Ninety years ago today, at Clune’s Auditorium in Los Angeles, 2,500 people watched the premiere of The Clansman, a 12-reel saga of the Civil War and Reconstruction directed by the Kentucky-born filmmaker D.W. Griffith. Later retitled The Birth of a Nation, the movie climaxes with a horde of Negroes besieging a cabin full of whites. If you’ve seen any modern zombie movie, then you’ve seen an echo of the cabin scene: In Griffith’s eyes, the blacks outside that little house are the Living Dead, their monstrous arms reaching through the doors and windows while our heroes try desperately to fend them off. In Griffith’s movie, the whites are rescued by the Ku Klux Klan, who subsequently strip the blacks of their arms and of the franchise.

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