Anthony Easton says:
Night of the Living Dead is Romero practicing. It is the beginning of using horror to express social concerns, it is beginning of making low budgets respectable, and it is the origin of the sex kitten as first victim. The best thing about it though, is his use of the domestic. Horror only really works when fundamental taboos are being shattered, and the idea of family as safe refuge is torn to pieces here. From the bickering sister and brother who notice the first zombie, to the makeshift commune at the farm house, to the child eventually eating her mother, any notion that you might have had that family both born and created would save anything no longer matters after viewing this film.
Pete Baran says:
Night Of The Living Dead shares a similarity with the previous film on the list, Some Like It Hot with regards to the way it is shot. You might say that the set-up and effects are inferior to the later Dead movies, but the zombies are that little bit more convincing. This works better as a horror, the others as satires, because it is in black and white. Just as Billy Wilder chose to film Some Like It Hot in black and white because the make-up made Jack Lemmon look green, the same Dead make-up – so persuasive here – looks blue in Dawn and Day Of The Dead. The shambling masses are still there, but in the later films resembling Smurfs. Which is terrifying in a wholy different way.