"Don't you know what's going on out there? This is no Sunday school picnic."

It's hard to believe it's only been a year since last Black History Month. So much has changed. America has its first white president since its first black president, and the Oscars are no longer so white.

However, I do feel it is my duty to point out that racial equality in scary movies online still eludes us. Three of the four horror films I reviewed last year have been taken down. I swear last February I spent a whole week watching Pam Grier escape from prison on Amazon Prime just so I had context in which to discuss Scream Blacula Scream, but now if you want to watch those kind of movies, it costs extra. And not one service has tried to replace these movies with Abby, William Girdler's blaxploitation knockoff of The Exorcist.

You might get the idea that the streaming services are promoting a white nationalist agenda, but I don't want to spread fake news. Maybe a cameraman is just standing in the way of the movies and that's why you can't see them.

Luckily, the movie that remains is an indisputable classic. It's one of the first films to feature a black man as the hero and might be the first movie that was actually scary. It's one of my favorite films with the words "of the living dead" in the title.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Night of the Living Dead.

I consider it a great honor to once again review this 1968 George A. Romero film since last year's review was eaten by Nazi mailer-daemons trying to suppress the achievements of African-Americans in cinema. That, or I accidentally deleted it. It matters not, because like a schoolkid who re-writes the same report about George Washington Carver every February, I remember the gist. (Peanut butter is delicious, and we should be thankful.)

The dead en masse mysteriously rise from the grave and start eating the living.It sounds like a trope now, but this is the first movie that happened in.

A truck driver named Ben (Duane Jones) has been forced to seek refuge in an abandoned farmhouse to avoid the swarms of ambulatory non-living persons, but gets stuck inside with the most useless white people you'll ever see this side of C-SPAN. They can't even put gas in a truck without blowing it up. Ben's got to take charge of the situation if he's going to survive. Can he hold out until rescue arrives?

It's one of the must-sees of the horror genre. That means if you haven't seen it, it's time, and if you have seen it, it's time to see it again.

Night of the Living Dead streams on Amazon and Shudder, and there's a color version on YouTube.