Night of the Living Dead

So, flipping through the channels I came across another old movie, Night of the Living Dead. It's a typical horror movie with flesh eating zombies... The fun thing is: the leading role is played by a black man. This movie was released in 1968, which makes this an actually accomplishment. During the movie showing the director spoke (a white man) and he said he didn't even give much thought to the fact he had a black man as his lead; he didn't mean it as any kind of statement, he just picked the guy who gave the best audition. What made this an even greater moment for Hollywood is that this movie went into production right after MLK Jr. was killed. The director said it was at this moment he realized what he was doing.

I though the movie was cool because, from what I saw, there was no stereotype in action. He was the hero of the movie, not the "black hero". What I mean by that is; I didn't get the impression any of the other characters focused on his race at all.

And from what I read the movie did alright; it made between 12 and 15 million dollars in the first 10 years. This is probably very well concidering it didn't have much of a budget. And at this time there were no movie ratings in place so little kids could go see it. The little kids were basically scared shitless; I just thought this was funny. Kids now probably wouldn't bat an eye at it. I do love corny scary movies.

Apparently this movie is no longer copyrighted (or w/e it is that keeps people from posting it online):

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2956447426428748010#

You can find it on Hulu as well.

Last funfact: This movie was inspired by the novel, I am Legend, which was made into a movie starring Will Smith. =]