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I love M. Lang's roaming camera and the stuff he did with sound was way ahead of their time, but it hardly influenced any American horror films of the period. The roaming cameras and long pans in American horror films came from another German expressionalist--the cinemantographer and later director Karl Freund. Visually, American horror films didn't really start moving until Hitchcock.
NOTLD redefined what a horror film was capable of, not to mention taking violence to a whole different level without the childish Grand Guignol absurdity of H.G. Lewis. It was also a horror film that spoke to Americans--here's a film in 1968 in which a black man is shot by a posse of rednecks and thrown on a fire. In that final frame, we know who the real threat is, and it's certainly not the walking dead.
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