The Showtime series “Masters of Horror,” created by Mick Garris, gave us some pretty awesome new films from some of the most brilliant creators in the game. The first of two seasons, which premiered in 2005, featured standout episodes directed by John Carpenter, Dario Argento, John Landis, and Lucky McKee; but if you’re asking me, it was Joe Dante who stole the show.

Dante’s Season 1 episode, which hit Showtime on December 2nd, was literally ripped from the headlines, and at the time, it was hailed as one of the most important pieces of political commentary of the era. Based on a short story by Dale Bailey, and written by Sam Hamm, Homecoming drew inspiration from the Iraq War that we were still in the midst of at the time of the episode’s premiere, centered on young American soldiers returning from the dead. But they’re not hungry for flesh, guts, and brains.

The twist in Dante’s Homecoming is that the re-animated soldiers, killed in the Iraq War, just want to vote in the upcoming election; they cannot be killed no matter how many times they’re shot or how brutally they’re dismembered, but they do drop dead of their own volition once their votes have been cast. President Bush is running for a second term, you see, and the dead soldiers want to make sure he doesn’t get re-elected so that the war can be ended and the still-living troops can be pulled out of Iraq.

Pretty heavy stuff for a zombie film, but Dante’s trenchant political satire was right in line with the zombie cinema that kick-started the genre. In many ways, it was Dante doing his best George Romero (the film even features a few direct nods to Romero), using zombies to comment on very real issues plaguing the country at the time. With Homecoming, the Gremlins director fired a shot at the Bush administration for selling America on a lie and getting countless young men killed in the process, and the 60-minute film sends as powerful a message as a horror film ever has.

Watching Homecoming today, 12 years after it premiered on Showtime, you’d think it’d be dated given how period-specific it was, but I was surprised to discover this week that it’s actually as relevant today as it was back in 2005. President Bush is of course no longer in office and the Iraq War is no longer a source of news, but in today’s political climate, the themes of a president selling America on a lie, while at the same time obscuring the real facts and demonizing one specific group, feel incredibly prescient.

The zombies, treated in Dante’s story not as monsters but rather as “others,” clearly mean no harm to the American people (in one scene, a husband and wife take a zombie into their place of business and share an emotional moment with him – he just wants to be seen, loved, and respected for his service to the country), but the current administration is intent on painting the opposite picture. Roaming freely around America, the zombies threaten to expose the president’s lie and derail his chances at a second term, and they’re having none of that.

Frustrated that they’re not actually attacking anyone, the president’s adviser delivers a line more chilling today than it ever was. Right after the aforementioned scene where a zombie is taken in by a kind husband and wife who don’t believe the lies, we cut to the president’s team in their campaign office.

“God dammit, why don’t they do something,” the adviser bemoans. “Eat a brain or bite somebody’s throat out or something, goddamit. At least we’d have an excuse to round them up.”

In a later scene, we see that several zombies have been round up in a makeshift camp.

The episode ends with a “Tales from the Crypt”-like twist. Despite the American people (along with the dead soldiers) casting the majority of their collective votes for the Democratic candidate, the current president wins his bid for a second term; his team, running the show behind the scenes, hacks the system so that he can win despite actually losing. This causes every dead American soldier from every war in history to rise from their graves, taking over the world to make sure no more lives are lost and that the democratic principles of the country are kept in check.

A zombie narrates over a series of patriotic images:

The government continues. In exile. But Washington D.C. is ours. We are here to stay. All across this country, an army of fighters, one million strong, who laid down our lives to defend the land we love. But know this truth. Our lives are precious. And if you ever again send our brothers and sisters to give their lives for a needless, pointless lie, then we guarantee that you will see the true face of war. The face… of Hell.

Homecoming isn’t just the most important “Masters of Horror” episode. It’s one of the most important zombie films ever made. And it’s worth a revisit today, now more than ever.