Dawn of the Dead (2004)

It's this movies fault, this is the one that kicked off my obsession with the Zombie sub genre. I had picked the DVD on the off chance it might be a decent watch and I was proved so very right. We open with an attractive young nurse making her weary way home after a long shift. Everything seems normal on the surface and she gets back to her home and snuggles with her husband.

Come the morning however and things are very, very different. Her husband wakes up to find a blood soaked young girl in their room and he gets bitten by the little cow. He then turns into a zombie and attacks the nurse. Said nurse escapes and heads out of town. She teams up with a cop, played by Ving Rhames and they make their way to a shopping mall where they meet further disparate survivors. Once there they have to figure out what they're going to do to survive this apocalypse.

Whilst the original was a commentary on the rampant consumer culture in America at that time, this version takes a different tack. This is more about how different people from very different backgrounds knit together and make a community or family of sorts. That could be taken as an allegory for the insular and selfish nature of life in the modern age. This film has a very stylish and modern feel to it and the music score? Superb! It really helps the movie along and adds a sense of dread and at times light relief.

As with other zombie films, the actors here aren't well known, with Ving Rhames being about the best known of the lot. To me this is a bonus as you want your zombie films to make you think you could be there, and that's hard to do when you see Tom Cruise having his innards chewed on, as nice a thought as that may be! As with other horror films, you end up having people you want to see die and you have the ones you want to survive. In keeping with the Zombie tradition though, the film ends with an abrupt volte face.

This film blew me away when I saw it and it still has the power to hold me now. The writing here is first rate, making the action engrossing and engaging. There are moments that pack a real emotional punch and there's your quota of scares and full on gory moments. The director, Zack Snyder, decided to take a faster, more intense tone with this remake, and you can see that shining through in each and every frame of this cracking movie. As I said at the start of this interview, Dawn Of The Dead kicked off my love of the undead. It's not my favorite zombie movie, that honor belongs to Zombieland, but this runs it a very close second.