With his intention to make one zombie flick for every decade, Romero finally followed Night Of The Living Dead and Dawn Of The Dead in 1985 with Day Of The Dead. With gore amplified, the film was one for, as Romero puts it on a fine 40-minute documentary, “the trolls” among Dead’s fans.

Centred on the underground-dwelling survivors of zombie hell, Day is good and claustrophobic. Happily, Romero’s plans to make an epic were curtailed when backers backed off from a film clearly heading for unmarketable “unrated” territory. That enabled him to work in rare intimacy, involving friends and setting Day in a cheap-to-use mine that was atmospheric but miserable to work in. It’s a shame George doesn’t feature on the audio commentary, but the documentary reveals much about the perils of raising the dead in bargain-basement hell. Although Savini’s FX team used real offal, they couldn’t afford much of it. So when some schmuck left a fridge of animal innards unplugged for two weeks, the splatter still had to be used. You can almost see the honk-inducing stench.

Despite its sick-tacular grue, though, Day Of The Dead is an oddly affecting satire, finding humanity in Bub, its flaky-skinned hero.

DVD Extras:

Commentary with the special effects team
The Many Days Of The Dead doc