Birth of the Living Dead

Zombies are now a ten-a-penny staple of the horror genre across all media (films, games, TV, books, comics). But back in 1967, when 27-year-old Pittsburgh-based director George A Romero made low-budget shocker Night of the Living Dead, in which flesh-eating ghouls feast on the viscera of anyone with a pulse, it was a ground-breaking revelation. This fascinating documentary about a piece of guerrilla film-making that went from drive-in fodder to the darling of the art-house critics contains suitably glowing plaudits from fans and admirers. But it's the jovial, self-effacing Romero who adds meat to Rob Kuhns's conventionally told tale. He's an effusive subject who reveals his original intention was to make a Bergman-esque feature called Whine of the Fawn, not a taboo-shattering classic featuring "a new kind of monster". The fact that his feature debut had a black leading man, Duane Jones (whose race is never an issue in the story), is just one of the game-changing elements of a production made against the backdrop of the horrors of the Vietnam War on the telly and race riots on the streets of America.