George Romero, 1940-2017

Writer/director George Romero, who jump-started the zombie movie genre with 1968's low-budget Night of the Living Dead, has died aged 77.

Night of the Living Dead is a wonderfully creepy little movie in which the zombies become zombies not long after dying and start going after people because of an insatiable desire for their brains. Eventually, they trap a small number of humans in an isolated house in the middle of nowhere in western Pennsylvania, with the people turning on each other as they can't figure out how to deal with this unknown menace.

Night of the Living Dead led to several sequels, as well as a whole bunch of other moviemakers making their own zombie movies in the past 20 or so years. Granted, being a low-budget movie, it has some plot holes, such as the fact that humans should be able to move faster than the zombies, and that it's not as though there should be all that many zombies considering how many people die each year. But the horror works, and here we are.