually ham and chocolate syrup) many tried to have the film shut down and banned.
A small mistake by the producers would ensure it got the most exposure possible, though.
Requirements at the time in the United States required a film to be copyrighted before release to make sure it didn’t fall into the public domain.
The producers had done their due diligence and got the copyright filed and even on the title screen… but only for Night of the Flesh Eaters.
When the name changed so suddenly close to release, the need to file a whole new copyright on the name flew right over everyone and led to the film releasing into the public domain almost immediately as Night of the Living Dead, as once it was released there was no going back.
This is exactly what film scholars and historians point to when discussing the success of the movie as well. Most television channels at the time would rerun old movies on late nights or weekends, and most stations had late-night horror movies running even through the mid-2000s before streaming started to kill it off.
For these showings though, licensing fees had to be paid to studios, producers, filmmakers, and all kinds of people thanks to the copyrights filed on them.
With no copyright for Living Dead, that meant channels could show the movie all they wanted without having to pay a cent.
Television programmers love nothing more than the word “free” and Night of the Living Dead became a repeating staple of these late-night horror viewings and even cinema/drive-in showings throughout the following decades.
Hell, I saw it in a drive-in theater in Georgia in the mid-2000s. It was awesome! All thanks to one small mistake in filing a copyright and changing a name, Romero’s little film that upset the pearl-clutchers and gave biting social commentary became a classic, spawning sequels, remakes, and a lasting legacy for Romero now six years after his passing.
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