“George A. Romero takes us out of the night, beyond the dawn, and into the darkest day of horror the world has ever known.”

No ’80s horror series is complete without something from the “Father of the Zombie Film,” George Romero! In the third film of Romero’s continuing saga of the undead, a small group of scientists and soldiers maintain a lonely outpost in an underground missile silo, where they struggle to understand and survive the flesh-eating horror that roams the earth above.

To the scientists, secure in their bunker, the hunger of the dead proves to be a nominal threat in comparison to the increasingly sadistic authoritarianism of the army grunts assigned to guard their research. Military logic and hierarchy are quickly becoming obsolete as social norms disintegrate, and the soldiers are left clinging desperately to a macho fantasy of power and control, utterly disinterested in the pre-apocalyptic principle of “cooperation.” As tensions between the survivors mount in a nightmarish cabin fever scenario, Day of the Dead begs the question: Will the deciding battle for humanity be fought among the living, or against the dead?

Lori Cardille, Greg Nicotero (special effects makeup maestro, currently an executive producer of AMC’s The Walking Dead), Joe Pilato (in what can only be described as a career-defining role), Terry Alexander, Richard Liberty, and Sherman Howard as Bub (a lab zombie, and arguably the most sympathetic character in the film) co-star in this controversial classic with gut-wrenching gore effects by the savant of savagery himself, Tom Savini.