After watching the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead, a group of friends and I spent the next three hours discussing how exactly we'd all survive a zombie attack. Supplies, we agreed, were essential. To fortify our hideout, we identified the grocery store, liquor store and local gun shop as prime looting sites. That we were even having such a somewhat serious (and somewhat drunken) discussion is a testament to the power of the zombie. Forget Star Wars-Land of the Dead, the fourth zombie movie from director George Romero, is the true geek-event of the summer. After the box-office success of 28 Days Later and the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead, zombies have risen again, a fact that enabled Romero to get big-budget, major-studio backing for his latest epic. For zombie fans, it's a long-awaited payoff. Last year's Dawn remake was flashy but ultimately tepid and unsatisfying, causing fans to clamor for Romero to return to the big screen and do it right. Before you flock to theaters to feast on the director's gore-filled, anti-capitalist masterpiece, though, here's a look back at some of the best flicks the genre has to offer.

Night of the Living Dead set the standard for zombie films back in 1968, and though there have been countless imitators since then, Romero's work stands out for the political and social commentary he injects into each movie. Night is as much about the various social revolutions of the 1960s as it is about marauding, flesh-eating ghouls. For its part, Day of the Dead, released in 1985, paints a fairly bleak picture of what happens when the military and the scientific community are allowed to operate unchecked.

However, it's Dawn and Land that are the least subtle and most memorable. A brightly colored, blood-spattered comic book fairy tale, Dawn is also a sharp critique of the rampant consumerism of the 1970s (a facet that was missing from the 2004 remake). Land is the most polished, and most political, of Romero's zombie quartet. The greatest danger in Land comes not from the "stenches," as the zombies are called, but from super-rich overload Kaufman (an extremely understated Dennis Hopper). Meanwhile, members of the city's lower class quietly advocate a full-scale uprising against Kaufman and his bourgeois cronies. Once the zombies literally start to eat the rich, it's pretty clear who Romero voted for during the last election.

Of course, zombie films aren't just about politics. No, the chief attraction of zombie films is the almost never-ending string of beheadings, eviscerations, torn limbs and exploding skulls. If you think the zombies have it bad, the living get it much worse. In Stuart Gordon's classic Re-Animator, poor Barbara Crampton is nearly molested by the reanimated severed head of the nefarious Dr. Hill. The final moments of Captain Rhodes in Day of the Dead provide a similarly enduring image. As he's slowly being ripped apart by zombies, Rhodes gasps, "Choke on it...choke on it!" Although it's questionable whether anyone would still be conscious as their guts were being munched by zombies, it's a shocking scene.

While Romero's original quartet is practically cannon among zombie films, there have been other interesting variations. Director Gary Sherman's Dead and Buried brings zombies back to their folkloric roots by giving the film a voodoo subplot. Out-of-towners meet untimely ends in the hamlet of Potter's Bluff, but they're not in the ground for long. Someone in the town finds a way to raise the dead and turn them into bloodthirsty yet obedient creatures that look like they belong in a Norman Rockwell painting.

Also undeservedly obscure is Bob Clark's Deathdream. Though not technically a zombie movie-there's only one flesh eater, and his mortality status is decidedly ambiguous until the film's climax-Deathdream ranks alongside Romero's films in terms of its intelligence and political undercurrents. Vietnam vet Andy returns home quiet and surly, prone to murdering the family dog and drinking blood. His anti-social behavior tears his family apart. Andy's father knows something is wrong, but dear old mom just can't accept that her son's a psychotic killer with a blood addiction.

Not all zombie films are "serious" affairs full of splattered brains and social commentary. There are some, like Dead Alive and Evil Dead II and Simon Pegg's masterful zombie-parody Shaun of the Dead that play the genre up for laughs. They're loads of fun because the comedic tone usually lets the filmmakers get away with obscene amounts of gore and other shocks (see the zombie baby and intestine-strangling scenes in Dead Alive), though all the outrageous bloodshed makes them unpalatable to some viewers.

Other zombies take a different approach. Undead, an Australian zombie outing directed by the Spierig brothers, combines flesh-eating mayhem with big-eyed aliens and an Aussie farmer who can seemingly pull guns out of his ass. Meanwhile, Cemetery Man, starring Rupert Everett, gives zombies an existential twist. Everett stars as Dellamorte, caretaker of an Italian graveyard where the dead keep coming back. Finally, there's Lucio Fulci's Zombie, which eschews all of the above and goes straight for all-out shocks (watch out for the particularly icky eyeball scene), gratuitous nudity and an amazing sequence where a zombie fights a shark underwater.

Be warned, though: a steady diet of these films may leave you with some disturbing thoughts. You may look at garden tools and ponder how well they could be used as weapons against a gang of zombies; upon entering a building, you might start making plans how best to fortify it should society collapse and the dead start roaming the streets. If your friends start to worry about you, just remember-it's better to be prepared than to be lunch.