The George Romero Forgotten Classic Is The Most Important Zombie Movie

Posted by Lourie Helzer on Wednesday, June 26, 2024

In Land of the Dead, society’s richest and most powerful old white men have decided that the best course of action when dealing with the zombie apocalypse is simply to ignore it. The movie takes place in a city that has been walled off from the undead, where the 1 percent live in a swanky high-rise tower named Fiddler’s Green, and the poor live in slums and struggle to survive. If that doesn’t sound like an allegory for late-stage capitalist America, we don’t know what does.

Land of the Dead feels painfully relevant. The movie goes out of its way to show that those who don’t live in the luxury high-rise struggle to find medicine and food while the rich, led by Dennis Hopper’s Kaufman, get everything hand-delivered to them by lackeys like John Leguizamo’s Cholo, who have been tricked into thinking that they can earn a place among the elite.

When Cholo—a Latino—mentions getting an apartment in Fiddler’s Green, Kaufman basically tells him in no uncertain terms that people “like him” wouldn’t fit in there.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7qLXAp6ufqpWWuKq60aiZqKxemLyue8Snq2iflaS%2FqLGMq6amnaKkeq2tzZ1kqJ5dmbKisI2hq6ak