A remake of George A. Romero's 1978 zombie film, Dawn Of The Dead (2004), begins much the same as the original. For unknown reasons, people across the country are turning into bloodthirsty, animated corpses with rotting visages only an undertaker could love. The morning after the outbreak of a mysterious "virus," an unlikely group of humans still capable of thought and speech converge on an empty shopping mall outside Milwaukee to escape the marauding zombies, who were until then the friends, families, neighbors of the survivors. As they fortify their defenses against the peril outside the mall walls, they must also face the threats they pose to one another. Unspecified days pass in a haze of mall enjoyment and zombie sniping until the remaining survivors opt to make a break for the nearby marina in order to escape by boat to a hopefully deserted island in Lake Michigan.