Born in the Bronx and raised in Pittsburgh, PA — where he would go on to lens his most famous films — George Romero, the director of Spanish-Lithuanian descent who was called "the Father of the Zombie Movie" by the New York Times, essentially invented the flesh-eating ghoul genre as we know it with his feature debut Night of the Living Dead (1968). As a child growing up in the '40s and '50s, Romero was fascinated by the science-gone-wrong thrillers of that era, B-grade pictures which used the deceptively simple symbols of mad scientists, crazed killers and atomic monsters to smuggle to their audiences more subversive messages about post-war society. "I grew up on the Famous Monsters of Filmland," Romero once told NPR of the definitive horror-centric magazine, which was first printed in 1958 and acted as the prototype for publications such as Fangoria and Video Watchdog. Originally published by James Warren and edited by Forrest J Ackerman, Famous Monsters covered a wide range of genre topics but, in its early days, was especially reverent towards silent films and thrillers of the '30s, all of which would influence Romero throughout his career.