"I mentioned to him that I liked the mall better at night, that the zombies seemed to have more purpose than the shoppers. “That’s how I got the idea!” he said. “I know the people who own it and I went through the mall, empty, one time and I said, ‘Holy shit! That’s the perfect place for the fulcral episode where we can show the false security of the whole consumer America trip. That’s why this is in color – Night was black and white – because of the mall. So I wrote a little sketch about it and then put it in a drawer while I did some other things I’m really surprised no one else picked up on the idea, because now there are these shopping developments where you can live on top and work and shop down below and never have to leave the building. That’s a trip. In this film, the mall becomes the cause. The four heroes get in there to get some Civil Defense water and food and then they rack out and this consumerism, it’s too tempting for them to resist. They arm themselves heavily, they become banditos fighting for all that stuff.” Are the bikers then supposed to be an antidote for them or are they actually an exaggeration of that; racing through the mall at l00 miles an hour and scooping up color TVs? “I think they’re the ultimate of what the heroes are becoming, fighting for control of the Mothership. In fact, when they first see the raiders, the bikers coming over the hill, Peter takes off his new watch and all his other shit and that’s a flash toward realization. The raiders are consumerism at its extreme and they just storm in there and go bananas and then of course that causes the downfall. But the heroes, even though Roger is dying at that point, he still has his candies and radios and shit … and that’s why they’re so extreme in their garb during the attack scenes, all the crossed gun belts, fighting over microwave ovens, I mean…” He doubled over with laughter. Romero has a weird slant on the world, to say the least. With Night and Dawn he has filmed some of the most explicit violence imaginable and yet he can argue, convincingly, that it’s detached violence because it’s directed at things rather than people; that the zombies become merely so many insects to be swatted aside. At the same time, he’s starting to make the zombies smarter and more sympathetic because he genuinely likes them. On a set, he resembles a giant, bearded shepherd with his poor dead flock shuffling after him. Sometimes he refers to his zombies as “sharks,” which is a startling but dead-on comparison."