By JASON COMERFORD

For millions of drive-in moviegoers in the late 1960s, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead represented an unprecedented cultural shift: a coolly relentless upheaval of all the established rules. Romero and his production crew turned their attention and talent away from the industrial films and commercials they produced for various Pittsburgh-area businesses, and shot the film piecemeal on nights and weekends. When it was released in the fall of 1968, audiences barely knew what hit them; Night of the Living Dead’s documentary realism and frank depiction of gore caused a national sensation.
 
“Until the Supreme Court establishes clear-cut guidelines for the pornography of violence, Night of the Living Dead will serve nicely as an outer-limit definition by example,” Variety huffed at the time, going on heap scold and shame upon the makers of what the publication called an “unrelieved orgy of sadism.” But the times changed, and thirty years later, the Library of Congress selected Night of the Living Dead for inclusion in the National Film Registry, alongside other films deemed “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.” Romero’s nightmare vision of a relentless force threatening heartland America shifted the course of onscreen horror, for better or worse, and to this day spawns spoofs, imitations, sequels, and remakes of every type.
 
Musically, the film stakes its territory early and often. Romero, not being able to afford a composer on the film’s paltry $114,000 budget, instead turned to selections from the Capitol Hi-“Q” production music library. Despite its mixture of composers, styles, and sources, the soundtrack for Night of the Living Dead is remarkably consistent and thematically coherent, an unconventional mixture befitting the film it supports. Bookending the film is an otherworldly composition titled “Eerie Heavy Echo,” credited to composer Spencer Moore, which opens and closes the film with tense, eerie electronic tonalities. Short musical stings and strident blasts of emphatic brass are later employed to more strongly emphasize the film’s numerous shocks, but the spectral otherness of “Eerie Heavy Echo” strongly establishes the film’s anything-could-happen tension.
 
Varese Sarabande released a compilation of music selections and dialogue clips from Night of the Living Dead to LP in 1982, but the most definitive release to date came with producer Jim Cirronella’s exhaustive 2010 reconstruction for Zero Day Releasing, entitled They Won’t Stay Dead!: Music from the Soundtrack of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. Cirronella painstakingly restored nearly all of the music from a wide variety of sources (save for a handful of electronic cues created by Hardman Associates which are lost); he even tracked down the actual music box seen onscreen early in the film, and made a new recording of its gentle theme for inclusion on the album. A true labor of love that was well worth the long wait, They Won’t Stay Dead is an essential addition to any film music library, and the perfect way to capture the spirit of the Halloween season.