Dawn Of The Dead: How The Zombies Were Already On The Island

In a credits sequence, the survivors of Dawn of the Dead meet a grisly fate; what happened to them, and how were the zombies already on the island? Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead, a remake of the George Romero classic, was released in 2004 to critical acclaim and box office success. It has subsequently been hailed as Snyder’s best work and the film remains a fun zombie flick for genre fans to sink their teeth into.

Written by future Guardians of the Galaxy’s director James Gunn, Dawn of the Dead follows a group of survivors who take shelter inside an abandoned shopping mall amid a zombie apocalypse. While the general plot is lifted from Romero’s original, Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead is less a remake and more of a re-imagining, with running zombies in contrast to Romero’s slow-moving shamblers and a more action-oriented screenplay with less focus on social satire. At the end of the movie, the remaining survivors flee the city on a yacht, searching for refuge on a supposedly uninhabited island.

Dawn Of The Dead’s credits sequence, presented in a “found footage” style, shows their arrival at an island whereupon they run out of supplies and are swarmed by a pack of zombies. It is assumed that the survivors all die, though viewers never witness their deaths as their camcorder is dropped amid the scuffle. Previously, in the same sequence, the survivors come across a small boat floating near the island and onboard discover the still-snapping head of a zombie inside a cooler. A few canoes can also be seen, stacked up on the dock, which could suggest other survivors had the same idea – fleeing to the island, only to die from bite-wounds and turn into zombies.

The “found footage” style of filming (popularized by The Blair Witch Project) does, as the name implies, suggest another group of survivors later find the camcorder and watch the footage back. Or, perhaps, the survivors from Dawn of the Dead actually did survive and later retrieved the camcorder, though this is probably wishful thinking. Of course, all of this is conjecture, and the survivors may simply have had their facts wrong in regards to the island’s population.

Either way, the credits sequence is a fun cherry on the cake that shows just how unpredictable a zombie-infested world would actually be. It’s also darkly humorous and slightly unusual that the protagonists should succeed in their goal of reaching the island, only to meet their demise moments later. This is likely a tribute to Romero’s own Night of the Living Dead – the granddaddy of zombie films – which features its lead character being shot unceremoniously by fellow survivors at the end of the movie. In this regard, Dawn of the Dead is a fitting tribute to Romero’s enduring legacy.

About The Author