Do you wanna party? That’s the question that 1985’s Return of the Living Dead poses in one of the film’s most iconic scenes. As corpses claw their way out of their graves and a group of unlucky punk rockers begins to panic, the movie gleefully gives its own answer. It’s Party time!

Return Of The Living Dead

Return of the Living Dead is as important to the zombie genre as the original Night of the Living Dead. It’s the Reagan-era equivalent of the Cold War original. Disenfranchised youth have to deal with the failings of an older generation and the incompetence of the military-industrial complex.

It’s Night of the Living Dead for kids who listened to the Dead Kennedys and Black Flag.

Return of the Living Dead starts with two employees at a medical supply warehouse accidentally releasing a government-made chemical called 2-4-5 Trioxin into the air.

It creates a rain cloud over a nearby cemetery, resulting in a torrential downpour of toxic, zombie-making rain. Suddenly, all hell breaks loose as the punks hanging out in the cemetery attempt to get away from the reanimated corpses all around them.

Punk Rock Zombies

I can’t help but feel that the film’s punk aesthetic was part of a larger nihilistic trend in cinema at the time. Alex Cox’s Repo Man, another punk-adjacent film, came out just a year before. The punk biopic Sid & Nancy, a year later.

Return of the Living Dead was released during the brief period when Hollywood was catering to the generation that heard Johhny Rotten scream, “No future!” at the end of “God Save the Queen” and nodded their heads in agreement.

It’s very telling that the zombies of Return can’t be killed no matter where you shoot them.

With Night of the Living Dead, George Romero left the audience with the tiniest glimmer of hope. The zombies could be killed permanently if the brain was destroyed. Not so with Return of the Living Dead.

Burning The Zombies

Zombies born of 2-4-5 Trioxin—a chemical developed to kill marijuana plants because of the war on drugs and all that—are virtually indestructible.

The only way to get rid of them is to burn the body, but as Return of the Living Dead shows us, that creates noxious rain clouds that will, in turn, create a whole new batch of zombies. It’s an unwinnable doomsday scenario.

As if that isn’t dark enough, we also find out that the military’s contingency plan should the missing container be found, is to nuke the surrounding area.

Imagine a government willing to perform a nuclear strike on a populated suburb to cover up its own negligence. That’s the powerful statement made by Return of the Living Dead.

Unfortunately, the film also created the worst zombie trope in existence: brain-eating zombies.

I have a love-hate relationship with Return of the Living Dead. I love the movie, its bleak setting, and its dark humor—all of it. But I hate that zombies will forever be associated with “Braaaaaiiiinnns!”

Brain Eaters

The typical Romero zombie has an insatiable desire for human flesh. They will eat any part of the body as long as it’s still fresh. Trioxin zombies only eat brains. The problem comes when you realize that this makes no sense logistically.

Zombies work by something mysteriously, bringing their brains back to life and somehow causing them to function again.

If you eat someone’s brain, how will they, in turn, become a zombie? We see the zombies multiply in Return of the Living Dead, yet the zombies are never seen eating any part of the body other than the brains.

I once met Max Brooks, author of World War Z, at a comic book convention, and we discussed how dumb zombies eating brains was as a concept. So, if you don’t believe me, at least believe the guy who wrote The Zombie Survival Guide.