In the mid-1980s, 15 years or so after George A. Romero established the modern conception of the "zombie" as an reanimated flesh eater in Night Of The Living Dead, undead cinema found itself lurching toward a high water mark. The single greatest year for the zombie movie might best be pegged as 1985, which saw such classics as Romero’s own Day Of The Dead, Re-Animator, Return Of The Living Dead, and, uh…Hard Rock Zombies, if we’re being all-inclusive. Regardless, to seasoned horror hounds living through the golden age of the slasher movie and a surge in titillating grindhouse "classics," it must have seemed as if the ascendant zombie flick would be a staple of the genre forever. No movie monster of the decade had more cachet.
But a few years later? The zombie film had become functionally extinct in American cinemas, having been relegated to the zero-budget waste bin of independent, direct-to-video filmmaking--Blockbuster Video fodder at best. And it would remain that way through the early 2000s, the once-fearsome zombie reduced to a derided symbol of a tackier age. That is, until the tandem of Edgar Wright’s Shaun Of The Dead and Zack Snyder’s Dawn Of The Dead, both celebrating their 20th anniversaries this year, reanimated the genre in 2004 and filled it with an unholy vigor that has continued to propel walking corpses onto our movie screens through the ongoing, gory rebirth. No other year since 1985 has played such a big role in shaping how zombie cinema continues to be made and messily consumed today.
Granted, one would be remiss to launch into a discussion of 2004’s influential gruesome twosome without first acknowledging that the modern zombie revival actually had its first spark of the divine in 2002, with the release of Danny Boyle’s revolutionary 28 Days Later. Although its inclusion in the zombie canon is always a little contentious, given that its creatures are not technically reanimated dead but living humans infected with the “rage virus,” suffering people who will permanently die sooner rather than later from conditions as simple as dehydration or exposure, the structure of the film is undeniable zombie cinema. And its influential elements were innumerable, starting with the visceral shock of seeing a ghoul sprinting rather than shambling at you for the first time, and continuing into its sober evolution of Romero-esque social critique on man’s barbaric nature. Even its instantly iconic opening--Cillian Murphy’s Jim, waking up in a hospital and dejectedly wandering a seemingly totally abandoned London--would go on to be more or less parroted back by comics author Robert Kirkman in 2004's first issue of The Walking Dead, which would of course go on to be adapted by AMC as one of the touchstone zombie properties of the 2010s.
There’s no doubt that both Shaun and Dawn were informed by elements of 28 Days Later as well. What the 2004 duo accomplished, however, was moving the zombie movie back into the wider cultural conversation, cementing its viability simultaneously from two very different fronts. Snyder’s Dawn Of The Dead embraced those “fast zombies” in the course of making a lean, vicious reboot of Romero’s first sequel, reminding American audiences of the chaotic terror that zombies once evoked as a cinematic boogeyman. It went a long way in allowing viewers to take zombies seriously again, and not just view them as a cast-off bit of 1980s genre schlock. And Shaun, meanwhile, lovingly parodied the genre’s roots while deftly balancing genuine horror and emotion with sidesplitting jokes and wicked satire of the daily drudgery of modern existence. Together, the two films demonstrated how effectively but radically differently the living dead could be utilized on screen, making an observation that subsequent films have hammered home repeatedly during the past 20 years: The easiest way to influence how the audience perceives a zombie is to simply have them follow the characters’ leads.
It sounds so obvious in retrospect, but the zombie, more than other horror antagonists, can naturally vary in its level of perceived threat. They want to eat your flesh; that’s scary, sure. But at the same time, the traditional Romero ghoul is slow. It’s dumb. You could probably push one down a flight of stairs with a broom handle if you wanted to avoid getting your hands dirty. Because this style of zombie isn’t terribly competent in a one-on-one capacity, it’s easy and plausible to make them into the subject of mockery. Romero himself eventually highlighted this aspect in 2005’s underappreciated Land Of The Dead, imagining a post-zombie apocalypse world where the now-bougie survivors of a walled-off Pittsburgh have become not only complacent but contemptuous of the living dead as a threat, chaining them up and using them as playthings in a way that ultimately brings the audience through a 180, engendering sympathy for the monsters. This was one of Romero’s most radical ideas, critiquing the arrogance of the "survivors" in a mythos that he himself had created decades earlier, but one wonders whether he took any inspiration from the ending of Shaun, another setting where the zombie threat has been neutralized by society to the point of treating the creatures as pathetic punching bags.
Of course, this declawing of the undead didn’t simply show up fully formed in 2004. As the 1980s rolled on, the prevalence of horror comedy grew, perhaps out of a more jaded sentiment than anything else. Where the decade had begun with audiences titillated and aghast at the likes of Friday The 13th, they quickly grew inured to the new level of splatter and transgression that saturated cinemas. A rapidly ossifying form of cynicism had set in, and with it came a reduction in creators trying to tell sincere, scary zombie stories. Audiences increasingly thought they were a bit too cool for that. This is how we end up with titles like Night Of The Living Babes and Redneck Zombies by the time you get to 1987. By the 1990s, it was hard to find the zombie movie in theaters at all, and you have to widen your definition to include things like Pet Sematary, or foreign films like Braindead or Cemetery Man that were keeping the genre going outside of the U.S. Back in America, zombies had been relegated to clunky comedies like 1993’s My Boyfriend’s Back, their horror roots largely discarded. The years leading up to the early 2000s were lean times.
Shaun Of The Dead was instrumental in bringing comedy and genuine zombie horror back together in an organic way that worked in conjunction for both genres. It contains enough winking references to the history of the form--Ed yelling to Barbara through the phone that “we’re coming to get you” was an inspired NOTLD callback on Wright’s part--to sate the horror geeks in the crowd, while also being so perfectly self-contained that a comedy fan who has never seen a zombie film before will get just as much out of it as the most devoted Romero acolyte. And as suggested above, it registers primarily as comedy mostly because of the way its characters react, or lack a reaction, to a zombie plague as it descends upon them. One of the funniest running gags of Shaun Of The Dead is that Shaun and Ed are so hopelessly self-absorbed and unplugged from the realities and responsibilities of their world that they don’t even notice anything is amiss as that world is melting down around them. Shaun’s daily trudge to work and back is so utterly banal, how is he supposed to tell the zombies from the wage slaves?
And when Shaun and Ed finally do confront a couple of zombies in their backyard, what is their first instinct to eliminate the monsters? Not to acquire a gun, or even a heavy blunt object, but to instead to hurl silverware, household appliances, and eventually the unwanted items in Shaun’s record collection at the (very slowly) advancing threat. It’s only natural to be able to crack wise during a zombie attack, when they’re coming at you so ploddingly that you have time to argue about musical taste as you leaf through the LPs.
And yet Shaun Of The Dead doesn’t forget about the horror bonafides either, particularly in its third act last stand at The Winchester, as the group begins to be whittled down. Look no further than the spectacularly gory death of David, who is torn limb from limb in a manner no less shocking than the similar denouement of the mentally unhinged Captain Rhodes at the end of Romero’s Day Of The Dead. It almost feels like Wright is chastising us a bit for buying into the seeming lightness of his premise throughout--the trickster writer-director pulling the rug out from under you with a chuckle: “Did you think this was all fun and games? They’re still zombies, folks.” That’s what we get for getting complacent.
Snyder’s Dawn Of The Dead, on the other hand, sought to remind audiences of how ferociously the living dead could be presented, decades after they had become a punchline. That starts with reminding the viewer of the invasive nature of zombification--the way it forcibly takes hold of a familiar person’s body, turning it into a cruel marionette for its cannibalistic urges. Becoming a zombie is the ultimate loss of control, made all the more horrific by the Romero-esque idea that some kernel of your consciousness or soul might still be buried under the putrefying flesh, unable to escape or die. This is what Dawn Of The Dead’s Ana sees when she wakes up one morning to an innocent neighbor’s child having entered her home, only to see that kid rip into her husband’s throat with savage glee. Thirty seconds ago, Ana was asleep. Sixty seconds from now, she’ll be instinctually fighting for her life against her own reanimated husband, now trying to tear her face off. Quite a rapid period for someone’s life to completely fall apart.
That’s what Snyder’s film uses to such devastating effect: Speed. It accelerates the intensity of the scenario from zero to 100 with more alacrity than maybe any other zombie movie ever made, with the possible exception of the equally devastating (and even more emotional) intro to 28 Weeks Later. But like that film, this one drops us cold, into a world that has seemingly completely collapsed overnight, with a protagonist who is forced to hit the ground running if she wants to survive, without even the benefit of shoes on her feet. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to call these opening eight minutes or so a masterpiece--if anything, this is Snyder’s career peak, back when he was focused on simply making kinetic, crowd-pleasing action fare rather than buying into his own hype as a visual effects pioneer. No one else has captured the initial panic of societal collapse as pulse-poundingly as he does here, in the utter chaos of this panicked free-for-all.
Much of that hyperactive energy can be attributed to Snyder’s astute choice to utilize the type of sprinting killers first seen in 28 Days Later, applying that kind of razor-sharp focus to the traditionally dim and lethargic Romero ghoul. In the original Dawn Of The Dead, the survivors who set up shop in a large shopping mall find that they can bob and weave through the mall’s zombies without much effort, or use tools to distract and redirect them to where they want to be. With these zombies, on the other hand? Good luck redirecting something accelerating to tackle you like an NFL linebacker. You can’t win a fight against a creature with a human’s body, but no human’s sense of self-preservation. To zombie horror geeks who had grown up with the genre, it’s hard to accurately capture in 2024 what a revelation the "fast zombie" really was at the time--it managed to take a familiar threat, one you could winkingly disregard, and supercharge it into something wholly new and terrifying.
It’s no wonder, then, that the characters of Snyder’s Dawn Of The Dead react with fully justifiable terror, any trace of superiority they might have felt over the clumsy Romero ghouls evaporating instantly as it becomes clear that we are terribly equipped for survival in a real fight. And the audience simply follows suit, as the film invites you to anxiously consider what might happen if your own life fell apart just as catastrophically one morning. Perhaps we don’t have to seriously worry about the reanimated dead making us into a snack, but hoards of angry people in the streets, looking for a target for their rage as the supposed protectors of our society sit powerlessly on the sidelines? Well, we’ve seen that a time or two within recent memory. Dawn Of The Dead makes you feel that powerlessness. Its zombies are no hungrier than Wright’s in Shaun Of The Dead, but its characters more realistically mirror how we’d probably react to the moment--by shooting our neighbors, rather than playing videogames with them.
Together, Shaun and Dawn were both fantastically successful in making their zombie movies appeal to different audiences, with some obvious undead overlap. They both displayed reverence for genre source material in their own ways, while finessing new forms of interaction with the premise that would go on to be codified as tropes for the next two decades of zombie cinema. Most serious zombie horror that continues to be produced today has a lineage that runs through the transgressive moments of Dawn Of The Dead, and can one even consider making a zombie comedy without some level of deference to Shaun? Together, these two remade the modern zombie in their own image, and even Romero found himself following their lead. It’s hard to believe that there will ever be another year more consequential for our favorite cinematic flesh-eaters than 2004.
