Matt Mogk

by Matt Mogk After a typically harsh Chicago winter, the city by the lake was sunny and bright in the early summer months of 1969. Escaping the rising afternoon heat, a young film critic named Roger Ebert ducked into a local neighborhood theater to catch the matinee. He found an empty seat among the packed audience of mostly children and families and settled in for what he expected to be just another low-budget monster movie called Night of the Living Dead. Though the film had already generated some negative buzz, with Variety going so far as to call it an…