Watch the living dead online
Filed under: Comedy, Horror, Distribution
Did any of you get a chance to see George A. Romero's Land of the Dead this weekend? I went to a midnight showing on Friday night in Boston and half the audience were dressed like zombies. After seeing the movie I was in the mood to see the original Night of the Living Dead. So I did some research, and as it turns out you can watch the whole classic 1968 film for free online thanks to the fine folks at archive.org. Apparently the film's copyright has lapsed somehow, which is good for us, bad for George (if anyone could explain this, I'd appreciate it). So I'm off to watch more Zombie goodness.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
6-27-2005 @ 4:36PM
Jette said...
Previous copyright laws (which have changed) required that copyright information be included on every print of a film. If the prints did not include this information, the film could lose its copyright and become public domain. This seems to have happened both to Night of the Living Dead and to Charade (not a recommended double-feature, though), both of which are available on archive.org.
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6-27-2005 @ 10:22PM
TJ Farrell said...
I can't remember exactly how, but I believe that Romero simply forgot to put a copyright symbol in the film somewhere, and because of that, it automatically fell into the public domain. Sadly, this is the reason there are so many horrible DVD versions out there, since anyone can acquire the rights to the film and release it on DVD however they see fit.
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6-27-2005 @ 6:26PM
Mike said...
That explains why I have a super-cheap 50-movie classic horror DVD set that includes almost nothing from as recent as the 60s, with the notable exception of Night of the Living Dead.
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6-27-2005 @ 6:31PM
Bob said...
The free archived version has its own grainy documentary appeal, but to get the full effect of this movie, you must watch one of Elite Entertainment's crisp black and white DVDs (no other versions come close.) They have two DVD verions, both very good. Any other DVD is either a bad copy of the original, is colorized, or is bastardized with extra scenes (the "30th Anniversary Edition.")
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6-30-2005 @ 4:48PM
Eric said...
It wasn't Romero that screwed up it was Russo that messed up the copyright.
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