Dawn of the Dead (1978)

When there’s no more room in HELL, the dead will walk the EARTH!

During an ever-growing epidemic of zombies that have risen from the dead, two Philadelphia SWAT team members, a traffic reporter, and his television-executive girlfriend seek refuge in a secluded shopping mall.

Horror Science Fiction helicopter army chaos bite halloween dark comedy materialism machete gore martial law state of emergency shopping mall

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Body horror
Graphic violence

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Character

Classical in form, plot-driven, overwhelming and bleak.

classical in formformally daring
character-ledplot-driven
cooloverwhelming
warmbleak
gravecomic

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20 profiled raters. Loved most by The Provocateurs; disliked most by The Thrill Chasers.

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“Is Dawn of the Dead better than Night of the Living Dead?”
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Across media

If you loved this film, the series, the book, the album, the game.

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Reviews on TMDB

Written by TMDB members; each links to the original. Not part of Curator Co.'s numbers.

talisencrwon TMDB · Jul 20169/10
This is one of the finest sequels ever, in that it's both of comparable quality with the original, yet is fundamentally different from it at the same time. Marvelous stuff, with aspects copied thousands of times over the past two generations, with no end in sight. This and 'Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom', from about the same time frame, would make one of the best double-bills ever on the evils of consumerism gone rampant...
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Wuchakon TMDB · Aug 20188/10
Romero’s imaginative and thrilling zombie sequel A decade after the excellent “Night of the Living Dead” (1968), writer/director George Romero offers up this exceptional sequel. The plague of reanimated corpses with a hunger for warm flesh is now global and society is increasingly breaking down. A television exec (Gaylen Ross), her helicopter-reporter beau (David Emge) and two SWAT officers (Ken Foree and Scott Reiniger) take refuge in a suburban mall. Unfortunately for them, a veritable army of biker-raiders wants the mall for their own. One of the main reasons this film is so iconic is because Romero seriously considered what it would be like after a ‘zombie apocalypse’ and came up with an inspired story. While the bleakness of the situation is addressed there’s also a sense of adventurous freedom; for instance, the protagonists having an entire mall to themselves. The movie’s disturbing, ghastly and gory, but also action-packed and sometimes humorous. The zombies make for good bullet fodder while, at the same time, satirizing consumer society. The creative score is varied and I’m sure it was cutting edge at the time, but it’s very dated today, although you’ll probably find yours
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JPV852on TMDB · Dec 20208/10
Been a while since I last watched this one, but with the new 4K UHD out, decided to give it another watch going with the Extended Cut. Still very well made with some great zombie effects and really liked the characters, Peter (Ken Foree), especially. I'm not a big fan of the zombie horror genre but this is one of the exceptions. **4.0/5**
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Filipe Manuel Netoon TMDB · Mar 20241/10
**This must be some kind of joke, right?** Firstly, allow me to clarify: I am not a fan of “zombie” films, although I understand very well the interest that, in recent years, there has been for this material. I totally respect those who enjoy it. But let's be honest: a film has to have some aesthetic quality and some good taste to become “digestible”. And, well, I just finished watching this film, and I honestly can't understand how it has survived without ending up in the vault of oblivion. There are incredibly better films that have been forgotten as the years pass, but a certain type of crap, purely and simply because it's bad, lives on. The plot is essentially based on a moment of chaos in which the USA (the rest of the world does not exist) is taken over by zombies and no one knows what to do or where to go. Everyone thinks of themselves, saves their own skin and that's it. In the meantime, the usual opportunists take advantage of the situation as they see fit, and a small group of “surviving heroes” look for somewhere to take shelter. It's the plot of this film and a dozen other disaster films (zombies, volcanoes, wars, earthquakes, alien invasions, you name it). The level of
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