Dawn of the Dead

         So, obviously I need to talk about a zombie movie, it is time, ha ha. So I chose the classic, almost iconic zombie movie, Dawn of the Dead, first created by George A. Romero in 1978. This movie was great.  It came after Romero's 1969 Night of the Living Dead, which can be credited as one of the first zombie movies. I found two movie posters.

The first poster seems like the more official one because it is on the IMDb description of the movie. The big white letters is actually a quote from one of the characters in the movie, “When there's no more room in hell the dead will walk the earth." it is interesting to see that the word hell is all capitalized and so is the word earth, perhaps to infer hell on earth, kind of creepy. This makes the person who sees this poster want to go watch a scary movie, but it doesn't fully come right and say what the movie is about. Under that to the left, in smaller black letters, it says that it is a new George A. Romero movie. And in giant red letters it says, DAWN of the DEAD, and under all of that it has all of that tiny little white lettering that says who directed, and wrote and who was staring. The wording on the poster really doesn't give much insight into what the movie is about, especially if the movie goer had not seen Night of the Living Dead. The background of the poster is a light purple top half, and the bottom half black, probably to symbolize sunrise. And on the crest of that sunrise a giant white head with red blotches on the left side of the face, is peering over the darkness, like it is rising.

        The second poster for this 1978 film looks like this:

This poster is much more of a cartoon, but gives a larger explanation of what the movie is about. Starting from the top, there is an image of the sun rising over a city, with a helicopter flying over the sea of zombies that appears to be chasing the much smaller images of the "survivors". And under all of that in red is Dawn of the Dead and under that in the tiny white lettering is the names of the directors, writers, actors, etc. This poster seems to say a lot more to the viewer, and weirdly more than the first one, even though this poster had almost no words at all on it. 

         

In 2004 Dawn of the Dead was re- booted. It was directed by Zack Snyder, and written by James Gunn, and this movie took George A. Romero's original screen play and changed it. It is basically the same concept, but has several tweaks, to make it a different experience. The movie poster is also very different from the original movies. It had orange and yellow background and sun with back figures that seem to be staggering out of the light. The bottom half of these figures bodies fade back into the light, and once again the only lettering on the poster is the title of the movie and the quote, “When there's no more room in hell the dead will walk the earth", in black this time, however the quote changed too, it was all capitalized now. WHICH FEELS LIKE IT TOOK MEANING AWAY FROM THE POSTER. The only difference between the newer poster and the older posters in that these is a release date March 26 th in red at the bottom.

Both movies are good, and each has a redeeming qualities. But their posters are very different. And defiantly shows which movie was trying to make money and which was trying to make history. 

                                                                                                                                                                   Even the trailers are contrastingly different check them out:                                                                           The top video is of the 1978 Dawn of the Dead

and the bottom is from 2004.

-zombiegirl