Like the cities they infest, zombies have always swarmed the horror genre. Bouncing from highs like "28 Days Later" to extreme, cavernous lows like "Zombie Honeymoon," the genre has seen thousands of takes on one of horror's oldest monsters.
Despite numerous reinventions of the genre, the ravenous undead truly came to fruition in a barricaded Monroeville Mall in 1978.
Such was the paramount setting of George Romero's "Dawn of the Dead." The zombie movie master debuted as a director in 1969 with the innovative "Night of the Living Dead," which created the zombie as we now know it, but it wasn't until his sequel that the zombie genre was fully realized.
"Dawn of the Dead" follows two Philadelphia SWAT team members and a helicopter pilot and his girlfriend through their battle for survival against the ever-growing legion of undead.
Boasting some of the earliest work of gore, make-up and special effects mastermind Tom Savini, "Dawn" is truly one of the best zombie movies.
The special effects probably show its 30-year age the most, but its still evident they were ground-breaking at the time of its release. Savini worked wonders without digital enhancement, using creative, old-fashioned techniques, such as an exploding head rigged with blood-filled condoms.
Even if its gore effects were mediocre, "Dawn" would probably rank just a highly in the all-time spectrum of zombie flicks because of the its characters.
I mentioned the vast number of zombie flicks that are spit out of an assembly line. Over and over the characters are cliches, they lack any kind of appeal and you don't care what happens to them. "Dawn" delivers the opposite.
You get to see how the notion of an inevitably deteriorating world weighs down on the foursome as they pass day after day in mall, void of options.
At the same time, there are plenty of scenes where you see the characters bonding and enjoying life with each other in a zombie-ridden world.
Romero's "Dawn of the Dead" incorporates every factor that we now automatically expect from a quality film about the living dead. It may be 30 years old, but its quality continues to tower over 99 percent of the genre.
It may not deliver the heavy scares any more, but its lasting effect on the horror genre and the nostalgia attached to the cult classic "Dawn of the Dead" make it a must-see this time of year.
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