by Matthew Fouts

Created on: October 31, 2008

"When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth." This line was originally read in George Romero's Dawn of the Dead but it makes a cameo in the remake, which came out in 2004. The times in which these two movies were produced are very different. But, in many fundamental ways, these two movies are very similar in the way they reflect the particular fears and concerns of the society in which they were made. Specifically, I am arguing that the remake of Dawn of the Dead reflects the experience of the attacks of September 11 as well as the lingering fears created by that experience.

To begin with, let us take a look at the historical context of some of the more popular zombie movies of the past. It is generally acknowledged that the first big movie of the zombie genre is George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. Released in 1968, this movie clearly echos the time in which it was made. Critics have pointed out both the obvious parallels with the Vietnam War as well as the less obvious reflections of a society that was in turmoil. Civil unrest was sweeping the country like a prairie fire. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X had recently been assassinated and the riots at the Democratic national convention had occurred just two months before the movie was released. The idea that Americans were their own worst enemy as well as the fear that disparate elements of our own society threatened to consume the white American way of life could not fail to resonate with the viewing public.
Romero's sequel to Night of the Living Dead was released ten years later and to a very different viewing public. Dawn of the Dead came out in 1978 and was a continuation of the story begun in his first zombie film. In this story, the zombie menace is spreading and the civil defense apparatus is breaking down. Four friends desert their posts to escape the goulish plague. They end up barricading themselves inside a large shopping mall and looting the stores for supplies. The movie is chock-full of references to the growing consumer culture of the time. The zombies, themselves, look like shoppers as they shuffle through the mall and the heros are shown to be trapped within the mall as, I would argue, Americans were beginning to become trapped by the culture of commodity that was beginning to exist in 1978 and would soon come to fruition in the Nineteen-Eighties.
The remake of Dawn of the Dead, which was released in 2004 resembles, in many ways, Night more than the movie after which

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