As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
- Once the illusion of the mall's consumer paradise fades away, you realise that you're trapped in there... forever....And that's if you're lucky.
- The general Gorn levels of violence. It's almost like something out of a war scene. To be fair, it's hard not for things to get messy when you're fighting a horde of flesh-eating re-animated corpses, but it's still pretty unsettling.
- The opening havoc in the newsroom (with people angrily shouting at the expert trying to explain the nature and scope of the zombie plague and overworked news staff being told to air misleading information about the rescue stations), followed by the raid on the tenement building. Exposition aside, it shows how much society is slowly collapsing before we even see a single zombie.
- Though cheesy at times, certain extras really do exemplify the iconic and disturbing zombie walk that's been perfected in the years since the release of this film.
- The moans and groans of the undead.
- Roger's bites, particularly the leg. He's missing a huge chunk of himself that will never heal, and as we discover when they're sealing up the mall, it's constantly raw, as it gushes blood when the zombie squeezes the bandage when Roger is trying to get into the car. Roger's writhing and loud screams of pain only heighten how hideously painful it must be trying to keep going after receiving a bite like that. You feel the pain along with him.
- Roger's turning. Sure it's a tearjerker, but it's also horrifying to see what the nice and fun-loving Roger turned into once the zombie virus took over. Adding to the nightmare is the fact that the make-up is leagues better than many of the other zombies we've seen up to this point, and he appears as a shrunken, hideous monster. Roger even has a moment of seeming bewilderment over his situation, before his eyes settle on Peter and take on a look of hunger. He now views Peter, who's been his Heterosexual Life-Partner up to that point, solely as a meal. That hungry look in Roger's eyes as he slowly sits up and prepares to go take a chunk out of Peter is an image that stays with you long after you've watched the film.
- The reveal of Flyboy being a zombie.
- What really sends the above moment home is that Steve's zombie makeup is noticeably more detailed, with his skin much more clammy and rotten looking, his wound still oozing blood that's stained his shirt, and his unique Zombie Gait, in which he's balancing on what appears to be a broken ankle, looking several times like he's going to topple over.
- Another thing that sells it is the fact that "The Gonk" is playing normally over the shots of the zombies wandering the mall, but everytime the camera focuses of Zombie!Flyboy, the music distorts and echoes, possibly signifying that the person he once was, is gone.
- Actually, more terrifyingly, is that Steve isn't completely gone, even in his undead state, he still remembers where their hideaway is, and leads a group of fellow zombies directly to it, possibly foreshadowing the events of Land of the Dead by nearly 30 years.
- The icing on the cake is the quiet, haunted delivery of Peter's line after the wall topples over. "It's Stephen. They're coming up." We're with these two remaining protagonists at this point, and it's no longer safe.
- A biker trying to use the heart-rate monitor machine gets his arm ripped off by a swarm of zombies surrounding him.
- The original ending would have had Francine commit suicide by sticking her head into the rotating helicopter blades. The prop head meant for this scene was put to use for the infamous exploding head sequence mentioned above. The credits were meant to display over a final shot of the helicopter gradually sputtering out as the last of its fuel is depleted, showing that there was no real hope of survival for the party either way.
- Peter's “Let’s say the lady gets killed… you’d be able to chop off her head?” line in the Argento-cut.
- The tagline: "When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth."
- The shot of an office building's lights going out, floor by floor, is a beautifully symbolic but incredibly unsettling illustration of just how quickly society is falling.
- At the beginning of the film it is stated that half of the rescue stations - presumably in the Philadelphia area - have been "knocked out" or are "inoperative," without going into further details. One can only imagine how those rescue stations came to be "knocked out," particularly as Francine considers running inaccurate data about the rescue stations on TV to be a death sentence for those refugees arriving at non-existent rescue stations...
- The old one-legged priest's ominous warning to Peter and Roger is a subtle form of this, foreshadowing the apocalyptic situation in the latter half of the film, as well as in Day of the Dead.
- With the dead rising to life and attacking the living, gun battles, like the one shown at the housing project in the beginning, acquire a whole new level of danger: bad enough that you could get shot, but if one is not careful, those around you who have been shot dead will reanimate and attack you and anyone else unless they have been shot in the head. This is likely the reason why Roger hangs back and hovers over Roy Tucker's corpse while the other SWAT men advance toward the building entrance: he needs to make sure that Roy won't rise up and try to bite the other cops. Seeing as Roy was killed with a single shot to the head, Roger realizes that his corpse poses no danger. Other people shot and killed, like Wooley the racist cop, were very likely shot in the head afterwards to prevent them from reanimating.
- While they had it coming, the scene with several of the Bikers being eaten alive by zombies is incredibly disturbing. One in particular is shown having his stomach torn open and his guts ripped out while screaming in agony the whole time (and those "prop" guts by the way? Those were real cow intestines).
- One that applies to real life: Peter is absolutely correct, even if his demonstration goes too far, that aiming a gun at a person, even if you are trying to help them, is extremely dangerous. He aims his rifle right at Stephen to give him a taste.Peter: Scary isn't it...? Isn't it?
