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.

George A. Romero (seen above with zombie James Hetfield and others) is the man responsible for creating the undead zombie sub-genre we know and love to this day with his 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead.

Romero’s vision of zombies—swarms of dead rising from their graves and consuming the flesh of any living soul they can get their hands on—has shown great longevity. There’s been an incredible amount of movies, video games, TV shows, and comics made in the past handful of decades, including the Robert Kirkman comic The Walking Dead, which was of course turned into the hit AMC TV series of the same name.

And so, naturally, it made all the sense in the world to ask Romero if he wanted to make a couple episodes of The Walking Dead, something that would have surely sent geeks into a frenzy. But Romero said no. Here’s why.

It’s finally October and you know what that means? Breast Cancer Awareness 5Ks? Good guess. Pumpkin Spice Lattes? Delicious, but no. Halloween? YES. Horror movies? DOUBLE YES!

To get all you Geeks and Ghouls in the spirit for Halloween, I’ve compiled a list of 31 horror films to watch throughout the month of October.

Which ones are your favorite to watch?

Night Of The Living Dead: Re-animation
Netflix | Google Play | YouTube
DVD | Blu-ray
Directed by Jeff Broadstreet
Starring Andrew Divoff, Jeffrey Combs, Sarah Lieving, Robin Sydney, Adam Chambers, Denice Duff
Screen Media Films
Originally Released: October 16, 2012

Night of the Living Dead: Re-animation is a prequel to a remake. You read that correctly, it is a prequel to a remake of Night of the Living Dead. And the end result is as tacky as it sounds. In fact, it’s so tacky, it’s terrible. Even Russo’s Return of the Living Dead series had some nice slapstick humor to refresh the load; in Re-animation, we’re stuck with a movie that amounts to nothing more than a stale fart. Though coupled with a few good performances and some reasonable CGI zombie effects, the plot is deficient in much substance and the social commentary is laughably bad.

Set before the events of 2007’s Night of the Living Dead 3D, Re-animation aims to give the back story of how it all began. Despite the goal, the movie does very little to accomplish this, being more of a standalone weird zombie flick than just has the classic movie titled tacked on. The tale begins in a mortuary, where corpses become reanimated into zombies. And that’s about as much of the plot I want to describe, simply because this movie has wasted enough of my time as it is.

Hello Geeks and Ghouls, Famous Monster here. Well, it’s finally October and you know what that means? Breast Cancer Awareness 5Ks? Good guess. Pumpkin Spice Lattes? Delicious, but no. Halloween? YES. Horror movies? DOUBLE YES!

Welcome to 31 Days of Horror, where I’ll cover at least two noteworthy horror films a day for the entirety of the month. That’s 31 Days of Horror and 62+ scary movies perfect for a cold, dark October night. Be sure to visit Geeks of Doom every day this month for a double-shot of chills and thrills!

Today’s double-shot of flesh-eating, brain-draining zombie horror features George A. Romero‘s 1968 cult classic, Night of the Living Dead, and satirical sequel, 1978’s Dawn of the Dead. Two films that should give you plenty of food for thought – or is that thought for food?

He was the first iconic zombie of modern horror cinema, but most people don’t even know his name.

Bill Hinzman, best known to horror fans for playing the “Cemetery Ghoul” in the opening sequence to George Romero’s original zombie movie classic Night of the Living Dead, passed away on Sunday after a long battle with cancer. He was 75.