Black Summer strips the zombie series back to what Romero's first film actually is: strangers who do not know each other, no explanation, no cure plot, no military resolution, and the other survivors as the greater danger. It also reproduces the 1968 film's refusal of catharsis. Characters established as protagonists are killed without a scene to mark it, and the ending resolves nothing. The series is shot in long takes with almost no score, which is a modern method reaching for the same documentary flatness Romero got from a low budget and black and white.