Appearances are not trustworthy. That's a very radical message, one that the film embraces in a positive fashion in its unmistakable anti-racist undertones: Racism, after all, is the belief that appearances can always be trusted, because we're absolutely certain of the truth of those appearances. But the movie also promulgates that message in the most disturbing ways imaginable. It goes to great lengths to convey the fact that the zombies look just like us ("They are us," as Dr. Logan puts it in the film's second sequel, Day of the Dead). And it goes to even greater lengths to prove that we are our own worst enemies, that even the best of us can be completely wrong about everything, and the worst of us tragically right.

In Adam Simon's superlative documentary on the independently-made American horror films of the late 1960s and the 1970s, The American Nightmare, one of the speakers says that Night of the Living Dead conveys more about the turbulent end of the century's seventh decade than any other film, even (or especially) the ones that explicitly addressed that turmoil. I wasn't there, but watching this tale of normal people run amok, where black is white and night is day (at least thanks to the continuity errors in those television broadcasts) and hero and villain and monster are thoroughly juxtaposed, my fear is that he's right--and that he continues to be right even now.