Back in 1968 when Night of the Living Dead debuted at Saturday matinees and drive-in double features, even the darkest horror movies didn't end with everybody dead and the hero hung on a meethook. That's what separated Night of the Living Dead from other Hollywood fright flicks. That and the fact that it was produced, not in Tinseltown, but in what was then still called the Steel City -- Pittsburgh.

Night of the Living Dead must have aired a half dozen times on different stations over this Halloween weekend. I watched it Saturday night on Philadelphia's PBS station Channel 12, which only seems right since Night of the Living Dead creator George Romero had started out making film shorts for a children's show called Mister Rogers Neighborhood on Pittsburgh's PBS station WQED.

Pennsylvania's second city's contribution to the horror movie genre has had almost as many sequels as Rocky. Night of the Living Dead was followed by Dawn of the Dead in 1978, Day of the Dead in 1985 and Land of the Dead in 2005. And these are only the ones directed by Romero. The list of movies inspired by the original Night of the Living Dead, include Tombs of the Living Dead (1971), Hell of the Living Dead (1980), Night of the Comet (1980), Return of the Living Dead (1985), Night of the Creeps (1986), and Children of the Living Dead (2001), not to mention film parodies such as Night of the Living Bread (1990) and Shaun of the Dead (2004). What is it about flesh eating zombies that we never grow tired of watching?

In its day, Night of the Living Dead, did a Mexican hat dance on just about every social taboo in 1960's America, including reanimation of the dead, cannibalism, matricide, fratricide, patricide and having a black man star in a movie with an otherwise all-white cast. In Night of the Living Dead all the main characters get killed by the zombies except for the black guy (played by 32-year-old Duane Jones), who survives the night only to get shot between the eyes by a posse of rednecks led by a fat white police chief in plain clothes wearing a bandolier of .50 caliber bullets and a porkpie hat with three cigars sticking out of the hat band.

This friendly fire "irony" was not lost on the audience during the political turmoil of 1968, the year Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy died of head shots, the year Vietnam turned into what we might describe today as "our last Iraq." As terrifying as the march of the living dead had been the night before, the arrival of the gun toting rescuers at first light seems more distrubing.

You almost feel sorry for the zombies as they are gunned down like ducks in a pond. In the end the so-called good guys kill the hero and then use meathooks to transport his lifeless body. The banality of official evil surpassed the terror of the unknown.

Toward the end of the movie, that rural Pennsylvania police chief gets some of the best unintentionally comedic lines in Night of the Living Dead. "Chief, if I were surrounded by six or eight of these things, would I stand a chance with them?" asks a radio reporter. "Well, there's no problem," replies the chief. "If you have a gun, shoot'em in the head, that's a sure way to kill'em. If you don't, get yourself a club or a torch. Beat'em or burn'em, they go up pretty easy."

The reporter continues, "Are they slow moving, Chief?" To which the chief replies, "Yeah, they're dead. They're all messed up."