Stephen King’s Favorite Horror Is This Low-Budget Zombie Movie With 95% RT
“Carrie”’s author has had several favorite horrors across the years, but he still remembers “the helpless terror” he felt watching George A. Romero’s movie for the first time.
Even for those who have never had an interest in his novels and short stories, Stephen King is the ultimate king of horror who has created several groundbreaking stories that forever changed the world literature and cinema.
While being there for almost every new adaptation of his work, King doesn’t shy away from sharing some praise for other horror movies developed by the industry’s pioneers.
In fact, the author has been passionate about gory plots and terrifying creatures ever since he was a child, and one movie he watched at a pretty young age still makes King shiver 57 years later.
Stephen King Calls ‘Night of the Living Dead’ His Favorite Horror Movie
- On Rotten Tomatoes, Night of the Living Dead keeps scores of 95% and 87% from critics and audiences
- On IMDb, the movie rates 7.8/10
It might be pretty hard for a horror lover like Stephen King to tell precisely which movie of the genre he prefers the most, considering that he’s likely seen them all, but the author eventually opted for a zombie movie that, at least for him, no one could surpass for nearly 60 years.
In his essay published by Variety last year, King revealed that he still considers George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead the scariest film he has ever seen and one of his forever favorites.
“This movie has lost its elemental power over the years — has become almost a Midnite Madness joke, like “Rocky Horror” — but I still remember the helpless terror I felt when I first saw it”, the author wrote, calling the movie “low-budget masterpiece”.
Night of the Living Dead was released back in 1968 and was extremely successful in the world box office, grossing around $30 million, which is approximately 250 times more than the movie’s budget of $125.000.
Eventually, the movie spawned a popular franchise that has released five more sequels over the decades.
Stephen King’s Top-3 Also Includes ‘The Haunting’ and ‘The Blair Witch Project’
Apart from admitting to still be scared of Night of the Living Dead, King also reflected on his changing perception of “scary” in movies, suggesting that such a factor can shift radically throughout years in a person’s life.
“My conclusion is that the “scariest” varies according to the viewer’s age. As a kid of 16, the scariest movie was “The Haunting” (directed by Robert Wise). As an adult, it was “The Blair Witch Project,” with that building sense of doom and those truly horrible last 35 seconds”, the author recalled in the same essay.
More than that, in another interview King also confessed that he hadn’t finished The Blair Witch Project while watching it for the first time — the writer was in hospital, recovering from a car accident, and at some point the movie’s jump-scares were way too much for his pretty scary condition at the moment.
