Night of the Living Dead
*spoilers*
Finally got around to
Night of the Living Dead last night. I was worried its old school-ness would turn me off, and at first it did to an extent, but the movie just got better and better and never stepped back down. By the halfway point I was already sold, but when they left the house to get supplies I realized I was watching the only zombie movie you actually need to see.
Plenty of awesome zombie movies, but the simple, streamlined story of NotLD is their distilled essence. Starts out slow, just some odd **** going down, like people just randomly attacking other people, but then escalates further and further, until that end of the news story when for what I imagine was the first time in movie history you find out that zombies are cannibals. Even though we all know this in 2016 it's a pretty heavy moment.
But then they leave the house and it's just the perfect zombie scene. The first time the main characters have dealt with zombies since finding out that they might get ****ing devoured, and the first time the zombie horde truly manifests as something more than isolated groups of ten or so. The camera angles in that scene are amazing at giving some sense of just how massive the horde is, and right at that moment I popped the biggest zombie boner ever.
It was probably the best "OH **** ZOMBIES EVERYWHERE WE ARE ****ED THE WORLD NOW BELONGS TO THE UNDEAD!!!" moment I've ever seen. And the slow, atmospheric pacing is pretty much exactly what I look for in my horror. Definitely gonna have to rewatch that movie at least ten more times before the year ends.