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.