Dawn of the Dead

The title is the acknowledgement. Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg have named Romero throughout, and Romero liked it enough to cast both of them as zombies in Land of the Dead. What the film is built on:

• Romero's rules, kept exactly: slow zombies, bites convert, destroy the brain, and no explanation offered
• The siege structure, with a small group barricaded in an ordinary consumer space. Romero uses a shopping mall, Wright uses a pub, and both are chosen because the survivors would have gone there anyway
• The satire in the same position: Dawn of the Dead is about shoppers who barely change behaviour when they die, and Shaun opens on commuters filmed to be indistinguishable from the infected
• Specific shots and beats restaged, including the walk to the shop that the audience can see is wrong and the character cannot

Filed HIGH: without Dawn of the Dead there is no joke to make.

Romero's second film established the zombie outbreak as a story about institutions rather than about monsters, and World War Z is built on that reading: a global epidemiological emergency told through governments, armies and quarantine policy. The borrowing is the frame, not the creature. Romero put survivors in a shopping mall and let the film be about consumption and about how fast an ordered society stops functioning; World War Z moves the same question up to the scale of states. The fast-moving infected are from 28 Days Later rather than from Romero, whose dead are slow.

Jackson has talked about Romero as formative, and Braindead is what happens when a young film-maker takes Dawn of the Dead's gore effects as the point rather than the cost. The inheritance is the infection rules, the boarded-up house and the practical splatter; the departure is tone. Romero played it straight and let the satire sit underneath; Jackson puts a lawnmower in the third act and lets nothing sit underneath at all.