Dawn of the Dead most certainly is a horror film and is quite a thrilling spectacle but some of its features sets it apart from others of the same genre and helps it transcend the usual boundaries of zombie films. The storyline involves a group of survivors of a zombie attack who have managed to seal themselves off inside the consumers department of a shopping mall. The film might seems cliché for a zombie flick but the fact is that it was released in 1978 and was a huge hit at the time.

The few features that the director Romero consciously made sure of was that it wasn’t as gory as it could have been. The zombies themselves were pretty ordinary looking as far as other zombies are concerned, also most of the action took place in broad daylight without too much of scary shadows and dark alleys being used to scare the audience. In fact the zombies were made pretty comic while they were also scary as they fell off escalators or toppled over each other. But the fact is that because the zombie attack, the lighting and the zombies themselves were represented in such an uncharacteristically casual way, without the usual techniques used by film directors to scare audiences, the horror is actually heightened. It is as if a audience which watches the Dawn of the dead would start fearing the daylight as well, leave alone the night time.

The film is a well written story with its fair share of societal references that most horror and science fiction films have.