Since its release, some critics and film historians have interpreted "Night of the Living Dead" as a subversive film that critiques 1960s American society, international Cold War politics and domestic racism. Elliot Stein of "The Village Voice" saw the film as an ardent critique of American involvement in the Vietnam War, arguing that it "was not set in Transylvania, but Pennsylvania – this was Middle America at war, and the zombie carnage seemed a grotesque echo of the conflict then raging in Vietnam." Film historian Sumiko Higashi concurs, arguing that "Night of the Living Dead" was a film about the horrors of the Vietnam era. While she admits that "there are no Vietnamese in "Night of the Living Dead", ... they constitute an absent presence whose significance can be understood if narrative is construed". She points to aspects of the Vietnam War paralleled in the film: grainy black-and-white newsreels, search and destroy operations, helicopters, and graphic carnage. In the 2009 documentary film "Nightmares in Red, White and Blue", the zombies in the film are compared to the "silent majority" of the U.S. in the late 1960s.