Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Pretty much every zombie movie is a post-apocalyptic movie, and the modern conception of the zombie movie began with Night of the Living Dead, which depicts the first hours of the end of civilization as we know it.

George A. Romero took a budget a little over $100,000 and skills learned working on industrial films and made a horror movie in his hometown of Pittsburgh. While the movie doesn’t use the word “zombie,” it so clearly is the progenitor of the zombie genre.

At the time, people didn’t know what to make of Night of the Living Dead. Now, it’s considered a seminal horror movie. Of course, it helped that due to an error in submitting the copyright it ended up in the public domain. Hey, that helped make it a cult classic, and Romero a horror movie icon.