As the world literally goes to hell in an apocalypse of flesh-eating zombies, four survivors take refuge in a shopping mall and bask in its resources. The result is a mini-manifest destiny, in which the humans migrate from one end of the mall to the other in an attempt to kick out all the zombies and set up house.

Has there ever been a more revealing, stirring, nihlistic, prophetic, grosser, and downright spot-on picture ever painted of the American consumer society? George A. Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead” is perhaps the most poignant horror film ever made for the way it constantly pushes the envelope of violence and depravity to eventually make us realize that the true monsters are not measured by their atrocities, but by how society allows itself to respond to them. Tightly edited, cleverly scripted, and ultimately deeply moving; it’s startling how we are eventually numbed to the film’s graphic violence and eventually see ourselves in the faces of the ever-numbing human characters, who become more and more zombie-like and repulsive as their zombie adversaries become increasingly innocent and even pathetic. Which is Romero’s final point: Is there really much difference between hungry zombies wondering around mindlessly in a shopping mall and desperate consumers clambering for after-Christmas sales? Here is America itself, reduced to perhaps its most painfully revealing metaphor.