Dawn Of The Dead (1978) - The zombie purist's classic

Zombies are everywhere these days and, rightly or wrongly, many consider Dawn of the Dead (1978) to be the cause of it all. It's actually a follow-up to the 1960s `Night of the Living Dead,' but Dawn was the more successful due to its epic scale and added action (that and being in colour).

If you've never seen Dawn of the Dead (1978) before, and only watched modern zombie movies, you may not get why it's so popular. The zombies here move slower than your Gran and are simply painted either slightly greener than normal or slightly bluer than normal. Plus they only really eat you if you're completely stupid. Yet, despite those flaws, the film is still a classic.

For a start it's the longest of all zombie films (extended edition, anyway) and is set in a world that is slowly falling apart due to the undead outbreak. Our four heroes take refuge in a shopping mall in an attempt to wait out the dead.

If you talk to any die-hard fans, they'll delight in telling you that Dawn of the Dead is an attack on a consumer society and that zombies are a metaphor for shoppers with too much cash (or something). That may be true, but, at the end of the day, that sort of talk is all a little pretentious and, ultimately, Dawn of the Dead is about zombies ripping you apart if you get too near them or don't blow their brains out quick enough.

Someone once described Dawn of the Dead as `the Gone With the Wind' of zombie movies. I can see what they mean - it's large, loud, epic and proud of itself. If you haven't already seen it, you may want to put yourself in audiences' shoes when they first saw it in 1978. Back then, an apocalyptic horror movie on this scale was pretty unheard of. Don't expect massive battles, great special effects of particularly realistic zombies (and don't expect them to run, either!). Just enjoy it for what it is - a piece of genuine cinema history.

I love it, and yet I can still pick a fair few holes in the plot, characters and theme. The story kind of trundles in no direction and many motivations are left unexplained, but that's a small price to pay for a film that will - whether you like it or not - stand the test of time in the zombie genre.

10/10 The Monty Python Knights of Camelot are currently looking for this