Dawn of the Dead

Philadelphia is coming apart. A TV station broadcasts emergency survival directives no one can follow anymore. Fran Parker, a producer at the station, is leaving with her boyfriend Stephen, a helicopter pilot. They are joined by two SWAT officers — Roger DeMarco and Peter Washington — who have just come from a chaotic, bloody raid on a tenement building where residents refused to surrender their dead for removal. The four take the station's traffic helicopter and fly north with no destination.

They find a massive suburban shopping mall and land on the roof. The mall is overrun with the dead, drifting through the corridors out of old habit — drawn to the place without knowing why. The four survivors decide to stay. They seal the loading dock entrances with delivery trucks, block the department store doors, and methodically clear the building level by level. During the clearing, Roger is bitten. He knows what it means. He keeps going anyway, becoming reckless, even giddy — as if the bite has freed him from having to care about survival.

Roger dies and turns. Peter shoots him. They bury him in the mall's garden center.

The three survivors build a life inside. They break into stores, eat the restaurants' food, sleep in the furniture displays. The mall becomes an absurd parody of normal life — everything available, nothing meaningful. Fran is pregnant. The question of what the future looks like, if there is one, hangs over all of it.

Months pass. Then a biker gang, hundreds strong, descends on the mall. They break open the entrances looking for supplies, flooding the building with the dead again. In the chaos, Stephen is shot by the bikers. He dies and turns — and leads the zombies back to the survivors' hideout, because he remembers where it is.

The mall becomes a slaughterhouse. The bikers are torn apart. Peter holds the hideout as long as he can, then fights his way down through the building to reach the roof. He nearly doesn't make it. Fran is already at the helicopter. They lift off with barely any fuel, heading somewhere that may not exist, into a country that has already ended.