Dawn of the Dead (1978) on Netflix
The dead are rising and the cities are falling into chaos. Stephen, Fran, Roger and Peter escape Philadelphia by helicopter and take refuge in a shopping mall.
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- Netflix4.3/5
- IMDb7.8/10137,609 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes92%
Trailer
Plot summary
In Philadelphia, as an epidemic of the reanimated dead spreads and social order collapses, traffic reporter Stephen Andrews and Francine Parker, a producer at his station and pregnant with his child, plan to escape the city by taking the station's helicopter. Across town, SWAT officer Roger DeMarco joins a raid on a housing project whose tenants refuse to hand over their dead, and the gunfire and the walking corpses there leave him ready to desert. He and another officer, Peter Washington, meet Stephen and Fran at a police dock, and the four fly out. After stops for fuel, they find a shopping mall stocked with food and medicine and decide to stay.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Dawn of the Dead (1978)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The make-up artist Tom Savini rented a skeleton that turned out to be a real human one; it stood on display in an Allegheny County costume shop until County Coroner Joshua Perper confiscated it in 1982, still carrying fake flesh from the film.
- George A. Romero got the idea for the film in 1974, when a friend whose company managed the Monroeville Mall showed him its hidden parts and joked that someone could survive in a mall in an emergency; Romero began writing the screenplay from that.
- Because the production used a real, open shopping mall during the Christmas shopping season, filming ran nightly once the mall closed, from 11 PM until 7 AM, when the automated music came on.
- The original screenplay had Peter and Francine kill themselves, Peter by shooting himself and Fran by putting her head into the helicopter's rotor blades, but the ending was changed during production.
- The US theatrical cut drew an X rating for its graphic violence; rejecting it, Romero and the producers released the film unrated to help its commercial prospects.
- Make-up artist Tom Savini, offered work on Night of the Living Dead before he was drafted into the Vietnam War, made his debut as an effects artist here, with a crew of eight applying gray makeup to two to three hundred extras every weekend of the shoot.
- The film's bright, fluorescent fake blood, made by 3M, was an accident; make-up artist Tom Savini opposed it, but Romero kept it, saying it emphasised the comic-book feel of the movie.
- The tune heard in the mall and over the end credits, "The Gonk", is a polka-style instrumental by Herbert Chappell from the De Wolfe stock music library, with a chorus of zombie moans added by Romero.
