The 'massification' of the zombie in Romero's film is a nod to this. Graphic video footage of the Tet Offensive (1968) and piles of dead bodies were routinely broadcast.

As Vox writers Zachary Crockett and Javier Zarracina point out in their utterly fascinating article on the political roots of zombies: Night of the Living Dead was also revolutionary in that it was the first prominent film to feature vast hordes of zombies (in the film, they are referred to as 'ghouls'), as opposed to an isolated few - and to use those hordes as a symbol of an impending apocalypse.ДЇor the first time, many Americans were being exposed to the wide-scale horrors of war. Night of the Living Dead was one of the early cinematic responses to that sociopolitical chaos, with its popularization of the hordes of zombies leading the charge. Night of the Living Dead arrived during a time of tumult in the U.S., when discontent with the Vietnam War was spilling over into Hollywood and the Civil Rights movement was reeling after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. However, there's more to the metaphor than the Cold War. Nuclear weapons are a power on par with God, Night of the Living Dead seems to say, and could only come back to bite us.

The umbrella term 'radiation' is blamed for the epidemic of the undead resurrected as limb-eating monsters, a clear reflection of the Cold War-era fear of nuclear war. Like Frankenstein, Night of the Living Dead demonizes the advancement of science. Mary Shelley and other Romantic-era writers would interpret the myth of Prometheus as a cautionary tale about the dangers of overreaching progress - the aberration that is Frankenstein's monster being a chief example of this. Prometheus is most famous, perhaps, for his tragic quest to take fire to the humans, gifting humanity with its source of light, warmth, life, and progress, but dooming himself to the eternal torture of being chained to a rock where his liver was gnawed out of him, only to be grown back the next day. But after Prometheus' trickster ways - all in service of his precious creations - angered Zeus, fire was taken away from humanity. Mary Shelley called her creation 'The Modern Prometheus,' a reference to the Greek myth revolving around the Titan who is credited with molding man from clay.

War of the living dead