The lunatics have taken over the underground research facility in this plague-fuelled military satire they should have called Dr. Strain-Love or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Our Zombie Overlords.

Waiting another seven years to unleash his third Zombie onslaught, George A. Romero takes the time to reinvent the genre with each instalment. Like an undead Planet of the Apes (still not to be confused with Night of the Bloody Apes), the trilogy acts as a State of the Union Address for the pre-, mid- and post-apocalypse.

And though every entry is a unique statement, they carry and mutate the ideas spawned by their predeccesors. Dawn of the Dead ended with gangs gleefully gunning-down ghouls for sport; by the time we get to 1985’s Day of the Dead, the zombies are practically peripheral to the survival-turned-ideological struggle. But that’s what it was always about: humans needing no help tearing each other apart.

That subtext which lurked in Night of the Living Dead’s horror and its sequel’s comedy can no longer be contained, either by the setting or execution. The themes visually implied in Dawn are now stated in monologues and arguments, delivered in unhinged screams by actors who chew more scenery than the zombies themselves. Romero rips away the comfort of the shopping mall and makes us witness to the inevitable: the end of the world, and the dawn of a new one.

What little humanity remained in retail is replaced by demented humans driven Underground and completely insane by the plague that walks the earth. They are divided into two factions: mad scientists and even madder soldiers. The only glimpses of humanity come from Bub (Sherman Howard), a zombie being “socialised” by a nutty professor (Richard Liberty); an ironic twist that recalls I Am Legend and Frankenstein, with a new morality instilled in the hearts of those we labelled and treated as monsters.

Day of the Dead was met with some disappointment on its release, perhaps by midnight crowds expecting more fun zombie action; it was overshadowed by the more drive-in-friendly The Return of the Living Dead. But the darkness here is in keeping with the shambling spirit of the original (how many 20-year franchises can say that?), and Tom Savini’s gore is literally jaw-dropping; the shots of people ripped apart while still alive are among the genre’s defining images.

It lacks the psychological depth of its predecessor (it is hard to be subtle when every other word is “fuck”), yet behind the profanity there is surprising profoundness, specifically in the scene where Bub listens to Beethoven. The result is bleak but it could never have been anything else, dragging the trilogy kicking and screaming to its logical, horrifying conclusion. If only it had stayed dead…