Best Horror Movies: Stephen King on the ‘Helpless Terror’ of ‘Night of the Living Dead’

This essay by Stephen King on his favorite horror movie of all time is one of several contributed as part of Variety’s 100 Best Horror Movies of All Time package .

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I thought deeply about this question, perhaps more deeply than the subject — my scariest horror movie — deserves… but then, I’ve seen a lot of horror movies, so maybe it’s a valid Q.

My conclusion is that the “scariest” varies according to the viewer’s age. As a kid of 16, the scariest movie was “The Haunting” (directed by Robert Wise). As an adult, it was “The Blair Witch Project,” with that building sense of doom and those truly horrible last 35 seconds. But overall, I’d have to say “Night of the Living Dead,” George A. Romero’s low-budget masterpiece.

I’ll never forget the smarmy older brother doing his bad Boris Karloff imitation — “They’re coming to get you, Barbara… there’s one now!” He’s pointing to the elderly wino stumbling among the gravestones, only the elderly wino turns out to be a reanimated corpse, and when Barbara locks herself in her car, she discovers that the smarmy brother — Johnny — has taken the keys. Meanwhile, the old man is trying to get at her, and the viewer understands he will not stop. It’s a moment of pure atavistic terror. Barbara puts the car in neutral (probably impossible without the key, but that’s movies for you) and rolls it down the hill, getting away… temporarily.

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In the end, no one survives. This movie has lost its elemental power over the years — has become almost a Midnite Madness joke, like “Rocky Horror” — but I still remember the helpless terror I felt when I first saw it. And now that I think of it, there’s a real similarity to “Blair Witch,” both with minimal or no music, both cast with unknown actors who seem barely capable of summer stock in Paducahville, both with low-tech special effects. They work not in spite of those things, but because of them.

Stephen King is the author of “The Shining,” “It” and “The Dark Tower.”

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