10 Movies So Good They Ruined Genres

4. Dawn Of The Dead

The late, great George A. Romero is widely credited with popularising the zombie genre with 1968's Night of the Living Dead and especially his astonishing 1978 follow-up Dawn of the Dead.

With its brutal violence, colourful band of survivors and stunning social commentary, it's still held up today as the ultimate zombie movie, and justifiably so. It proved that the genre could be more than mindless blood-letting, using the zombie apocalypse as a platform to say anything important about contemporary society (namely our enslavement to consumerism).

Though the zombie genre has remained popular for the last four decades, it's followed a similar trajectory to shark movies, with filmmakers knowing they can't compete with Romero's towering achievement and not even bothering to try.

There's a reason why the genre tends towards either shameless shlock or comedy these days, because the specific tone of Romero's classic is so incredibly difficult to replicate successfully.

As such, we're either lumped with Resident Evil and World War Z, or something like (the admittedly stellar) Zombieland, none of which really want to be taken seriously as thoughtful works of zombie media.

It's certainly a compliment that Dawn remains an enduring influence on almost every zombie movie you'll ever see, but its success also killed most filmmakers' interest in doing anything other than paying easy homage to it. And that ultimately even goes for Romero himself, whose subsequent films never reached this peak again.