When brother and sister Johnny and Barbra (Russell Streiner and Judith O’Dea) go to visit their father’s grave, Barbra is terrified for her life when Johnny is killed by a flesh-eating zombie. As she escapes to a nearby farmhouse Barbra discovers other desperate individuals who are preparing to do battle with the undead.
A deceptively simple tale of a group of strangers trapped in a farmhouse who find themselves fending off a horde of recently dead, flesh-eating ghouls, Romero’s claustrophobic vision of a late-1960s America literally tearing itself apart rewrote the rules of the horror genre, combined gruesome gore with acute social commentary, and quietly broke ground by casting Black actor Duane Jones in its lead role.