You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who would argue that Night of the Living Dead is anything less than one of the most influential horror movies of all time, but it wasn’t until Romero followed it up with Dawn of the Dead a decade later that the floodgates opened to unleash imitators like a horde of the undead. Night of the Living Dead’s success inspired other independent horror movies but only a scant few zombie outings.
Chief among them is director Jorge Grau’s 1974 effort The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue, also known as Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (a rare instance in which the US rebranding is superior to the original title); a highly underrated zombie movie. The similarities to Night of the Living Dead are irrefutable (it was, in fact, pitched to Grau as “Night of the Living Dead in color”), but it avoids playing like a derivative rip-off. A Spanish-Italian co-production lensed in England, it harnesses an international flavor along with ample atmosphere.