Night of the Living Dead isn’t just a zombie movie, it’s the zombie movie. With that in mind, you should expect this movie to live up to its horrifying legacy.
- The fact that the zombies aren't as thick as bricks here. In fact, they're capable of being horrifyingly smart, like when the cemetery ghoul uses a rock to break open the window of Barbra's car, or when a few zombies began beating on the barricades with makeshift clubs, or use rocks to smash the lights of Ben's truck.
- "In the cold room at the University, we had a cadaver, a cadaver from which all limbs had been amputated. Some time early this morning, it opened its eyes and began to move its trunk. It was dead, but it opened its eyes and tried to move."
- The part where the zombies slowly walk over to the destroyed truck to devour the corpses of Judy and Tom realistically shows them eating and tearing their organs and body parts so graphically it might make anyone who watches this scene also have Nausea Fuel. Doesn't help that the music playing in this scene is so creepy and eerie.
- The scene where the zombies truly begin their assault on the house, with hands thrusting through the gaps between the boarded windows and doors, blindly groping even as the besieged humans vainly try to make them retreat with slashing knives and bludgeoning hammers. It's so iconic that both of the sequels include parallels to it.
- When Barbra gets carried away by a sea of zombies all at once. Ben tries to grab her but the huge swarm of hands envelope her screaming body into the crowd almost as if absorbing her. What makes it especially bad is one of the zombies is her brother from the beginning of the movie.
- That pretty iconic picture of zombie-Karen staring straight at the viewer, which often appears on DVD covers.
- When Karen turns in the basement, she kills her mother and eats her father's corpse. There's just something wrong about a child doing that.
- In that same scene, Karen brutally stabs her mother repeatedly in the chest while the latter's screams are distorted via feedback into bone-chilling cries of anguish and pain. Anyone seeing that scene may lose some good nights sleep afterwards.
- The decaying corpse up the stairs (shown above). The eerie silence doesn't help at all.
- Ben's death at the end of the film. He survives long enough to be shot in the head by his "rescuers".
- The implication that many living people might have been mistaken as zombies by overeager zombie hunters and shot.
- The end credits sequence over grainy still photographs set to distorted police radio calls. That, coupled with images of Ben's corpse, are eerily reminiscent of many news reports from the Civil Rights struggle.
