This is another of those stories that has been brewing in my imagination for a long time. The roots of it go way back to when I was ten years old. My best friend and I snuck into the cavernous old Midway movie theater in the seedy Kensington section of our hometown of Philadelphia to see the world premiere of Night of the Living Dead. October 2, 1968. My buddy freaked midway through the flick. I stayed to see it twice. He had some real PTSD from that film—and if you’ve grown up since you can’t really appreciate the impact that film had. There had been nothing like it before, and everything that has zombies since then—The Walking Dead, iZombie, Zombieland, Game of Thrones, 28 Days Later, World War Z, Resident Evil, and all the rest—owes an unpayable debt to George R. Romero. It was the first of a new genre. And don’t even try with a counterargument that flicks like I Walked with a Zombie and others were first. They weren’t. Those films deal with a badly slanted and deeply racist interpretation of Haitian folklore. Those are technically ‘real’ zombies, whereas Romero’s monsters were flesh-eating ghouls. It was European film distributors who hung the word “zombie” on Romero’s monsters. That label stuck and will always identify this genre. As a result, when people these days mention zombies they are almost exclusively referring to the flesh-eaters. This story, then, is for that ten-year-old kid … and so many others, who discovered their favorite monsters in movie houses.