10 Movie Endings You Can No Longer See
2. Dawn Of The Dead
After being held up in a shopping mall for months following the end of the world, Dawn of the Dead’s surviving duo of Peter and Fran find themselves in jeopardy as raiding bikers cause their safe haven to become suddenly far less safe.
With barriers and defences now down, hordes of zombies begin to pour up into the shopping mall’s offices. Their once bunker and now home under attack, the two race to the roof to get aboard their helicopter to make their uncertain journey onwards.
Whilst the version we’ve all seen ends ambiguously, the original script was a lot darker and more definitive about things.
According to special effects guru Tom Savini the “suicide” ending was indeed shot. Romero spent some years denying this before admitting in a DVD commentary that some work had been done on it.
Evidence of it still exists in the film, making this the only entry on a list that you still kind of see. Peter puts his gun to his head for a moment and Fran’s way out was to include deliberately decapitating herself on the helicopter’s blades - a chilling call-back to an earlier scene with an unfortunate zombie.
At the very least, knowing that the script called for Peter and Fran to commit suicide makes the final scenes of Dawn make a lot more sense.