Do I remember it right that the whole “zombies eat brains” thing comes from Return of the Living Dead?

Yep! Return Of The Living Dead is a whole other level of fucked up, and it is fantastic.

There’s a hardcore band named after one of the best lines.

I’ve seen several folks make the case over the years that the Hollywood Zombie is a conveniently blank canvas to paint present day existential dread onto, that “zombies” can always represent the threatening other, be they nazis, communists, anarchists, kids these days, mindless consumers, terrorists, nazis again for some fucking reason, liberals, conservatives, whatever.

Deeply ironic, considering Romero movies are mostly about threats from the living. Night is a classic American horror movie with desperate strangers trapped in a house. Dawn is about what people think they need. Day is loudly about the limits of authority and quietly about the limits of hope.

It’s not until Snyder’s fast-zombie remake of Dawn (and the modern craze it kicked off) that right-wing moralizing really crept in. Even though that movie has the absolute best takedown of apocalyptic gun fetishism.