George A. Romero and Italian superfan/collaborator Dario Argento go bigger, bloodier and bitier in this 1978 sequel to Romero’s epochal apocalypse picture.

Dawn of the Dead comes 10 years after Night of the Living Dead but picks up roughly where it left off, with the taste for human flesh spreading like hot cakes. Four survivors (Ken Foree, Gaylen Ross, Scott Reiniger and David Emge) make like real Americans and head to the easiest place to get a gun: the mall.

Unfortunately the zombies have the same idea and instinctively return to the shopping centre, “an important place in their lives.” In Zombieland they swarm to a theme park, in Shaun of the Dead (England) a pub. Here the disease is capitalism, where humans consume until they’re blue in the face. Let’s call it Shingle All the Way.

Like Aliens and Terminator 2, this is one of those action sequels to a horror flick that dials everything up to 11 while retaining the heart of the original. It opens with SWAT teams raiding a housing project, showing the pandemic’s disproportionate effect on black and Latino communities. As the action moves to the Big Shop of Horrors, Romero builds on those themes by imagining how society would adapt to life among the lobotomised. The results look disconcertingly familiar.

As in the original, the characters act as anyone would in their situation, mostly trying on lots of hats. But Romero swaps the original’s noir aesthetic for bright red blood and strip mall lighting, casting a garish, comic tone on scenes of Muzak slapstick and enough disemboweling to make you question your decision to shop at TK Maxx.

Apparently Romero had asked special effects artist Tom Savini to work on Night of the Living Dead, but ironically Savini was drafted to Vietnam as a combat photographer. He returns to the sequel heavily influenced by the horrors he witnessed there, raising the bar for cinematic gore and appearing in the feature as the leader of the biker gang.

But for all its department store dismemberment, the movie’s starkest moments are quiet scenes of the survivors subconsciously rebuilding the society that ultimately killed their friend. We see the white couple being served dinner by their black comrade. We watch them count money, propose marriage and obsessively watch a TV that has transmitted nothing but static for three days.

Romero shows people as mannequins, existing solely to display material goods, our lives meaningless without the social make-up of money and marriage. As Fran wonders aloud: “What have we done to ourselves?”

While the living are torn apart by their own selfishness (which starts immediately when our heroes refuse to share cigarettes), the zombies appear almost harmless, shambling around escalators and falling into fountains as the bloodthirsty humans hunt them for sport.

Alternating shopping and killing sprees, the film depicts a society whose corporate greed can never be sated. And as for spiritual wealth, Peter sums it up with the immortal line: “When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the Earth.”

With its peeling layers of subtext, competent characters (a woman is actually capable of human speech this time) and a progtastic score by Goblin, Dawn of the Dead reinvented the genre a decade after Romero had invented it in the first place.