Zack Snyder's 2004 remake of George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead is one of the better horror re-dos out there, and that's not by accident. When most people think of Snyder's career now, their minds tend to go to his DC films, especially the catastrophe surrounding the released version of Justice League. To horror fans though, Snyder will always be most associated with his first - and to date only - film within the genre, Dawn of the Dead.
Every horror remake gets some level of backlash from the genre community, and it's no wonder, due to the fact that horror is probably the most remade genre out there. Just about every major classic has been remade at least once, and it's frustrating for fans, as the remakes rarely live up to the originals, or even come close. Thankfully, Snyder's Dawn of the Dead proved to be a rare exception. Nobody is saying it's better than Romero's film, but it's a damn good zombie movie in its own right.
So, what did Snyder - along with screenwriter James Gunn - do with his Dawn of the Dead that sets it apart from most horror remakes, and remakes in general? Lots of things, for which both men should be commended.
What Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead Remake Got So Right
One reaction many fans had to the idea of Dawn of the Dead being remade - there wasn't much issue with Zack Snyder being the one to direct it, as nobody really knew who he was yet - was the feeling that it was a pointless endeavor. After all, George Romero all but invented zombie movies with Night of the Living Dead, and Dawn was arguably his magnum opus. No director or writer was going to outdo Romero at zombies, and thankfully, both Snyder and Gunn realized this.
Snyder's Dawn of the Dead made no attempt to do Romero better than Romero, instead using his basic template to craft a story perhaps worthy of sitting beside the Romero films at the top tier of zombie cinema. Snyder's remake had zombies, and survivors living in a mall, but everything else was fresh and new, outside of some well-placed homages to Romero's work. The characters were all new, the story beats had little in common with the original, the level of action was amped way up, and the zombies didn't operate the same way. What Snyder and Gunn retained was the basic feeling of hopelessness experienced by those still alive after the rise of the living dead, and also, at the same time, the need to try and preserve what makes humans human.
Way too many remakes - horror or otherwise - seem to be afraid of deviating too much from the original story, yet, as Disney's soulless Lion King remake showed in 2019, slavish devotion to the film being remade just leaves most moviegoers with an empty feeling. The Lion King 2019 was almost exactly the same as the original, yet somehow not nearly as good. In horror, Carrie, Psycho, and The Omen have also made the same mistake, among others. Classics are classics for a reason, and telling the same story with the same characters again rarely leads to satisfying results. If more remakes operated like Snyder's Dawn of the Dead, keeping the outline but changing up the rest, maybe the word remake wouldn't be so hated by fans.