The zombie genre is one of the most popular subcategories of horror cinema. Swarms of the undead can be used as a metaphor for any number of social issues, while the immense pressure of surviving in a post-apocalyptic wasteland presents the living characters with real challenges that force them to grow as people if they’re written well.
George A. Romero’s zombie-infested masterpiece Dawn of the Dead is arguably the greatest zombie movie ever made, but it faces stiff competition from some of the genre’s other offerings. There have been plenty of great zombie movies from around the world that have given Dawn of the Dead a run for its money.
DAWN OF THE DEAD: It Has The Genre’s Best Social Commentary
With Night of the Living Dead’s allegory for contemporary racial tensions in the United States, Romero established that an essential component of any zombie movie is a sprinkling of sharp social commentary. In Dawn of the Dead, he tackled the zombie genre’s ultimate satirical target: consumer culture.
Amidst the blood-soaked carnage of Dawn of the Dead, Romero buried a bitter critique of the end-times terror of living in an increasingly capitalist society.
CLOSEST CONTENDER: 28 Days Later (2002)
Danny Boyle denies that 28 Days Later is a zombie movie, but c’mon, it’s a zombie movie. With its gritty visuals, ultrarealistic tone, and visceral editing, 28 Days Later brings a sobering reality to the Hollywood fantasy of a zombie apocalypse.
In response to zombie movies that had made survival in a zombie-infested world look fun or easy, Boyle reminded viewers that it would be utterly terrifying.
DAWN OF THE DEAD: It’s Artful AND Entertaining
Stylistically, Dawn of the Dead has it’s cake and eats it, too. It doesn’t choose between the grindhouse thrills of the midnight movie circuit and the sophisticated edge of so-called “elevated horror.” Instead, it exhibits both beautifully. It revels in gore, but it’s also a respectable work of art.
Very few horror movies have managed to pull this off, with almost every horror film falling into one of these two categories, but Romero nailed that balance effortlessly in Dawn of the Dead.
CLOSEST CONTENDER: Rec (2007)
The “found footage” subgenre of horror cinema can be truly awful if the execution is lazy, but if as much attention is paid to the composition of a “found footage” movie as any other movie, then it can be a captivating moviegoing experience that puts the audience right in the protagonist’s shoes.
Such is the case with REC, which revolves around a news crew that gets quarantined in an apartment building being consumed by a zombie virus. The quarantine creates an intense cinematic claustrophobia, while the dawning realization that everyone in the building is being left to die as collateral damage to prevent further contamination is seriously haunting.
DAWN OF THE DEAD: It’s A Perfect Sequel To Night Of The Living Dead
Dawn of the Dead is technically a sequel to Night of the Living Dead, although the only connective tissue is the zombie apocalypse; the movies have no characters in common besides the hordes of flesh-eaters. But still, it’s a perfect sequel to that movie.
In Night of the Living Dead, we saw this apocalypse from the perspective of a few people stranded out in the countryside, which was certainly terrifying, but in Dawn of the Dead, that fear was amplified by showing the more chaotic response in heavily populated urban areas. James Cameron did a similar thing in another perfect horror sequel, Aliens, replacing the single xenomorph from the first Alien film with a colony of dozens of them.
CLOSEST CONTENDER: Train To Busan (2016)
In a post-Walking Dead world completely desensitized to zombie movies, the best zombie movies are simply the ones that manage to make zombies scary again. Yeon Sang-ho’s Train to Busan does just that. It takes the sprinting zombies of World War Z and uses a more lenient age rating to make those sprinting zombies feel like a real threat.
Train to Busan has some of the zombie genre’s signature social commentary, too, as the class divisions of the train gradually begin to represent the class divisions of society and the viral outbreak is revealed to be a result of corporate greed.
DAWN OF THE DEAD: It’s The Best Zombie Movie By The Godfather Of Zombie Movies
George A. Romero is the godfather of zombie movies. The idea of the undead originated from Haitian slaves, decades before Romero was born, but Romero defined the modern zombie movie with Night of the Living Dead. Since then, zombie stories have generally revolved around a band of survivors struggling amid a widespread apocalypse in which the dead rise from their graves and eat people’s brains.
Every zombie movie is a different take on Romero’s (admittedly flexible) formula. So, it makes sense that the official best zombie movie ever, if there was one, would be a Romero film. Every non-Romero zombie film is fundamentally derivative of Romero’s work.
CLOSEST CONTENDER: Shaun Of The Dead (2004)
The hilariously dry Shaun of the Dead is a comedy, but it works so well as a zombie movie that it could arguably take the top spot. Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg have always been hesitant to call Shaun of the Dead a parody of zombie films, because that implies that they’re making fun of zombie films, when they actually made the movie for the opposite reason: it’s a love letter to zombie movies.
By the 2000s, the genre had become inherently self-aware after hundreds of zombie movies followed Romero’s basic outline. Wright and Pegg’s script takes a lot of affectionate jabs at zombie movies, but it also has characters and situations that feel real. It hits all the familiar beats, but develops enough of its own identity to feel fresh. It’s a perfect example of the Romero formula being redone right.
DAWN OF THE DEAD: It’s A Definitive Portrait Of Post-Apocalyptic America
Post-apocalyptic America has been depicted in a ton of different ways across decades of horror cinema, but the definitive portrait can arguably be found in Dawn of the Dead, with the overmilitarized response to the zombie uprising and the salvation found in a shopping mall, a monument to capitalism.
Romero’s movie is an incisive satire of the American Dream, turning the country’s optimism on its head in a disturbing gonzo nightmare-scape.
CLOSEST CONTENDER: Night Of The Living Dead (1968)
The masters of any genre – sci-fi’s Ridley Scott, the western’s Sergio Leone, comedy’s Mel Brooks etc. – ironically compete with themselves for places on lists of the best movies of that genre. George A. Romero may have perfected the zombie movie with Dawn of the Dead, but he defined it with Night of the Living Dead.
If it hadn’t been for all the ground that Romero broke with Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead wouldn’t have been able to exist. And Night of the Living Dead is a near-perfect movie in its own right.