Best Horror Movies

Bickering siblings Johnny (Russell Streiner) and Barbra (Judith O’Dea) drive to a rural Pennsylvania cemetery to place a cross with flowers on their father’s grave. Johnny teases his sister, who is afraid of cemeteries, taunting, “They’re coming to get you, Barbra!” A pale-faced man (S. William Hinzman) lumbers toward the pair. The man suddenly grabs Barbra as Johnny rushes to save her. While fighting the man, Johnny falls and hits his head on a gravestone, knocking him unconscious. Barbra flees in Johnny’s car, driving it into a tree. She abandons the car and runs into a nearby farmhouse to hide. She finds a knife and uses it for self-defense and soon discovers that others like the man are outside. While exploring the empty house, she discovers a hideously mutilated corpse at the top of the stairs.

In a panic and attempting to flee the house, Barbra is intercepted by Ben (Duane Jones), who arrives in a pickup truck and attacks the mysterious figures with a tire iron. After subduing one of them, Ben sets the body on fire, scaring off the others. Ben boards up the doors and windows from the inside with dismantled furniture and scraps of wood as Barbra becomes hysterical. He then takes out a couch and sets it on fire, again to scare off the attackers. Ben finds a rifle and a radio as Barbra lies catatonic, incapacitated on a couch in the living room. The two are unaware that Harry and Helen Cooper (Karl Hardman and Marilyn Eastman), their daughter Karen (Kyra Schon), and teenage couple Tom (Keith Wayne) and Judy (Judith Ridley) have been hiding in the cellar. One of the attackers bit Karen earlier and she has fallen ill. Harry wants the group to barricade themselves in the cellar, but Ben argues that they would, effectively, be trapping themselves down there. Ben carries the argument, and the group cooperates (begrudgingly, in Harry’s case) to reinforce the main part of the house.

Radio reports explain that an epidemic of mass murder is sweeping across the eastern seaboard of the United States. Later, Ben discovers a television upstairs and the emergency broadcaster reveals that the murderers are consuming their victims’ flesh. A subsequent broadcast reports that the murders are being perpetrated by the recently deceased who have returned to life. Experts, scientists and military are not sure of the cause of the reanimation, but one scientist is certain that it is the result of radiation emanating from a Venus space probe that exploded in the Earth’s atmosphere. A final report instructs that a gunshot or heavy blow to the head will stop the “ghouls” and that posses of armed men are patrolling the countryside to restore order.

Ben devises a plan to escape using his truck involving all of the men in the house. The truck is in need of fuel, so Ben and Tom leave the house to obtain fuel, while Harry hurls Molotov cocktails from an upper window. Ben is armed with a rifle and torch, while Tom is to drive the truck and man the gas pump. On the way out the door, Judy fears for her boyfriend’s safety and chases after Tom. Upon arriving at the pump, Ben places the torch on the ground next to the truck, and Tom then carelessly splashes gasoline onto the torch, starting a fire that quickly engulfs the truck. Tom tries to drive the truck away from the gas pumps to avoid further damage, but when he goes to exit the truck, Judy gets stuck. Tom goes back into the truck to try and free her, but the truck explodes, killing them both. Ben runs back to the house to find that Harry has locked him out. He kicks the door open and gets revenge by punching Harry repeatedly.

Some of the living dead converge upon the truck and, in a notoriously gruesome scene, begin eating Tom and Judy’s charred remains. Meanwhile, others try to break through the doors and windows of the house, some pounding with their fists while others use bricks and boards. Ben manages to hold them back, but drops his rifle. Harry seizes the fallen rifle and turns it on Ben, who wrests it away from Harry and then shoots him. Harry stumbles into the cellar and dies.

Shortly after, Helen discovers that her daughter Karen has been transformed into one of the living dead and is consuming her father’s corpse. Karen stabs her mother with a cement trowel, killing her, before going upstairs. Meanwhile, the undead finally break into the house and Barbra sees her brother Johnny among them. The resultant shock causes her to lower her defenses and she is carried away into the zombie horde. Ben retreats into the cellar, locking the door behind him (which, ironically, was Harry’s plan all along). He shoots the reanimated Harry and Helen Cooper.

In the morning, a posse approaches the house and proceeds to kill the remaining zombies. Hearing the commotion, Ben ambles up the cellar stairs into the living room and is shot in the head by a posse member. His body is carried from the house and burned with the other zombie corpses.