Shot for $114,000 after deferments, Night of the Living Dead was released by Continental Distributing, the motion picture exhibition arm of The Walter Reade Organization, with little fanfare. It wasn't until the film's 1969 re-release on the bottom half of a double bill with Herbert J. Biberman's Slaves (1969) that word of mouth began to spread about the little horror film that could.

"...one of the best horror films ever made."
Andrew Sarris, The Village Voice

"Night of the Living Dead...is one of the best horror films since Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers [1956]. The fact that the uniformly good cast is completely unknown enhances the movie's basic air of authenticity, and throughout there is a feeling that these are real people fighting the nightmarish horror threatening to engulf them. An uncommonly good shocker."
Peter Harris, Toronto Daily Star

"One of the most gruesomely terrifying movies ever made-and when you leave the theatre you may wish you could forget the whole horrible experience...The film's grainy, banal seriousness works for it-gives it a crude realism."
Pauline Kael

"In a mere 90 minutes, the horror film (pun intended) casts serious aspersions on the integrity and social responsibility of its Pittsburgh-based makers, distrib Walter Reade, the film industry as a whole, and exhibs who book the pic, as well as raising doubts about the future of the regional cinema movement and about the moral health of filmgoers who cheerfully opt for this unrelieved orgy of sadism... No brutalizing stone is left unturned."
Lee Beaupre, Variety

"The dialogue and background music sound hollow, as if they had been recorded in an empty swimming pool, and the wobbly camera seems to have a fetishist's interest in hands, clutched, wrung, scratched, severed, and finally-in the ultimate assumption-eaten like pizza."
Vincent Canby, New York Times

"Directors of the new high-budget horrors would do well to study the honest brutality and unrelieved gruesomeness of Night of the Living Dead; they might learn the difference between what makes people giggle nervously and what makes them scream in terror."
Howard Smith The Village Voice

"If you want to see what turns a B-movie into a classic...don't miss Night of the Living Dead. It is unthinkable for anyone seriously interested in horror movies not to see it."
Rex Reed

"A real shocker...it's a gourmet session for those followers of macabre, grotesque situations. A rouser for the strong-stomached horror film addict."
Thomas Blakely, The Pittsburgh Press

"... a pearl of a horror picture with all the earmarks of a sleeper...Those with queasy stomachs will find some of what goes on in the picture hard to take. Not many films have been able to create so vivid a sense of terror. There are a number of scenes that perhaps go too far in their realism."
Louis Pelegrine, Film Daily

"... a genuinely scary little horror picture for adults...wrings maximum effects from an absolute minimum of means... From this classically simple situation director George A. Romero and writer John A. Russo build an amazing amount of suspense. Romero keeps things constantly happening and directs with limitless energy... Night of the Living Dead is taut and uncompromising."
Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times

"Courage has abounded in the making of this film and the risks have yielded high dividends."
Richard Weaver, Films and Filming

"You get what you pay for in Night of the Living Dead, a horror film that has the power to literally horrify. How sleet it is."
Kenneth Turan, Washington Post

"If you do like horror films, this may well be the most horrifying ever made. It eschews comic relief, explanatory scientists, romance, distractions of any sort-all the conventional elements usually tacked on to horror films to relieve tensions and which usually merely dilute interest."
Elliott Stein, Sight and Sound

"Director George A. Romero has done an admirable job of creating hysteria and crude, brutal mayhem, with the most functional camerawork and sound. I think the makers of Night of the Living Dead set out like many before them to make a quick horror film for a quick profit and they probably will."
Joseph Lewis, The Point

"Night of the Living Dead has a little of everything to satisfy most customers. There's the gore, the flowing blood. There's violence galore. There's an uncompromising ending that leaves most viewers dumbfounded. There's even a nude... before nudes were popular in horror films. In the last analysis, this unique film succeeded because it was the kind of film audiences hungered for. Simply, it was the right movie to come along at the right time. And it was honest. What it promised its audience, it gave them in full measure, even far exceeding most expectations."
Gary Anthony Surmacz, Cinefantastique

"...the pinnacle of zombie movies. Terrifying in its simple audacity, it boasts some of the most heart-stopping moments ever committed to celluloid. God bless George A. Romero."
Empire

"..a horror film without hope, a bleak, relentless nightmare of our fears about facing death...The crudity of the film, the pseudo-cinema verite use of the camera adds to the impression that what we are seeing is not solely fantasy, but a nightmare firmly fixed on reality."
Stuart M. Kaminsky, Cinefantastique

"The film's power lies in the way the basic plot....is carried through to its conclusion with ruthless logic and subtle irony, on the way deflating every cliche it throws up."
Phil Hardy, The Encyclopedia of Horror Movies.

Compiled by Richard Harland Smith