The Return of the Living Dead

The funniest film in this category and it has one of the bleakest endings in the genre, which is a difficult trick.

Dan O'Bannon wrote and directed it, and it exists because of a legal split: Romero kept "of the Dead", John Russo kept "Living Dead", and this is Russo's side of the arrangement. O'Bannon deliberately made it a comedy so it would not compete with Romero.

It is the film that invented the zombies wanting brains, which is not in Romero at all and is now what most people think zombies do. It also makes them fast, articulate and impossible to kill, which is the actual horror: they explain to the police over the radio that shooting them in the head does not work.

The punk soundtrack, the graveyard, and Linnea Quigley are the aesthetic that defined a decade of imitators.

Then the ending arrives and refuses to let anybody off.