Shopping mall

Shopping malls are large public structures which houses individual market outlets of varying types and specialities including clothing stores, shoe/sunglass and other similar apparel outlets, music stores, video stores and sporting equipment outlets. Most malls also boast a food court which includes many notable restaurant and fast food chains and coffee shops.

A shopping mall served as the primary setting of George Romero's landmark 1978 zombie feature Dawn of the Dead. In the film, four civilians, Peter Washington, Roger, Stephen and his fiance Francine Parker hole up inside of a shopping mall in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in order to escape a zombie plague. The mall featured in the film was actually the Monroeville Mall, located at 200 Monroeville Mall, Route 22 in Monroeville, Pennsylvania. Romero chose to film his movie in a mall due to a throwaway remark made by a colleague of his named Carnegie Mellon, who suggested that someone would be able to survive in the mall should an emergency ever occur.

Romero used the setting to develop the subtext of the film, which was a statement against consumerism. In the film Francine Parker remarks about the zombies, "What are they doing? Why do they come here?", to which her lover Stephen replies, "Some kind of instinct. Memory, of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives."

A shopping mall was also the principal setting of the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead, directed by Zack Snyder. The fictional Crossroads Mall, located in the state of Wisconsin, served as a temporary sanctuary for another group of zombie holocaust survivors. The actual structure used for the film was the Thornhill Square Shopping Center located at 300 John Street in Thornhill, Toronto, Ontario, Canada until it was partially demolished to make way for office complexes. Most of the set pieces and store fronts seen in the movie however are unique to the film and were not part of the original shopping center. Although the actual Thornhill mall was partially razed, it was not in fact the site of a zombie infestation as the movie suggests.