"Night of the Living Dead" King of Horror Movies

What scares a creator of nightmares? In this week's Entertainment Weekly - in a column titled "Do Movies Matter? (Part 1)", professional frightener Stephen King lists movies that have had an impact on him. He talks a bit about the first movie to scare the pants off him:

Night of the Living Dead has been around so long that it's become the cinematic equivalent of a knock-knock joke, but I still remember the pure horror I felt the first time I saw the little girl stabbing her mother to death with a garden trowel. What I remember thinking as I watched those crazy shadows bounce around at the whim of a swinging lightbulb on the end of an electric cord is "I'm in the hands of a lunatic, and he will stop at nothing to scare me." I've never in my life been more frightened in a movie theater.

The subject of the two-part column is, like the title reads, "Do Movies Matter?" The question he asks is, do great movies have the same weight and importance as great plays or great books do? "My answer is you bet your sweet round fanny," quips King, going on to detail the movies that have impacted him throughout his life - from "Bambi" to Paul Newman in "The Hustler" to "Night of the Living Dead". In next week's column, he promises to give his two cents on "Kill Bill" and "Mystic River" (the two of which he deems "remarkable in its own way, and each a classic").

Source: Entertainment Weekly