In 1978, ten years after Night Of The Living Dead exploded into the public consciousness, George A. Romero released the long-awaited sequel to his ghoulish masterpiece. Dawn Of The Dead crawled out of its shallow grave and onto our movie screens, eliciting a thumbs up from Ebert, a thumbs down from many others, and the disgusted screams of an entire generation.

This time, the horror was set not in a graveyard or a farmhouse, but in the newsrooms of our largest cities, in the segregated tenements of urban America, in the places we hold dearest in our hearts—our shopping malls. The Monroeville Mall, to be exact.

Inspired by a tour George had been given by the mall’s owner only four years earlier, he had quickly begun drawing up plans for his sequel, setting it inside the mall. In November of ’77, production began in the Monroeville Mall, taking only a short break for Christmas, and wrapped at the beginning of February. For a little over a month, the mall was teeming with production crews, motorcycle gangs, and, of course, the living dead.

28 years later…

October, 2006. The living dead have once again infested the Monroeville Mall. Their faces green with rot; blood and gore dripping down their chins. Eight hundred ninety-four zombies roam these halls, setting what was then the Guinness World Record for the largest gathering of the undead.

At a nearby college, a struggling student with no car can only lament as the record is set without him. Missing his chance to make horror history in a place already made historical by horror.

It would be another 20 years before I finally made my way to Monroeville—urged on by the recent announcement of the mall’s inevitable demise—and walked the same halls that the living dead had marked with bloodied handprints. Halls that Romero and Savini had poured blood, sweat, and gore into. That had become home to the Living Dead Museum and host to the Living Dead Weekend, an annual celebration of everything zombie and the mall’s unique role in horror history, gathering the gruesome and gritty stars not only from Romero’s oeuvre, but from every zombie walk of life. From Night Of The Creeps to Creepshow to the unofficial sequel, Return Of The Living Dead. Every year, horror fans from across the globe gathered in Monroeville like Romero’s zombies had in ’78.

But this year was different.

A year prior, it had been announced the mall had been sold off and was slated for demolition in April of ’27. My first trip would be my last. So I joined the hordes of fans who gathered to celebrate Dawn Of The Dead and the Monroeville Mall for what seemed likely to be the last great Living Dead Weekend.

The Night Before The Living Dead: An Evening In Evans City Cemetery

“They’re coming to get you, Barbara.”
—Night Of The Living Dead (1968)

As Ken Foree was stepping into the mall that made him a genre star and giving an emotional farewell to Monroeville and his fans, we were stuck in traffic. It was almost dusk as we finally arrived and the festivities at Living Dead Weekend were already winding down for the day.

But Dawn was not Romero’s first rodeo in Pittsburgh. A student of Carnegie Mellon, George fought to make all his films in Pittsburgh. Less than twenty minutes from the mall, fans can visit the homes featured in Creepshow and Martin. Where the three rivers converge, Land Of The Dead’s Fiddler’s Green still waits to be built. And less than an hour from Monroeville sits the cemetery where the dead first came alive.

Evans City has changed very little since Night Of The Living Dead. Driving into town, it’s easy to incidentally recreate the opening scenes from the classic film, wandering down lonely roads that twist in and out of the surrounding trees.

Me and my horror bestie, Krystina, were worried we wouldn’t be able to locate the spot in the cemetery—a few headstones among a sea of headstones—where Romero began his cadaverous career. But a quick search on the GPS revealed a map that clearly marked the gravestones the cemetery had become famous for. While other cemeteries might shy away from fans of the undead, Evans City Cemetery is loud and proud about their role in horror history, inviting eager fans to come see where it all started.

Driving to a cemetery for any reason other than mourning always feels a tad ghoulish. (Sorry to say, Mary Shelley.) And entering a cemetery to partake in cinematic voyeurism doesn’t feel particularly exciting. There’s no great build up to staring at hundred-year-old headstones. But driving to the cemetery, we got the sensation that we were being followed. And that we, in turn, were following others. Like a funeral procession. So we fit right in.

Pulling into the cemetery, we parked right in front of the infamous Blair tombstone. We noticed other cars circling the grave plot, like vultures. Everyone was waiting for someone else to make the first move. Just in case someone was actually grieving, like you’re supposed to do in a cemetery. My bestie and I were the first to move. George hadn’t hesitated to bash Johnny’s head against a gravestone, we saw no reason to feel ashamed for wanting to do the same.

Now the thing with graveyards is, unless someone pulls a Poltergeist, they don’t change much. The towns change around them, the trees grow and die, but the dead, unlike Romero’s creations, tend to stay where they are. There were a few new additions to the grave plots (there always are), but the cemetery seemed the same as it was when Barbara fled into the woods 58 years earlier. It was like walking through a filmstrip.

There was an energy. Those opening scenes haunted this place more effectively than any ghost ever could. We felt we could see Johnny’s body lying in the grass. And as the sun set, draining the color out of the sky and our surroundings, it became more and more plausible that the dead would come wandering out of the woods.

So we set about recreating every moment as exactly as we could. The horror fan’s equivalent of lying in a chalk outline at a murder scene. We clutched the tombstones as if the dead were right behind us, we fell to the ground, our skulls cracked open upon hundred-year-old headstones, and we rose from the dead, to find fresh prey among the living.

Our shamelessness revealed our true forms to the other onlookers and we took turns trading stories and snapping photos. Horde joining horde, ghouls reanimated by each other, until only our shadows were visible among the graves. We wandered out of the graveyard, back into the lonely night, waiting for the dawn.

Dawn Of The Living Dead Weekend: When There’s No More Room In Hell

Fran: “What are they doing? Why do they come here?”
Stephen: “Some kind of instinct. Memory… Of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.”

—Dawn Of The Dead (1978)

Entering the Monroeville Mall above Romero Court, where a bronze bust of George smiles up at his adoring fans, we are greeted with a brief history of the mall.

Developed on an old strip mining site, the mall opened in ’69 and featured the Ice Palace, an ice skating rink with an adjacent restaurant where diners could watch the skaters while they ate. Like most malls of the time, it was decorated with fountains and plant life, like a displaced jungle, all flourishing under enormous skylights. Where George Romero’s smiling head now sits, a colorful clocktower once dominated the court, where puppets danced to mark each passing hour. While none of these features remain, it’s all captured in time by Romero’s film.

We are also captured by Romero’s work, and, looking out over the railing at the court below, we see how many others were captured as well.

Bodies churn beneath us, but comparing them to Romero’s zombies—even though they’d consider it a compliment—is unfair as these thousands of fans are brimming with life. They take selfies with Romero’s grinning bust and eagerly await panels, photos, and autograph sessions with their favorite Dawn stars.This is a special occasion as the Living Dead Weekend has gathered all three surviving stars—Ken Foree (Peter), Gaylen Ross (Fran), and Scott Reiniger (Roger)—in the very place they made the film 48 years prior.

Sadly, David Emge, who played Stephen (better known as Flyboy), passed two years ago. And though his absence is felt, Scott Kellaway, a British Dawn fan who’s flown in for the weekend (and who is the spitting image of a young Emge), treats fans by cosplaying Flyboy in his living and undead forms.

“I’m closer to these people than I am to my friends back home,” Scott told us.

Him and the other stars help fans recreate moments from their favorite film, not just a photo to hang, but a reminder that the fans are as much a part of the film’s success as those who starred in it. Down the hall, something bellows with unbridled rage—a rage that fully expresses the unfair treatment of the dead by the living—and it’s followed by faux screams of terror bursting with delight. Eugene Clark, who played Big Daddy in Land Of The Dead, attends every convention in full zombie makeup, ambushing fans with big bear hugs that look like a vicious zombie attack in well-timed photos.

Big Daddy is not the only zombie on hand. Aside from a reunion of Dawn’s infamous undead, there are scores of fans with painted faces, bloodied maws, teeth full of brains, and one rotting cosplayer even walks around with a mouth full of flowers, a reminder that even from death comes life.

One pair of zombies wear gory Walmart employee uniforms, a silent criticism of the capitalist monolith that has purchased (and plans to demolish) their beloved mall. George would have been proud. Further down the mall, many fans, myself included, stop to take photos in the Hero Hallway. The passage through which the heroes of the film first enter the mall and by which the undead ultimately give chase.

Later that day, Mike Christopher, who played the Hare Krishna zombie, will once again don the costume to take photos with fans in the location he helped make infamous. Moments like these send chills of excitement down my spine. It’s one thing to meet your heroes (or villains, in this case), but to also be able to walk with them through the very sets where they made their bones (or moans) is priceless.

Mark C. Scioneaux, an author, Living Dead vendor, and enthusiastic fan, said it best:

“You’re meeting them [the actors] not in some convention hall or gymnasium, but you’re meeting them in the actual location where the movie was filmed. And that’s a surreal moment.”

The surrealism continues at the other end of the mall, known as the Biker Entrance. It’s here where amateur stuntmen and simultaneous make-up artists, Tom Savini and Taso Stavrakis, led the Pagans, an actual outlaw motorcycle club, to crash through the bay windows and go tear-assing through the mall.

At a panel featuring Stavrakis, Savini, and Walking Dead make-up artist Greg Nicotero, they recount stories from making Dawn Of The Dead. The one-shot helicopter beheadings that Savini knew would work exactly as he’d planned, the fake heads blown apart by shotguns because the initial effect didn’t work quite right, the near-death experience of throwing yourself off a balcony with only a stack of cardboard boxes to break your fall. Savini and Stavrakis still seem like the college students they were when they left their classes behind to help Romero make his film.

Nicotero, who cites Dawn Of The Dead as one of the films that drove him into special effects, remembers visiting the Monroeville Mall after filming wrapped, and seeing tire streaks from the Pagan’s bikes still marking the floors of the JC Penney.

At the Biker Entrance, we witness fans recreating the scene of zombies pawing at the plate glass, trying to get into the mall, and we join them, shuffling around outside before slapping our rotting corpses against the glass, eager to be let in.

From here, Lawrence DeVincentz gives film tours of the mall twice a day for all three days of the weekend. He walks fans through the locations, recreating scenes, guiding fans through the labyrinthine back halls and maintenance tunnels featured in Dawn.

There isn’t an inch of the mall that isn’t wandered and worshiped by its fans.

We spoke with Tina Romero, daughter of George and filmmaker whose own zombie picture, Queens Of The Dead, is now streaming on Hulu.

“It’s really remarkable. The love here in this space and the people who come to honor this place one last time. You can’t help but feel sad that the walls are coming down. The fact that there is so much meaning to so many people from this film, it just speaks to the power of movies, and that’s what I keep coming back to.”

The Last Day Of The Living Dead: A Grim Realization

“It’s really all over. Isn’t it?”

—Dawn Of The Dead (1978)

There’s a scene in Dawn Of The Dead. Peter, played by Ken Foree, and Flyboy break into a gun shop to replenish munitions and avail themselves of better weapons.

“Ain’t it a crime,” Peter says as he examines a gorgeous high-powered rifle, “the only person who could miss with this gun is the sucker with the bread to buy it.”

Walmart purchasing the Monroeville Mall feels like a crime in the same vein.

Driving to the mall for the final day of the weekend, I was filled with a mix of emotions. Disappointment in myself for not making the pilgrimage sooner; sorrow that another weekend was ending; and a furious rage at the blind, meaningless destruction that only capitalism can provide.

It’s an obvious irony that the Monroeville Mall, made famous by a film that criticized the mall’s mindless materialism, would meet its end in the maw of an even bigger capitalist fish.

Ralph Langer, a Pittsburgh native who played a zombie in Night, Dawn, and Day Of The Dead, gave us a rundown of how he experienced the mall growing up.

“Back in the day, everyone had towns with Main Streets. So if you needed things, you didn’t go to a mall, you didn’t go to a shopping center, you went to Main Street.

“But then, all of a sudden, the shopping centers came in and started taking business away and then the malls started to come in and they took business away from the shopping centers.”

So the cycle continues.

Walking through the mall, evidence of the ceaseless cycle can be found everywhere. Storefronts lie empty and dark. The fabled Ice Palace has been paved over for a food court with just as many empty facades. There are even signs stationed at every entrance stating no one under 18 is allowed in the mall without adult supervision. And what’s a mall without teenagers roaming its halls unsupervised?

“We’ve been feeling the mall’s loss in stages,” says Aleen Isley, local artist and actress whose teenage years were spent working at Brookstone in the Monroeville Mall. “First was when we lost the trees and fountains in the 2000s,” talking about the classic jungle decor featured in Dawn. “Knowing they’re gonna tear it down to replace it with an outdoor mall…”

The senselessness mirrors the carnage of the film’s climax. I find myself feeling like Flyboy, hidden behind the now non-existent mall foliage, watching the bikers tear the mall to pieces.

“It’s ours. We took it,” I mutter to the capitalists and materialists who see no value in historical locations and are already counting the millions they’ll make letting an abandoned mall depreciate.

“It’s ours. We took it,” I say, referring to the fans who made the mall a temple to independent film and thought. The convention that reclaimed the mall for the undead. And the Living Dead Museum, who saw the same potential that George had, collecting artifacts and replicas from Romero’s works, as well as other local films and horror hallmarks, helping to revitalize the mall over recent years.

Inside the museum, fans can listen to a jukebox play the emergency broadcast from Night Of The Living Dead. They can see costumes and props, including one of Savini’s cutaway machetes, and learn the histories of Romero’s films. They can see the entire toolshed from Evil Dead 2. And they can visit the Maul Of Fame, a wall where cast members from George’s Living Dead films smear and sign their bloodied handprints.

From the gift shop you can even take home a piece of the Monroeville Mall—bricks and pieces of escalators and elevators.

But before we exit through the gift shop, let’s take a quick trip back to Evans City Cemetery. There you can see the chapel featured in Night, exactly as it was 58 years ago. But only 15 years ago, the chapel was slated for demolition. Decrepit and in disrepair, it was considered a lost cause. Until Living Dead fans came together, raising $50,000 to preserve it.

One hopes the Monroeville Mall can find a similar salvation.

Tina Romero had her own final words in regards to the proposed Monroeville demolition.

“Dawn Of The Dead will live on. Living Dead Weekend must rise again…”

As I finish writing this, the mall’s proposed demolition is no longer as sure as it once seemed. Tenants of the mall aren’t being allowed to renew their contracts beyond 2026, but Living Dead Weekend, who originally thought June would be their final event, are using the opportunity to host one more event, re-animating Living Dead Weekend for one last sendoff this October.

It would be a good time to heed Ken Foree’s advice:

“Your passion is not misplaced. Your hunger for this is not misplaced. There are many like you… This is the last time you’re going to be here. Okay. In between getting an autograph signed and in between going to the celebrity parties this weekend or the screenings or some of the other events… Take a walk down one of these hallways… and have your wife with you, your boyfriend, your girlfriend… children. Take a walk for a few seconds… Take a walk and just take a nice deep breath. Look around because this is your temple… It’s yours.”

We lingered, my horror bestie and I, watching them tear down the stage, stack the chairs, close up the halls that had been filled with people and were now empty. We lingered and we took it all in.