And to anyone else who might share in the sentiment he shared in an interview recently, that overall, the most frightening horror film has to be, for me, the original Night Of The Living Dead.

“There has been an epidemic of mass murder, being committed by a virtual army of unidentified assassins,” said the news reporter in a bit from the film I never, ever forgot. Sure, Jaws makes me wary of being in the ocean whenever I hit the beach. But that isn’t too often and is seasonal.

George Romero’s 1968 film dug into my soul when I was a kid. Its simple, low dialogue, black and white flick sobered me up real quick that human beings could become monsters. Not one. Not some. Anyone. Immediately, mindlessly, and brutally. Yes they were the recently deceased, but they sure looked like Average Janes and Joes wandering the land, overtaken by human selfishness revved up to 1000.

I was petrified. Now, even then, I loved horror movies and monsters, aliens, and weird occult matters. By the 80s, Dracula, the Wolf Man, Frankenstein’s Monster and the Creature were household names and felt, familiar. They were monsters, sure, but they had a neighborly quality to me. I watched them for the darkly familiar, to get a vibe.

But the Living Dead was the only film to give me nightmares. I was (and still am) a person who hardly sleeps. But after seeing that movie, I was terrorized by zombie apocalypse dreams every night for years. They continued from the age of eight to around fifteen, of living underground, creeping about peeping through holes in the wall, only to see an eye without an eyelid set in a hungry, skeletal head, looking back at me. Breaking the wall, hordes of ones just like it swarming over me, nowhere to go, no negotiation, no exit. Just bite after bite, agony. Black.

In another nightmare I was routinely devoured feet first by undead children, only to be regurgitated and the process would repeat. I would wake up, startled, sweaty, often on the floor. I couldn’t watch another zombie film for decades.

What was it about the film that for me did what others lacked? I want to say it’s that I felt I could do something if the foe was a vampire or werewolf. There’s some chance of escape, or leaving town. Perhaps I could exploit a monster’s weakness. Yes, options existed.

But Night Of The Living Dead removes all of these. You can run, but every direction reveals the same obstacle: the Living Dead. Leaving town? Same outcome. Weaknesses? Well, the Dead seem to shrug off just about everything save for a bullet to the brain, and who here is a crack shot 24/7 while under severe pressure and while running? Yeah, me neither.

But that isn’t what frightened me the most. Monsters are strangers, and we’ve all been taught about stranger danger. But the Living Dead are your neighbors, classmates, coworkers. Family. When I was a boy, there were a lot of deaths in the family, and as such, lots of funerals, so this made the movie all the harder to deal with. What if my great-grandmother came out of the coffin and tried to kill me? Or my uncle? My aunt? Everyone in all the hospital morgues around the country… the world, even.

Imagine giving those people a second death, one through violence. Either that, or be devoured by your kin and friends.

The familiar was made horrid. That was the sickness, the social plague that chilled the bones to the marrow. What if, just what if, little me had to go up against my own hometown and the people I loved? Oh, how simple a premise, yet how diabolical is its implication once fanned out and compared to things such as narcissistic familial abuse, mob mentality, political allegiances, cults, lust, patriarchy, gangs, and any manner of group function wherein the individual becomes part of what seems to be a subjected mass.

Shudder. Even now it’s a palpable sensation. However, these days I can watch such films and shows and enjoy them, parse them and their meanings, from great (sadly cancelled) ones like Black Summer to the even more frightening Return Of The Living Dead (where the Dead have cunning, speed, and are even harder to remove). So I suppose even a horribly ingrained phobia can be reconciled.

But what about you? What horror film really, truly shook you? And if you haven’t seen the original Romero film, please, watch it. With a gun.