8. Dawn of the Dead (Lesson: Stability Never Lasts)
What could be better than being shacked up in a shopping mall with years of supplies to thrive on? Certainly not a shopping mall surrounded by ravenous zombies that want to suck your eyeballs dry and leave you dancing in the dark. The real magic of Romero's Dawn of the Dead is not just his masterful grasp of editing for television commercials, but the fact that he allows the survivors of the zombie plague to build a kind of paradise in the shopping mall where they take refuge. Romero uses a lot of Adam, Eve and garden metaphors and these give the movie enormous power. The imagery and editing makes you feel like you've been in the mall for decades and could carry on reasonably well forever. But stability never lasts, and this is one of the main morals of the story. It's not so much about counting your blessings while you have them, but making sure that you account for the idiotic bikers circling your safety net like sharks, careless and greedy forces that could care less about letting the zombies in to your shelter and ruining everything. In other words,
humans are the real threat to stability in a world overrun with zombies. And the humans will come.