George A. Romero may have invented the modern zombie, but it was Lucio Fulci who … well, he didn’t perfect it, but he made the walking undead far grosser, more predatory, and sadistic than they had ever been before. He also lacked the genius from Pittsburgh’s fascination with subtext, and using zombies as a metaphor for modern life. Instead, for his 1979 unlicensed Dawn of the Dead sequel Zombie aka Zombi aka Zombi 2, he pillaged the setting of the old pre-Romero voodoo flicks like I Walked With a Zombie and used their tropical beauty as the background for eye-slicing, grave-busting gruesomeness, and the first-ever fight between an amputee zombie and a very heavily sedated shark. – Richard Whittaker
