If you’ve never seen the film that created the zombie sub-genre as we know it today, George A. Romero‘s 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead, on the big screen before, you may be able to do just that this Halloween season.

The movie is set to return to theaters next week on two different nights in celebration of its 50th anniversary. You can find full details on the screenings, which are through Fathom Events, along with a promo video below.

It was something I did often in high school and college – the ol’ all-night movie marathon. As a 36-year-old married adult with 2 children, the concept of staying up all through the night watching movies is something that sounds unreasonable and completely illogical. But then I saw the advertisement pop up in my Facebook feed”¦ the Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington, Long Island, NY, was hosting an all-night horror movie marathon. It took me over a week of intense debate as to whether I should do it, but on Saturday morning, with my wife’s permission (of course), I purchased my ticket for their 2018 Up All Night “Pay to Get Out” Horror Movie Marathon and headed out to meet my fate”¦ 8 horror films in 13 hours, one last great All Nighter… for now.

Tonight marks the return of Games of Thrones, where the primary villains are the White Walkers, a marching army of undead. Today, the man most responsible for making the word “undead” part of the zeitgeist, the Godfather of modern zombie culture, George A. Romero, has died today at 77 after a brief fight with lung cancer.

You can’t look anywhere without seeing the impact the Bronx-born filmmaker had on the modern world. From Game of Thrones to The Walking Dead, to iZombie, television is as full of zombies as the Monroeville Mall was in 1978. In 1968, Romero along with a small band of colleagues created one of the most iconic and influential films of any genre in history, with Night of the Living Dead. In the film, a rag tag group are thrown together in a farmhouse while undead zombies gather outside hungry for human flesh. Hilariously, Romero hated the word “zombie” which he would of course become synonymous with.

Nights of the Living Dead: An Anthology
Paperback | Digital Book | Audio CD
Edited by Jonathan Maberry & George A. Romero
St. Martin’s Griffin
Release Date: July 11th, 2017

In 1968, a horror movie from director George A. Romero came out called Night of the Living Dead. Nearly 50 years later, zombie horror is “alive” and well, with hit shows like The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead based on Robert Kirkman’s comic book series. Over the past decade, we’ve seen a renaissance of zombie fiction in all forms of entertainment, from comics to novels like World War Z (Max Brooks) and Pride & Prejudice & Zombies (Seth Grahame-Smith) to TV and film. Zombie even manage to cross over into other genres. The TV series iZombie takes the flesh eaters into the world of police forensics and the underground “brain trade.” Movies like Warm Bodies (2013) showed zombies can be romantic and of course Shaun of the Dead (2004) proved they can be the butt of jokes.

Though, there was a time when zombies were not the “it” thing in horror, but back in 1989, an undead anthology called Book of the Dead (edited by John Skipp & Craig Spector) made zombie literature cool again. Nights of the Living Dead is a collection of original zombie short stories all based in the world Romero built. What’s really interesting is reading the introductions by Romero himself and co-editor, author, and unabashed Romero fanboy, Jonathan Maberry.

FEARnyc is the destination for horror fans in New York as we get closer to Halloween. The film festival, put together by director John Capo, is showing over 65 horror movies through Thursday, including world premiere originals and timeless classics. FEARnyc emanates from Cinema Village, located near NYC’s Union Square. On Saturday, I arrived at 4:45 pm and took in an awesome four-film marathon that included the world premiere of Pool Party Massacre, as well as classics The Lost Boys, George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, and 1973’s The Exorcist, the latter of which included a seance.