3rd Dawn of the Dead (2004) Image Analysis

This scene is towards the end of the film and shows Monica being killed by Glen’s chainsaw as he loses control of it. Monica’s death fits very well to the conventions of a horror as she is the typical female victim who has sexual intercourse in the film and eventually is killed off. It is a common convention of horror for the blonde victim to have sexual relations and then die which is also seen in House of Wax. It is also quite ironic how she has the most gruesome death in the film after she has been portrayed as a typical feminine girl. A close up has been used so that we can clearly see the body horror as it is the most shocking and impressive throughout the film.

This scene also fits very well to the sub-genre which is action horror as the scene occurs when the vehicle is crashing and the zombies are chasing them. There are many elements of body horror in the film in addition to the action, but as the zombies are much faster and scarier than those in the original Dawn of the Dead it is seen primarily as an action horror. In the original film, the female victim (Francine) turns into the final girl and it goes against the conventions but in this film, we are left to assume that the final girl (Ana) is brutally killed.

Also in comparison to the first Dawn of the Dead, the gore is much more extreme and shocking as there were no major censorship restrictions in the industry and on the “Extended Cut” DVD release. The director of the film, Zack Snyder, clearly knew that the modern horror audience are much tougher and it is much more difficult to shock them, which is why he wanted to make the body horror as unique as possible. This illustrates Janet Staiger’s audience theory from her book ‘Interpreting Films’ that the institutional context makes people watch horror films differently nowadays to when films like the first Dawn of the Dead were pushing the limits of censorship.