Zombie Movies

Day of the Dead (also known as George A. Romero’s Day of the Dead) is a 1985 horror film by director George A. Romero, the third of Romero’s Living Dead movies. It is preceded by Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead. Steve Miner directed a remake which was released on February 15, 2008. Director George A. Romero describes the film as a “tragedy about how a lack of human communication causes chaos and collapse even in this small little pie slice of society”.

Plot

An undead apocalypse has ravaged the Earth whilst America’s last surviving humans study them from within an underground military establishment. The survivors in the film are horrified at the prospect that they “are the only ones left”, creating a crisis within human civilization over whether or not the idea of human society should be continued or abandoned. The living characters in the film are made up of three distinctive groups, each of whom have been given a task by the government – but since the government is no longer providing oversight (and may no longer exist) each group is becoming increasingly subject to temptations that go beyond their instructions. The scientists have been ordered to find a resolution to the epidemic but are tempted to violate nature’s boundaries guarding life and death, soldiers who are assigned to protect the doctors appointed to study the zombies but are tempted to enforce fascistic martial law and destroy the specimens in an act of rebellion, and the civilians who are assigned to serve both groups with basic though necessary services like transportation and communication but are tempted to abandon the cause and, instead, live out their last days in reckless abandon.

Cast

• Lori Cardille as Dr. Sarah Bowman
• Terry Alexander as John
• Joe Pilato as Captain Rhodes
• Jarlath Conroy as William McDermott
• Anthony Dileo Jr. as Pvt. Miguel Salazar
• Richard Liberty as Dr. Matthew Logan / “Frankenstein”
• Sherman Howard as Bub, The Zombie
• Gary Howard Klar as Pvt. Steel
• Ralph Marrero as Pvt. Rickles
• John Amplas as Dr. Ted Fisher
• Phillip G. Kellams as Pvt. Miller
• Taso N. Stavrakis as Pvt. Torrez

Dawn of the Dead is a 2004 horror remake 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 produced by Strike Entertainment, 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. The film was Rated R in the U.S. for “Pervasive strong horror violence and gore, language and sexuality”. In Australia it was edited for content and is rated MA15.

Production

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 and upbeat 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. 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  (two exceptions to this are Roots and Panasonic). Most of the mall was demolished shortly after the film was shot. The fictitious stores include a coffeeshop called Hallowed Grounds (a lyric from Johnny Cash’s song “The Man Comes Around,” which was used over the opening credits), and an upscale department store called Gaylen Ross (an in-joke reference to one of the stars of the original 1978 movie).

The first half of the film was shot almost entirely in chronological order, 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.

Cast

• Sarah Polley - Ana Clark
• Ving Rhames - Kenneth Hall
• Jake Weber – Michael
• Michael Kelly - C.J.
• Kevin Zegers - Terry
• Lindy Booth - Nicole
• Mekhi Phifer -  Andre
• Inna Korobkina - Luda
• Ty Burrell - Steve Markus
• Michael Barry - Bart
• Jayne Eastwood - Norma

Night of the Living Dead, directed by George Romero, is a 1968 independent black-and-white horror film. Ben (Duane Jones) and Barbra (Judith O’Dea) are the protagonists of a story about the mysterious reanimation of the recently dead, and their efforts, along with five other people, to survive the night while trapped in a rural Pennsylvania farmhouse.

George Romero completed the film on a $114,000 budget, and after a decade of cinematic re-releases, it grossed some $12 million domestically and $30 million internationally. On its release in 1968, Night of the Living Dead was strongly criticized for its explicit content. In 1999, the Library of Congress registered it to the National Film Registry as a film deemed “historically, culturally or aesthetically important”.

Night of the Living Dead had a great impact upon the culture of the Vietnam-era United States, because it is laden with critiques of late-1960s U.S. society; a historian described it as “subversive on many levels”. Although it is not the first zombie film, Night of the Living Dead is the progenitor of the contemporary “zombie apocalypse” sub-genre of horror film, and it influenced the modern pop-culture zombie archetype. Night of the Living Dead (1968), is the first of five Dead films directed by George Romero, and twice has been remade, as Night of the Living Dead (1990 film), directed by Tom Savini, and as Night of the Living Dead 3D (2006).

Influence

Director George Romero revolutionized the horror film genre with Night of the Living Dead; per Almar Haflidason, of the BBC, the film represented “a new dawn in horror film-making”. The film has also effectively redefined the use of the term Zombie. Early zombie films — Victor Halperin’s White Zombie (1932), Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie (1943) — concerned living people enslaved by a Voodoo witch doctor; many were set in the Caribbean.

The film and its successors spawned countless imitators that borrowed elements instituted by Romero: Tombs of the Blind Dead, Zombie, Hell of the Living Dead, The Evil Dead, Night of the Comet, Return of the Living Dead, Night of the Creeps, Braindead, Children of the Living Dead, and the video game series Resident Evil (later adapted as films in 2002, 2004, and 2007), Dead Rising, and House of the Dead. Night of the Living Dead is parodied in films such as Night of the Living Bread and Shaun of the Dead, and in episodes of The Simpsons (“Treehouse of Horror III”, 1992) and South Park (“Pink Eye“, 1997; “Night of the Living Homeless”, 2007). The word zombie is never used, but Romero’s film introduced the theme of zombies as reanimated, flesh-eating cannibals.

Night of the Living Dead ushered in the slasher and splatter film sub-genres. As one film historian points out, horror prior to Romero’s film had mostly involved rubber masks and costumes, cardboard sets, or mysterious figures lurking in the shadows. They were set in locations far removed from rural and suburban America. Romero revealed the power behind exploitation and setting horror in ordinary, unexceptional locations and offered a template for making an “effective and lucrative” film on a “minuscule budget”. Slasher films of the 1970s and 80s such as John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th (1980), and Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), for example, “owe much to the original Night of the Living Dead“.