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Say what you will about Zack Snyder’s recent movies, but in 2004 his film career got off to a strong start. His debut movie “Dawn of the Dead,” a remake of George Romero’s 1978 film of the same title, received largely positive reviews and earned over $100 million at the box office against its $26 million budget. The movie even caught the attention of horror legend Stephen King; in his nonfiction book “Danse Macabre,” he described the movie’s opening scene as “genius perfected,” and argued that it “begins with one of the best opening sequences of a horror film ever made.”
“Ana (the gifted actress and director Sarah Polley) is relaxing in bed with her husband, Luis, when they are visited by the cute little skate-girl who lives next door,” King wrote. “When Luis goes to see what she wants, cute little skate-girl tears his throat open, turning him into a zombie … and in the Snyder version, the zombies move fast. (Romero never liked that part, but it works.)”
Not only does this movie introduce running zombies — which weren’t completely unheard of in the zombie genre, but definitely not included in Romero’s original — but bite victims transform at an accelerated speed too. It takes no less than a minute for Luis to become a zombie, chasing Ana out of her bedroom and making her climb out of her bathroom window. As King describes it:
“Through a miracle of inspired editing (just when did she pick up those car keys, for instance?), Ana is able to escape, first into a neighborhood that’s become a slaughterhouse, and finally into the countryside (with a handy mall nearby). I’d argue that the most effective terror sequences are either the result of instinct or pure accident rather than screenwriting or direction, and that’s the case here.”
It’s a fast-paced, chaotic sequence, one that gives both Ana and the audience barely any time to breathe. We’re made to imagine just how utterly overwhelming it’d be to go from sleeping peacefully in your bed to being chased by your zombified husband in under two minutes; it grants a ton of audience goodwill towards Ana as she somehow adapts to the situation without having a full-on meltdown. The audience’s immediate attachment to Ana is vital because, as King explains, it feels totally plausible the movie might kill her off.
Dawn of the Dead (and why sometimes it’s good to cast an unknown)
“Polley is a Canadian actress whose face was largely unknown to American audiences in 2004,” King wrote. “If we saw an actress like Julia Roberts or Charlize Theron as Ana, we’d know she’s going to live. Because it’s Polley, we root for her to escape… but we’re not sure she will. Those first nine minutes are a sonata of anxiety.”
In a lot of ways, the opening of “Dawn of the Dead” was sort of the antithesis to the opening of “Scream.” For the 1996 slasher flick, director Wes Craven hired the very well-known Drew Barrymore to play Casey in the opening sequence. With Barrymore featured prominently on so much of the marketing material, this choice seemed designed to lull the audience into a false sense of security. Surely a movie wouldn’t hire Drew Barrymore just to kill her off in the first nine minutes, right? Wrong: that’s exactly what it did. The result was a movie that established early on it wasn’t messing around; when other characters (played by lesser-known actors) were in danger, it was now fully believable the movie could kill them off.
Meanwhile, “Dawn of the Dead” played around with the idea that Ana might have a similar role — that she might only exist to die a grisly death and establish the stakes for the real main lead, who’d be introduced soon after. The result is a horror movie with a suspenseful, terrifying opening sequence, but which also lets us keep rooting for the expected cold open kill throughout the rest of the film.
It’s a smart creative choice, one that writer James Gunn deserves some credit for. We don’t know why he was hired to write this script, considering his only major writing credit at the time was for 2002’s “Scooby Doo,” but he hit it out of the park here. This would be the first and (in all likelihood) last time Gunn wrote a script that Snyder would direct; it’s a shame, because the two made for a pretty good team.