This review was updated on September 21, 2024
‘They don't know why, they just remember. Remember that they want to be in here.’ If George Romero’s groundbreaking, self-produced debut Night of the Living Dead had worn its satirical elements relatively lightly – a Black hero, a dash of generation-gap angst, some timely, Vietnam-era newsreel-style shakeycam – by the time of this long-delayed sequel, Romero had evidently decided that subtlety was overrated. He was right, too: the tale of a group of survivors from a zombie apocalypse who hole up in a suburban shopping mall only to discover that the undead are instinctively drawn to the place, this is sledgehammer satire and all the better for it; a hilariously blunt sideswipe at unthinking consumerism.
Which isn’t to imply for a moment that Dawn of the Dead is not a clever film. While it may be stuffed with cheap thrills – from buckets of inventive gore to a giddy, fist-pumping truck-based action sequence – the script itself is as sharp as a pin, plunging us head-first into the crisis and refusing to let up, while at the same time finding ample room for character development and audience identification (the fact that the terrific cast pretty much vanished without trace in the years afterwards is criminal).
A tough film to finance and a controversially violent one on release
A tough film to finance and a controversially violent one on release – hence the multiplicity of different cuts – Dawn of the Dead would inspire a whole wave of cheapjack zombie flicks, up to and including Zack Snyder’s punchy but superfluous remake and Edgar Wright’s loving homage Shaun of the Dead (both 2004). Romero himself would return to the well several times with varying degrees of success, but Dawn remains his grand statement: hysterical and horrifying, punishingly relentless yet oddly comforting, endlessly inventive and so much damn fun.
Find out where it lands on our list of the 100 greatest horror movies ever made.
What to Watch Next:
Night of the Living Dead (1968); The Stuff (1985); [Rec] (2007)