A crew that shot educational segments for Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and industrial films for Pittsburgh steel mills ended up in a condemned farmhouse with no running water, pouring Bosco chocolate syrup over amateur actors and passing around organs from a local butcher. This episode explores how George A. Romero, Russell Streiner, John Russo and their partners at Image Ten turned $600 contributions and a total budget of around $114,000 into Night of the Living Dead in 1968, abandoning an alien comedy idea and drawing on Richard Matheson's I Am Legend to focus on the confusing first hours of a disaster rather than its aftermath.

The conversation examines why the film's cheap black-and-white stock and civil-defense stock music made it feel like a wartime newsreel to audiences raised on Vietnam footage, the significance of casting Duane Jone ...