So on the very day that Bram Stoker’s Dracula entered the public domain, Herzog set about creating his own version of the film-one that, unlike the 1922 original, could legally use parts of Dracula without any legal headaches. Murnau’s original Nosferatu is the greatest film to ever come out of his native Germany. Over the years, he has long maintained that F. Over the course of his near-60-year-long career, Werner Herzog has proven that there’s nothing he can’t or won’t at least try to do for the love of filmmaking ( eating his own shoe included). Though many critics of the time attempted to declare Night of the Living Dead DOA because of its extreme gore, its reputation as a game-changer in the genre has given it continued life, with several sequels and even a couple of remakes, including Tom Savini’s 1990’s redux, with Tony Todd in the role of Ben. That’s when the ever-resourceful Ben (Duane Jones) shows up to help. Barbra, seeing a farmhouse nearby, runs there for help-only to discover the dead body of the home’s owner-and many slow-walking creatures coming her way. It all kicks off when siblings Barbra (Judith O'Dea) and Johnny (Russell Streiner) pay a visit to their father’s gravesite and are subsequently attacked by a strange man. Because even though the word zombie is never uttered in Night of the Living Dead, it's clear to the audience that that's what his half-living monsters are. Romero only ever cowritten and directed this one movie, his feature directorial debut, he’d still go down in history as a horror pioneer. Throw in a killer soundtrack and one of cinema’s most satisfyingly efficient endings and you’ve got a horror-comedy for the ages. Landis expertly balances laugh-out-loud humor with genuinely terrifying frights-most of them courtesy of special effects makeup wizard Rick Baker, who won a much-deserved Oscar for his work on the film (the werewolf transformation scene is iconic for a reason). Fortunately, his old pal Jack-looking very much worse for the wear-shows up to warn David that a full moon is coming and if he doesn’t kill himself before it arrives, he too will transform into a flesh-craving canine. While Jack is torn to bits, David survives but wakes up weeks later in a London hospital with little recollection of what happened. American pals David (David Naughton) and Jack (Griffin Dunne) get slightly lost as they backpack their way through England and end up being attacked by a werewolf. Horror-comedy is not an easy genre to pull off-especially when a movie like John Landis’ An American Werewolf in London has been around for comparison for nearly 40 years.
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