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Dawn of the Dead
Promotional poster for Dawn of the Dead
Directed by	Zack Snyder
Produced by	Marc Abraham Eric Newman Richard P. Rubinstein
Written by	1978 Screenplay: George A. Romero Screenplay: James Gunn Uncredited: Michael Tolkin Scott Frank
Starring	Sarah Polley Ving Rhames Jake Weber Mekhi Phifer Kim Poirier
Distributed by	Universal Pictures
Release date(s)	March 19, 2004 March 26, 2004
Running time	Theatrical Cut: 100 min. Director's Cut: 109 min.
Language	English
Budget	$28,000,000
Gross revenue	$102,356,381
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

Dawn of the Dead is a 2004 horror film reimagining of George A. Romero's 1978 film of the same name. The remake and original both depict a handful of human survivors living in a shopping mall surrounded by swarms of zombies, but the details differ significantly. Directed by Zack Snyder, the film was released by Universal Studios and stars Ving Rhames, Sarah Polley and Jake Weber with cameos from original cast members Ken Foree, Scott Reiniger and Tom Savini. It was released in the United States on March 19, 2004, and in the United Kingdom on March 26, 2004.

Contents 1 Plot 2 Cast 3 Production 4 Music 5 Comparisons to the original 6 Deleted scenes 7 Reception 8 Possible sequel 9 Rating 10 Satire 11 See also 12 References 13 External links

Ana, a nurse, finishes a long shift at her Milwaukee County hospital and returns to her peaceful suburban home. She and her waiting husband Louis make love and go to sleep, missing warnings trickling through the local media concerning a mysterious and rapidly-spreading virus which kills and then reanimates its infected hosts as aggressive flesh-eating zombies.

The next morning the couple are awoken by their zombified neighbor, a young girl, who bites Louis in the throat. Ana locks the zombie out of the room, but despite her frantic efforts, Louis dies, immediately reanimates as a zombie, and chases Ana from the house. She flees her now chaos-torn neighborhood in her car, before a failed carjacking sends her crashing into a tree and knocks her out. Upon reviving, she meets Kenneth, a grim police sergeant traveling to Fort Pastor, a nearby US Army base. With the route to the base blocked by zombies, they and three others - jack-of-all-trades Michael, petty criminal Andre and his pregnant Russian wife Luda - break into the nearby Crossroads Shopping Mall. Inside the mall a scuffle with a zombified mall security guard results in Luda getting a minor bite-wound.

They confront three living security guards - C.J., Bart and Terry - and give up their weapons in exchange for refuge. After the group secures the mall, they head to the mall's roof to dispose of bodies and paint SOS signs. There, they "meet" another survivor, Andy, who is stranded alone in his gun store, across the mall's zombie-infested parking lot.

The next day, Terry sides with the new arrivals, C.J. and Bart are disarmed, and the inhabitants of a delivery truck are allowed into the mall: the driver, Norma; jerkish Steve; working man Tucker; trampy Monica; elderly homosexual Glen, bitten Frank and his teen daughter, Nicole and an anonymous (and severely-injured) obese woman. These newcomers report that Fort Pastor has been overrun by zombies and no help is coming. Shortly afterwards, the obese woman dies, reanimates and is "killed" when Ana thrusts a metal fireplace poker through her head. The group determines that bites are how the zombies multiply their numbers; after Ana and Michael argue about what to do with the rapidly-deteriorating Frank, the man is isolated in a store with guard Kenneth, allowing him "every single second" before expiring. Michael and Ana achieve an awkward reconciliation, which is interrupted by Kenneth's shotgun blast as he destroys Frank's reanimated brain.

Though the mall provides many material distractions, Kenneth bonds with Andy, and other survivors begin pairing off romantically (Ana and Michael, Terry and Nicole, Steve and Monica), the undead surround the refuge in ever-increasing numbers, eventually filling the parking lot. Finally the mall’s power goes out and C.J., Bart, Michael and Kenneth enter the underground parking garage to turn on the emergency generator. After they meet an unaffected dog, a zombie swarm kills Bart and traps the others in the generator compartment, where they douse the zombies with gasoline and set them ablaze.

Meanwhile, Andre, faced with the fact that Luda's bite-wound is inexorably killing her, sinks totally into denial and has his heavily-pregnant and infected wife tied to a bed in the mall's children's store. As she gives birth, she dies and reanimates. Norma checks on the couple, discovering the zombie-Luda and the demented Andre clutching a small bundle of blankets. Norma shoots Luda, causing Andre to snap completely; they exchange more gunfire, mortally wounding each other. Ana arrives onscene and opens the bundle to reveal a zombie baby. She pulls her revolver and a single shot rings through the mall.

At an impromptu memorial, the remaining mall-dwellers decide to flee the mall, fight their way to the local marina, and from there travel out on Steve's small yacht to an island in Lake Michigan. They reinforce two small shuttle buses from the parking garage, removing the seats, welding on a snowplow, attaching floodlights, stringing barbed wire, boarding up the windows, and cutting slits for the deployment of weapons. Chainsaws, propane tanks and other supplies are also loaded onboard. Meanwhile, Andy is starving, and will not have the strength to join the escape (and contribute much-needed ammunition), so the mall survivors strap a pack of food on "Chips", the dog from the basement, and lower him into the parking lot. Unfortunately, while the zombies pay no attention to the dog and Chips successfully follows Andy's whistle to the gun-shop, a zombie gets in as well and badly injures Andy. Nicole, distraught over Chips, takes the delivery truck and barges into the gun store, where she is trapped in a closet by a now-zombified Andy.

Kenneth, Michael, C.J., Terry, and Tucker gather their meager weapon supply and head into the sewers, while Steve is assigned guard-duty on their exit door. They reach the gun store, where Ken kills the zombified Andy and the group finds Nicole and Chips and stocks up on weapons and ammunition. C.J. detonates a propane tank to clear a path back to the sewers, but the zombies pursue them, Tucker is killed and (thanks to Steve's negligence) the zombies break into the mall, forcing an immediate evacuation. The survivors pile into the buses and smash out into the parking lot, where another propane bomb is used to clear a path through the waiting horde. When Glen moves to take out a last hitchhiking zombie with a chainsaw, a sudden swerve sends the weapon slashing into Monica's shoulder. The resulting splatter of blood covers the windshield, causing driver Kenneth to lose control and crash. Glen and Monica are killed, while Steve flees the toppled bus and is attacked by the hitchhiking zombie.

The others scramble for the second bus, meeting zombie-Steve en route. Ana shoots him dead, then must linger to get the boat keys off his corpse, allowing more zombies to catch up with them. Ana flees back to the bus, and Michael helps her in. After a short struggle, they pull away and speed to the marina dock, where they crash the bus and dash for the boat. Cornered in the bus by their pursuers, C.J. detonates a final propane tank blowing up the vehicle, the zombies, and himself. The remainder of the group gets on the boat, except for Michael; he was bitten while helping Ana. Ana futilely pleads with him to come before the boat sets sail with Terry, Ana, Kenneth, Nicole, and Chips. Ana watches unflinchingly as Michael draws his pistol, places it under his chin, and a final gunshot rings out over the water. As the credits roll, the boat reaches an island in the lake, only to be met by a new swarm of zombies. The survivors attempt to escape once again, but the film leaves it an unanswered question whether or not they succeed.

Main article: Dawn of the Dead (2004) characters

Actor	Role
Sarah Polley	Ana Clark
Ving Rhames	Kenneth Hall
Jake Weber	Michael
Kevin Zegers	Terry
Lindy Booth	Nicole
Mekhi Phifer	Andre
Ty Burrell	Steve Marcus
Michael Kelly	C.J.
Michael Barry	Bart
Jayne Eastwood	Norma
Boyd Banks	Tucker
Inna Korobkina	Luda
R.D. Reid	Glen
Kim Poirier	Monica
Matt Frewer	Frank
Bruce Bohne	Andy

The anonymous bloated female zombie who Ana destroys is played by actor Ermes Blarasin, who also appears as a zombie in the 2005 film Land of the Dead.

The production used real amputees to portray zombies with missing limbs.^[1]

James Gunn is only partially responsible for the screenplay, despite receiving solo writing credit. After he left the project to concentrate on Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, both Michael Tolkin and Scott Frank were brought in for rewrites. In a commentary track on the Ultimate Edition DVD for the original Dawn, producer Richard P. Rubenstein explained that Tolkin further developed the characters, while Frank provided some of the bigger action sequences.

The mall scenes of the film as well as the rooftop scenes were shot in the Thornhill Square Shopping Centre in Thornhill, Ontario and the rest of the scenes were shot in the Aileen-Willowbrook Neighborhood of Thornhill, Ontario. The set for Ana and Louis's bedroom was constructed in a backroom of the mall.^[1] The mall was defunct, which is the reason the production used it; the movie crew completely renovated the structure, and stocked it with fictitious stores after Starbucks Coffee and numerous other corporations refused to let their names be used.^[1] (Two exceptions to this are Roots and Panasonic.) Most of the mall was demolished shortly after the film was shot.

The first half of the film was shot almost entirely in chronological order,^[1] while the final sequences on the boat and island were shot much later and at a different location (Universal Studios Hollywood) than the rest of the movie, after preview audiences objected to the sudden ending of the original print.^[1]

The song that plays over the film's opening credits is "The Man Comes Around" by Johnny Cash. The track has suitably apocalyptic lyrics, contains mentions of Armageddon, numerous Bible references and quotes from the Book of Revelation 6:8. The film also featured "People Who Died" by The Jim Carroll Band, as well as both the original version of "Down With The Sickness" by Disturbed and the lounge, jazz-like version by Richard Cheese and Lounge Against the Machine (the lounge version was played during the film, while the real version was played when the survivors met their morbid fate at the island). Have a Nice Day by Stereophonics was also used early in the film. The muzak playing in the mall when the survivors first arrive is Bobby McFerrin's "Don't Worry, Be Happy" and as they flee to the buses it is Air Supply's "All Out of Love".

Director Zack Snyder personally selected all the songs for the film's soundtrack.

In the original film the zombies moved very slowly and were most menacing when they collected in large groups. In the remake, however, the zombies are fast and agile, and are, on the whole, closer to the quick-moving, psychotically violent victims of the 'Rage' virus in the 2002 British horror film 28 Days Later (not to mention 1985's Return of the Living Dead) than the traditional shambling Zombie archetype. Many admirers of the original (as well as Romero himself) protested this change, feeling that it limited the impact of the undead.^[2][3] This is somewhat borne out by the fact that the remake has almost no close up shots of zombies that last more than a second or two. Snyder mentions this problem in the commentary track of the remake's DVD, pointing out that they seem too human when the camera lingers upon them for longer.

In the original, all 'recently dead' are reanimated by an unidentified source. Zombie bites seem to somehow induce rapid death, and subsequent reanimation. The workings aren't elaborated upon. In the remake, it springs up worldwide overnight, and is definitely blood borne, relying on zombie bites for transmission. In the original, anyone who dies for any reason returns after an hour or two (so long as their brain is intact). In the remake, only those infected return and after a period of less than a minute after death.

The original had a smaller cast than the remake, allowing more screen time for each character. Many fans and critics protested the resulting loss of character development.^[4]

In the original version the story unfolds over several months, indicated by the advancing stages of Fran's pregnancy. In the remake the events transpire within approximately 1 month, as evidenced by the supplemental feature The Lost Tape: Andy's Terrifying Last Days Revealed, located on the DVD in the special features section.

Three actors from the original film have cameos in the remake, appearing on the TVs the survivors watch: Ken Foree, who played Peter from the original, plays an evangelist who asserts that God is punishing mankind; Scott H. Reiniger, who played Roger in the original, plays an army general telling everyone to stay at home for safety and Tom Savini, who did the special effects for many of Romero's movies and played the motorcycle gang member Blades in the original Dawn of the Dead, plays the Los Angeles County Sheriff explaining the only way to kill the zombies is to "shoot 'em in the head."

Additional references to Romero's original Living Dead movies include: A store in the mall is named Gaylen Ross, the actress that played Fran in the original Dawn of the Dead. A sign for "Wooley's Diner" can be seen, a nod to the character of "Wooley" in the 1978 version. The character Tucker's name is a reference to Rod Tucker, one of the SWAT team members in the original. A truck from the BP corporation is seen, the same company as in the original. The WGON helicopter from the first film is seen flying into the frame in one early sequence. The film's tagline, "When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth", is the same one from the first film, and is delivered in both films by actor Ken Foree. The mall-dwellers' ultimate escape plan echoes a similar attempt by a group of ex-policemen at the start of the original Dawn, while the re-make's opening sequences contain at least two references to the original Night of the Living Dead film: a car crashes into a gas station and explodes, and the female lead crashes her car into a tree.

Scenes cut from the film's original theatrical release were added back for the "Unrated Director's Cut" DVD edition. Along with gore effects removed to obtain an "R-rating",^[5] they include a clearer depiction of how the survivors originally break into the mall, and a short scene where the character of Glen "tortures" the imprisoned C.J. and Bart with his reminiscing about his homosexual coming-of-age. The DVD also offers, as a bonus feature, several more scenes which were not included in any version of the film.

In the UK, both this film and Shaun of the Dead were originally scheduled to be released the same week, but due to the similarity in the names of the two films and plot outline, UIP opted to push back Shaun's release by two weeks.

The film received a "Two Thumbs Up" rating from the television show Ebert & Roeper.

Heavily derided by some fans before its release,^[6] the film's debut received mostly positive reactions from both moviegoers and critics. Some felt that the film did not retain the social satire and poignancy of the original.^[7] George A. Romero is quoted as saying of the film, "It was better than I expected. [...] The first 15, 20 minutes were terrific, but it sort of lost its reason for being. It was more of a video game. I'm not terrified of things running at me; it's like Space Invaders. There was nothing going on underneath."^[8] The film grossed over $59 million at the box office,^[9] (over $102 million worldwide^[10]) and is currently the highest-grossing zombie film ever made.^[11] Its success also launched the career of director Zack Snyder.

George Romero's original Dawn of the Dead film was followed by 1985's Day of the Dead and 2005's Land of the Dead. In 2006 a remake of Day (also starring Ving Rhames) was announced and a trailer was released. Jeffrey Reddick, the screenwriter on this new production, has been quoted as saying that it is not in any way a sequel to Zack Snyder's version. The film was undergoing reshoots as of March, 2007 and its ongoing status is unclear.

There were reports that Universal Studios was in talks with the 4 survivors of the movie to return for a sequel.

Snyder has committed to at least producing another zombie movie entitled Army of the Dead ^[12]; however, Joby Harold (a co-writer of the film who was involved with the development) said in interviews that it is in no way connected to Dawn 2004.^[13]

This film has been Rated R in the US for pervasive strong horror violence and gore, language and sexuality. In Australia it has been rated MA 15.

A 2007 episode of South Park titled "Night of the Living Homeless" was based off of the plot line on Dawn Of The Dead, but with homeless instead of Zombies.

• Dawn of the Dead
• List of zombie films

• Dawn of the Dead (2004) at the Internet Movie Database
• Official Site
• Trailers
• Dawn of the Dead (2004) at Rotten Tomatoes
• Dawn of the Dead (2004) at Metacritic

• Dawn of the Dead (2004) at Box Office Mojo
• April 24, 2003 draft screenplay
• Thornhill Square Shopping Centre

Preceded by The Passion of the Christ

Box office number-one films of 2004 (USA) March 21, 2004

Succeeded by Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed

v • d • e The Living Dead series
George A. Romero/ John A. Russo film	Night of the Living Dead
Romero's Dead films	Dawn of the Dead  • Day of the Dead  • Land of the Dead  • Diary of the Dead
Russo's Living Dead films	The Return of the Living Dead  • Part II  • 3  • Necropolis  • Rave from the Grave
Dead Series remakes	Night of the Living Dead (1990)  • Dawn of the Dead (2004)  • Day of the Dead (2008)
Notable spoofs/parodies	Night of the Living Bread  • Shaun of the Dead
Unofficial/alternate sequels and remakes	Children of the Living Dead  • Day of the Dead 2: Contagium  • Night of the Living Dead 3D (2006)  • Zombi 2 and its sequels
Related Topics	Characters  • Return of the Living Dead (book)  • Trioxin  • Tarman

v • d • e Films of Zack Snyder
Dawn of the Dead • 300 • Watchmen