The Night King's approach is obviously a subtle nod to this classic moment in cinematic history.
They did do the lore thing though. The Children of the Forest were at war with men, so they turned a human sacrifice into the Night King, then lost control of their weapon and had to team up with humans to fight it off.
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this is the problem i have with the show and someone brought it up in relation to dragons: that crazy maester shouldn't have to invent some radical new weapon to keep off the dragons, they weren't that long ago and there should be armaments of this shit all over the place and readily available documentation. so with the wall, apparently they know enough that it's important and served a purpose but not enough to keep a bunch of fucking armaments and dragonglass or whatever somewhere beneath castle black. for such a backwards-facing culture in the north and talk of the First Men they seem to have just forgotten all the shit that matters.
And you know the battle with the Army of the Dead is gonna be like one episode, if that.
The show runners embarrassed themselves with the dragon-riding among other things. Remember the scene in Season 1 where Tyrion designs a saddle for Bran? I dont remember if that was in the book or not, but why was it in there? I don't think it was just to get Tyrion past Winterfell and the Starks safely. I think it was meant to foreshadow Tyrion designing a harness / saddle for the dragons. I think GRRM or whoever realized Danny riding on the back of a dragon would look absurd on television and were setting-up a plausible solution by creating a "saddle" or structure for dragonriding. It seems like that the people with total control now don't have a problem with absurdity…