Signs + Night of the Living Dead

• Sunday, August 24 at 1:30pm (Signs) + 3:45pm (Night of the Living Dead)
• Saturday, August 30 at 6:30pm (Signs) + 8:45pm (Night of the Living Dead)

Signs
M. Night Shyamalan, 2002, U.S., 35mm, 106m
With Signs, M. Night Shyamalan reworked the alien invasion film to explore something much more unnervingly intimate: a test of faith disguised as the apocalypse. Set almost entirely on a Pennsylvania farm, the story follows a grieving former priest (Mel Gibson), his brother (Joaquin Phoenix), and two children (Abigail Breslin, Rory Culkin) as they confront a series of increasingly uncanny disturbances in their cornfields. A masterful use of sound design, off-screen space, and measured, old-school compositions add up to a quietly suspenseful domestic drama about extraterrestrial (divine?) interventions, grief, and the desire to find meaning amid real-world chaos. For many, this was the film that crystallized Shyamalan’s style as something patient, precise, emotionally sincere, and attuned to the spiritual hidden within the everyday.

Followed by:

Night of the Living Dead
George Romero, 1968, U.S., 35mm, 96m
Duane Jones brings quiet authority to his role as a man barricaded in a farmhouse during a flesh-eating outbreak, besieged not only by the undead closing in but by infighting survivors and collapsing institutions. George A. Romero’s trailblazing debut didn’t just define the modern concept of zombies—it fundamentally reshaped the language of horror and seeded a cultural mythology so deeply that it’s easy to forget where it began. Shot on grainy black-and-white film with hand-built sets and improvised intensity (on both sides of the camera), Night of the Living Dead conjured a raw, near-documentary vision of social collapse that struck the perfect, nihilistic nerve in late-’60s America. A stripped-down siege movie driven as much by the monsters outside as by the slow disintegration of civility from within.

New 35mm print of Night of the Living Dead struck from the 2016 4K digital restoration by MoMA and The Film Foundation, taken from the original camera negative and overseen by George A. Romero. Print courtesy of Image Ten.