and demand. Directed by Kenny Scott Guffey, Jake C. Young and stars Denny Kidd, Mason Johnson and Brandon Ludwig. In other media At the suggestion of Bill Hinzman (the actor who played the zombie that first attacks Barbra in the graveyard and kills her brother Johnny at the beginning of the original film), composers Todd Goodman and Stephen Catanzarite composed an opera Night of the Living Dead based on the film. The Microscopic Opera Company produced its world premiere, which was performed at the Kelly-Strayhorn Theater in Pittsburgh, in October 2013. The opera was awarded the American Prize for Theater Composition in 2014. A play called Night of the Living Dead Live! was published in 2017 and has been performed in Toronto, Leeds and Auckland among others. Legacy Romero revolutionized the horror film genre with Night of the Living Dead; according to Almar Haflidason of the BBC, the film represented "a new dawn in horror film-making". The film has also effectively redefined the use of the term "zombie". While the word "zombie" itself is never used—the word used in the film is ghoul—Romero's film introduced the theme of zombies as reanimated, flesh-eating cannibals. Romero himself didn't initially consider the antagonists in the film to be zombies, later saying "I never thought of my guys as zombies, when I made the first film ... To me, zombies were still those boys in the Caribbean doing the wetwork for [Bela] Lugosi." The film and its successors spawned countless imitators in cinema, television, and video gaming, which borrowed elements invented by Romero. Night of the Living Dead ushered in the splatter film subgenre. As one film historian points out, horror prior to Romero's film had mostly involved rubber masks and costumes, cardboard sets, or mysterious figures lurking in the shadows. They were set in locations far removed from rural and suburban America. Romero revealed the power behind exploitation and setting horror in ordinary, unexceptional locations and offered a template for making an "effective and lucrative" film on a "minuscule budget". Slasher films of the 1970s and 80s such as John Carpenter's Halloween (1978), Sean S. Cunningham's Friday the 13th (1980), and Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) "owe much to the original Night of the Living Dead", according to author Barry Keith Grant. Critical analysis Since its release, some critics and film historians have interpreted Night of the Living Dead as