Night of the Living Dead 40th Anniversary Edition (1968) Starring Duane Jones, Judith O'Dea & Karl Hardman Directed by George A. Romero Written by John A. Russo & George A. Romero

This is the one, the film that started it all. When George Romero and his college friends, a band of ten people with little to no professional film experience, set out forty years ago to make Night of Anubis, little did they know exactly what they would set in motion. The film, renamed Night of the Living Dead, redefined the Zombie’s nature, launched a genre unto itself, the ‘zombedy’ humor genre, and a swarm of sequels (some regarded as canon, some regarded as crap).

The rather unfortunate omission of a copyright notice at the end of the film has left Night in the public domain since the completion of its original theatrical run, and as such anyone and their mother can put the film on VHS or DVD without paying the original creators; and so they have. After a long, long series of low rent, and often terrible, pressings of the film, Dimension Entertainment has finally sought to release the definitive version of Night of the Living Dead.

Definitive. Has it earned the title? Look at a few of the past releases and compare.

In the Frightfest “Nightmare in a Box” collection (Madacy Home Video), you’ll see a pretty standard release of Night of the Living Dead. (Why do I pick on this edition? Because I own it.) It’s the type of release that you find all over the place, and people buy it because it’s cheap. In this particular case, you’ll find it along with nine other horror classics for a scant twenty bucks. But, the transfer is dark and muddy. The movie freezes, ever so briefly, at each chapter mark. The disc has no features other than maybe a trailer for another public domain horror flick. It’s a passable copy for about two dollars, but if you, ya know, want to always be able to see what’s going on during the darker moments of film you might want to seek a higher quality copy.

Video and sound quality can be found on the 30th Anniversary edition that was released by Starz/Anchor Bay, but it’s a film purist’s nightmare. Upon initial inspection of the box, Night with added footage and a remastered score sounds like an amazing find. But when you discover that score to be not only remastered, but rewritten by a modern rock band, you’ll start to get that queasy feeling. The added footage is all superfluous story detail, and is made for the 30th anniversary edition. None of this is restored from the trims of the original shoot, all of those were lost in a flood ages ago. Rather these are all local theatre actors floundering about, and creating some back-story about the first zombie from the film being a child molester. Some may be attracted to additions, but they make most fans of the original cry out in disgust. The one saving grace is that you can remove the extra footage, though not the revised soundtrack.

If you want a little comedy with your zombies, you can always try the edition from 20th Century Fox which features commentary from Mike Nelson. Nelson, a veteran of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 offers a great series of gut-busters that at once both lampoon the film and shows a certain reverence towards it. This version of Night doesn’t offer a lot of other features, but it does clean the film up a little bit, so if you like having the option of poking fun at a great film once in a while, this edition is a great pick up. And you can watch the colorized version if you’re into that sort of thing. If you want another edition of the film but are still interested in the Nelson commentary, it can be downloaded at Rifftrax.com

Look, at last, at the long list of features offered by Dimension’s 40th Anniversary Night of the Living Dead edition: Two audio commentaries, and this time not just from one of our favorite comedians. George Romero himself, along with many members of cast and crew, reunite to provide the commentary. Also you’ll find a documentary chronicling the making of and impact of the film, a Q&A Panel with George Romero, The last known interview with actor and Night star Duane Jones, the original trailer and a photo gallery, and last but not least, the original script in a DVD-ROM format.

Now that’s a great list of features. Dimension did what so many other DVD compliers should have done long ago. They called up the original creators and got relevant commentaries, they used news and convention footage to mark the history of the film’s release and its rise to cult and classic status. Perhaps most importantly, they left the film unaltered but cleaned up the picture and sound quality to crystal clarity leaving the beginning of the zombie apocalypse looking more beautiful than you’ve seen it on any other release.

So, is this the definitive edition? Not quite.

While I have to applaud Dimension for being the first major distributor to give Night of the Living Dead the red carpet treatment, they still didn’t quite put the effort into the DVD that Elite Entertainment did into their release back in 2002. Elite’s Millennium Edition not only has the original trailer, commentary by George Romero and a second commentary from the original cast, the final interview with Duane Jones, and the original script, all just like the Dimension Release, but it also has TV spots, poster galleries, the Night of the Living Bread parody, Color filming location galleries, a history of Romero’s film company Latent Image, a restored Romero short There’s Always Vanilla, a new interview with Judy Ridley, Memorabilia gallery, Prop gallery, Cast member scrapbook scans, Romero short film and commercial collection, and an insert with a retrospective by Stephen King.

Could you possibly pack any more greatness onto a single disc? This version has almost everything the Dimension release was boasting, and then some. The one thing that MIGHT make you go back for the Dimension pressing would be the 40th anniversary retrospective. There is some interesting information in there, and a few very fun spots (highlight: the red-neck troop leader from the original movie returns to show off his rifle; he’s pure country) but most of it is scripted and poorly performed, the commentary is where all of there genuine reactions were stored.

So, not to say that the Dimension release is a bad deal; far from it. Their release is still of a very high quality and is very reasonable at an MSRP of $14.99. But if you are looking for the best of the best, there’s no doubt that the top of the line is still the Millennium Edition.

So zombie lovers everywhere finally have a good edition of Night to watch. Now if we could just get studios from making crappy Day of the Dead remakes, we could claim the franchise, and its integrity, to be secured.