Night of the Living Dead was one of my favorites, and really kicked off the whole Zombie genre running up to today. RIP Mr. Romero.
Fun fact: NotLD was immediately placed in the public domain upon release, due to a notice mistake by the distributors, which was required at the time for copyright.
Another fun fact. You don't see box sets of all the movies because Romero always had to raise money from different people so the rights for them (other than the first) are scattered.
Not only that, but Duane Jones got the role solely on merit. The part was not written with an African-American (or a minority) in mind, but Romero decided after the fact not to update the script in any way, which gives the film this odd colour-blind/progressive trait for that time (1968)...
(Mild spoiler below)
...And then post-filming but before its release, Dr Martin Luther King Jr was shot, giving the film's treatment of Jones character an unexpected tone in context. Romero mentioned this in one of his interviews to illustrate another way in which the film was shocking to its audience (beside the then never-seen-before level of gore in the movie -- something that has gone mainstream since then and may get lost when watching the movie).
As Jordan Peele said about his Get Out, "This is the only woke horror movie of all time, save for Night of the Living Dead. ... I felt like race has not been dealt with in my favorite genre which is horror. Every other human horror has its sort of classic horror movie to go along with it. So I kind of wanted to fill the gap in that piece of the genre of conversation." (http://www.npr.org/2017/02/19/515813914/in-get-out-jordan-pe...)
There is a weirdly slow car crash scene in Night Of The Living Dead - this was written into the script since someone borrowed the car and drove a dent into it, and they needed to explain the new dent in the movie...
One of the things about the film was how the humans treated each other far worse than what the zombies did to them. The zombies (the slow kind!) were just a force of nature.
Actually the film lab (owned by Romero) forgot to put a copyright on the release prints. Not sure "placed into the public domain" is exactly accurate - more like the file was not correctly copyrighted so it lapsed into the public domain".
In any case they fixed that with later releases but that's why a lot of the versions you see on TV are so crappy looking.
When I was about 10, I saw Night of the Living Dead and it fully cemented my love of horror movies. I had watched Tales of the Crypt, Are You Afraid of the Dark, Twilight Zone, and similar, but NOTLD was incredible. Terrifying, creepy, realistic... it gave me nightmares and shook me to my core.
Most people who aren't into the genre think that horror is all Jason-style slasher flicks. Horror is so much more than that. If you want to try something that I recommend, The Void was just released on Netflix, which is genuinely scary in a non-slasher way (although it has a lot of that too).
It's a shame that he didn't get more chances to branch out and ended up having to squeeze his "zombie worlds" to make a living.
Frankly I enjoy Knightriders far more than NotLD. The characters are more developed and the situation more complex than the zombie movies. I'm sorry that it doesn't get more play - I almost never see it on TV. Glad I have it on BluRay - the commentary track is the best part.
The Crazies [1] — about a virus that turns people irrationally aggressive and paranoid — is also quite good, and it's one of the few instances where the remake [2] is as good (in my opinion) as the original.
Fun fact: NotLD was immediately placed in the public domain upon release, due to a notice mistake by the distributors, which was required at the time for copyright.