Spawn of the Dead
How two prolific genre directors reanimated the Romero legacy for the 21st century, with wildly different approaches, at almost exactly the same time
In March 2004, zombie doomsdayers were presented with an unexpected treat of a dilemma at the cinema: should they watch the studio-backed Dawn of the Dead (1978) remake that looked like a straight-forward horror movie of the era, or the Dawn of the Dead tribute film from across the pond that appeared to be…a romantic comedy?
The movies on either side of this coinflip, Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead and Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead, may have looked very similar at a glance; they had rhyming titles, an identical point of derivation in George A. Romero’s 1978 classic, and relatively green directors with backgrounds in music videos and commercials. Wright had helmed a super-low-budget feature, A Fistful of Fingers, nearly a decade prior, then further developed his distinct high-intensity post-slacker style with the TV series Spaced. Snyder was making his feature debut with Dawn, working from a script by live-action Scooby-Doo scribe James Gunn.
But beyond those superficial similarities, Dawn and Shaun were about as dissimilar proto-legacy sequels of the same movie as possible.To best understand each film’s initial reception and eventual reputation, it helps to look at the impact of Romero’s OG zombie trilogy, and how each director worked with and against the near-universal doctrine established across those films.
With 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, 1978’s Dawn of the Dead, and 1985’s Day of the Dead, Romero showcased a world where the recently deceased rose from the dead and suddenly spiraled the planet into a waking nightmare. These “ghouls” seemingly had only one function and desire: to feast upon the flesh of the living. Night chronicled the initial outbreak, Dawn picked up the story at the hingepoint of societal collapse, and Day explored the harrowing reality of a world likely far beyond being saved.
Across these films, Romero inadvertently wrote the “rules” that have largely defined zombie cinema ever since: when there’s no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the Earth (that’s as good an explanation as you’re gonna get). To neutralize the dead, destroy the brain—nothing else will stop them. If you get bit, you’re gonna fall ill, die, and become a zombie yourself. And lastly, zombies don’t run; they walk, shuffle, perhaps amble. Basically, zombies move the way you’d expect a dead body might move if it could: very slowly.
And so it was, until 2002, when the Danny Boyle-directed/Alex Garland-penned 28 Days Later asked “what if the ghouls were alive, infected by a lab-accelerated virus, and could move like Olympic athletes on methamphetamines?” Considered sacrilege by many Romero purists, the “fast zombie” nonetheless turned out to be a shot in the arm for a genre that had seemingly exhausted its possibilities, and served as a pivot that would give the 2004 Dawn its raison d'être.
With the studio, screenwriter, and Snyder aligned on crafting a straightforward horror film, the overlap between the 1978 and 2004 Dawns could be boiled down to a group of people hiding from flesh-eating zombies inside of a shopping mall. Romero’s film, created when malls were a relatively fresh and paradigm-shifting addition to the American experience, operated as an indictment of 20th century capitalism and consumer culture. Watching a horde of the undead putz around kiosks and sleepwalk up escalators, one character asks “Why do they come here?” Another answers, “This was an important place in their lives.”
Such subtext is, by design, not to be found in the 2004 remake. But what Snyder’s take does boast is a high-energy, fast-paced action-horror full of effective thrills and chills. The opening sequence may be the most intense and terrifyingly tangible depiction of a zombie apocalypse onset in the genre. Main character Ana is introduced to the plague when a little girl zombie attacks Ana’s husband in their bedroom. In moments, he’s zombified and races after Ana, who locks herself in a bathroom, then escapes out the window to see the neighborhood consumed in chaos. Neighbors scream as they are chased by ghouls. Cars and houses are aflame. Sirens blare and military helicopters circle overhead. It’s the end of the world, apparently, and it came out of nowhere.
The direction of this sequence is exemplary of Snyder’s music video and commercial work. There are extreme closeups of an alarm clock ticking from one minute to the next, and door knobs rattling menacingly. There’s an overhead slow-motion shot of Ana’s husband falling onto the bed after having his throat torn open. There’s even a nod to The Shining as Ana’s would-be Wendy Torrance leans against the bathroom door, only for her undead husband to burst through and continue his relentless, bloodthirsty pursuit.
But the most crucial shot in this introductory scene comes early on, and is decidedly bloodless. Having just seen her husband brutally attacked by the little girl, Ana throws the zombie child down the hallway. When the little girl gets back up to continue her attack, she doesn’t crawl on the ground, or struggle to remember how her body might stand itself back up (in the Romero trilogy, knocking a zombie to the ground gives you an easy 20-second head start). Instead, the child zombie springs up from the ground like some sort of gymnast monkey, lands squarely on her feet, and then sprints full-speed back towards her prey. In that single shot, Snyder established that these were not your father’s ramshackle slowpokes—they were fast, spry, and determined.
The rest of Dawn 2004 follows the mold of this opening scene to frightfully fun effect. A previously bed-ridden old woman reanimates, exploding out of bed, shrieking through a furniture store before catching a fire poker through the eye. A zombie with legs chewed off below the knees monkey-bars his way to some sweet neck flesh in the mall’s darkened parking ramp. Also in the mix is a genuinely upsetting scene where a pregnant woman, dead and zombified, is strapped to a bed as her still-living husband coaches her through the birth of their child. As the father holds his baby girl (who, taking after her mother, is a zombie), he asks another survivor who has stumbled in, “You want to kill my family?” It’s the closest thing the movie has to a moral quandary, but there’s not really a discussion to be had. A few gunshots later, and the matter is settled.
Through the use of fast, physically imposing ghouls, and by eschewing social commentary in favor of heart-racing set pieces, Synder’s Dawn proved the viability of big budget action horror—a genre that operates more like a haunted house attraction than a ghost story told around a fire. In 2007, 28 Weeks Later, with bigger thrill sequences and a higher body count than its predecessor, more closely followed the video game logic of Synder’s Dawn than the original Danny Boyle film. World War Z took this approach to its logical end point, with Brad Pitt jettisoning from continent to zombie-infested continent, battling undead swarms in new and exciting (if not necessarily scary) ways at each stop.
While Snyder’s film aped Romero’s title and location, Wright’s Shaun of the Dead is much more faithful to the ethos of the original film, even if it only truly resembles a horror movie in a handful of later-reel scenes. In applying Romero’s zombie apocalypse parameters to a British comedy, Shaun is a great illustration of knowing the rules before you can break them. And Wright demonstrates his knowledge of Romero-esque expectations by subverting them over and over again in hilarious ways.
Romero supposed that zombies might return to patterns and habits of their previous life; in the opening title sequence, Wright shows scores of very-much-alive people already acting like zombies in their repetitious jobs and humdrum daily routines. While the two characters who first encounter a ghoul in Night of the Living Dead are a touch slow to realize the grave nature of the horror they’re facing, the titular Shaun takes this blissful ignorance many steps further; Shaun strolls through his entire morning routine to the shop and back, surrounded and pursued by zombies the entire time, without realizing he’s in the thick of an apocalyptic event. And near the end of the film, when all hope seems lost, military vehicles cruise onto the scene and make very short work of the zombies facing Shaun. In the closing minutes, we see that the “surviving” zombies are now reality TV fodder, and Shaun plays video games with undead best friend Ed in the shed out back, just as they did together before Z-Day. Turns out the zed-word isn’t so scary after all.
Shaun of the Dead proved the zombie romantic comedy to be an unexpectedly desirable genre, with films such as Warm Bodies, Life After Beth, and a couple of Zombielands following in its wake. Just as Wright recognized in Romero’s Dead films, and then drastically expanded upon with Shaun, the existence of zombies in these successors serve as a square one for character-driven stories. Zombies are the appetizer, not the meal. By taking the horror of zombies as a given, Shaun inspired other filmmakers to ask: in a zombie apocalypse, would your slacker best friend continue to make everything a joke? Would your contentious step-parent be more scared or annoyed? Would you forgive your ex so that you don’t die single?
Snyder and Wright’s intersecting inspiration 20 years ago is a rare and intriguing treasure. Amid a tidal wave of cash-in horror remakes in the early 2000s, two up-and-coming directors with auteurist aspirations put their own spin on the indisputable standard bearer of zombie films. By amplifying separate unique aspects of the original film and filling out the rest of the cinematic skeletons with their own budding idiosyncrasies, both 2004 films celebrated their 1978 forebear while establishing new paths in the genre for future directors to explore and expand upon. Remakes have been a part of cinema since the dawn of feature films; filmmakers and audiences alike would be wise to remember that, in 2004, Zach Synder and Edgar Wright proved there’s more than one way to resurrect the dead.