31 Days of Halloween: Dawn of the Dead

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Looking for some film recommendations for Halloween? 31 Days of Halloween exhumes some of our favourite horror films, giving all you film-hungry ghouls a brief run-down of some of the most frightful film classics to shamble into cinemas. So grab some treats, fire up your cauldron, and join us as we celebrate some of the best fright flicks of all-time this Halloween.

Dawn of the Dead (1978)

Dawn of the Dead, George Romero's epic follow-up to Night of the Living Dead, is rightly considered to be one of -if not the- best zombie movies ever made. Mixing satire and social commentary with plenty of tense set pieces and ingenious gore (courtesy of SFX guru and part-time Sex Machine Tom Savini), it is a true horror epic. 

As with most of Romero's Dead flicks, it's the humans that take centre stage, their descent into mindless consumerism a perfect mirror for the hordes of mindless ghouls who see the mall our survivors conquer as some kind of undead Mecca. For the most part the zombies provide a sense of gnawing dread; an ever present threat that slowly undermines our survivors' new found sense of safety and security. At the end of the day, a prison, no matter how big and well-stocked, is still a prison, and the true horror horror of the film comes from our heroes' realisation that they will never truly be free while the zombies roam.

For those of you uninterested in allegory, don't fear, Dawn of the Dead still has plenty of moments of outrageous gore and fantastic action. A tense trawl through an apartment block, which soon erupts into barely controlled chaos, kicks off the film and does an excellent job of establishing this frightening new world. Then there's the finale, a furious three-way rumble between our heroes, the zombies and a mob of marauding bikers that is goofy, gory and epic all at the same time. 

In the end, the film's greatest strength lies in the fact it can be enjoyed on so many levels: whether you want a searing socio-political satire, a piece of pure escapism, or just a raw and bloody horror film, Dawn of the Dead has you covered.