For five years, Geoff Turner has been working on a passion project: a catalogue of every home video release of George A. Romero’s 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead. As you may have noticed, Night of the Living Dead is everywhere, and that’s because a mistake on the part of its original distributor The Walter Reade Organization allowed it to slip into public domain. Anyone can put out their own release of the film… and pretty much everyone has. The result of Turner’s efforts is the book Night of the Living Tapes, which has the full support of Image Ten, the production company behind Night of the Living Dead, and will be released by Death Cult Press in October.
In Night of the Living Tapes, Turner has
meticulously catalogued video box art, promotional materials and distribution details gathered from collectors around the globe, to assemble NIGHT of the LIVING TAPES, the definitive compendium of the home video history of NIGHT of the LIVING DEAD, as authorized and approved by Image Ten, Inc., the film’s creators.
The softbound edition of Night of the Living Tapes has a page count of 185 pages – and there are clearly a lot of Night of the Living Dead fans who are very enthusiastic about getting the chance to look through those pages. Image Ten recently ran a Kickstarter campaign to fund the project and it greatly exceeded its goal. They were aiming to reach $3000 and ended up with a total of $19,409.
Image Ten co-director Gary Streiner says,
Image Ten’s mission is to supply fans with as much solid, reliable information as we can. That’s why we jumped all over Geoff’s book. There are so many fans out there who really dig these VHS copies.”
Night of the Living Tapes will be available to purchase from Death Cult Press and at both Amazon and Apple Books very soon.