the slasher type. While in the past, the term B movie had been applied, both in the United States and abroad, almost exclusively to low- and modest-budget American films, the growing Italian exploitation film industry now also became associated with the label (usually styled in Italy as B-movie). The demise of the Code The Production Code was officially scrapped in 1968, to be replaced by the first version of the present-day rating system. That year, two horror films came out that heralded directions American filmmaking would take in the next decade, with major long-range consequences for the B film. One was a high-budget Paramount production, directed by Roman Polanski and based on a bestselling novel by Ira Levin. Produced by B-horror veteran William Castle, Rosemary's Baby "took the genre up-market for the first time since the 1930s." It was a critical success and the seventh-biggest box office hit of the year. The other was George A. Romero's now classic Night of the Living Dead, produced on weekends in and around Pittsburgh for $114,000. Essentially a war movie pitting a small group of humans against a zombie corps, it built on the achievement of B-genre predecessors like Invasion of the Body Snatchers in its sub textual exploration of social and political issues. The movie doubled as both a highly effective thriller and an incisive allegory for America's treatment of the descendants of its former slaves at home and its conduct of a distant war against Vietnamese nationalists. Its greatest influence, though, derived not from its ideological implications but rather its clever subversion of genre clichés and the connection made between its exploitation-style imagery, its low-cost, truly independent means of production, and its high rate of return: $3 million in earnings in 1968, with much more to come as it was revived in various fashions. With the Production Code gone and the X rating established, major studio A films like Midnight Cowboy could now show "adult" imagery, while the market for increasingly hardcore pornography exploded. In this transformed commercial context, work like Russ Meyer's gained a new legitimacy. In 1969, for the first time a Meyer film, Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers!, was reviewed in The New York Times. Soon, Corman would be putting out nudity-filled sexploitation pictures such as The Student Nurses (1970) and Women in Cages (1971). With The Vampire Lovers (1970), Hammer similarly launched "a cycle of lesbian vampire movies