Horror Fans Bid a Bittersweet Farewell to an Empty Mall Full of Zombies

Brian Raftery made his first pilgrimage to the Monroeville Mall in the mid-1990s. Ross Mantle is a Pittsburgh-based photographer who believes we can learn about the living from the undead.

When Michelle Parsons was planning her wedding in 2007, she had only one honeymoon destination in mind.

“My fiancé asked, ‘Where do you want to go?’ And I said, ‘The Monroeville Mall,’” Parsons recalled.

The modest two-story shopping complex, 20 minutes from downtown Pittsburgh, might not seem like the most romantic choice. But to horror lovers like Parsons, the Monroeville Mall is “a holy place” — not to mention one of the largest and longest-standing movie sets in the country.

In the late 1970s, George A. Romero, the creator of the modern zombie genre, took over the building to shoot “Dawn of the Dead,” a blood-soaked tale of four survivors who hide out in an abandoned mall as they try to fend off bloodthirsty creatures and greedy bikers. As Romero once told Rolling Stone, the Monroeville Mall epitomized “the false security of the whole consumer America trip,” making it the perfect backdrop for a gory allegory about 20th-century capitalism run amok.

Since the film’s U.S. release in 1979, “Dawn of the Dead” has attracted generations of fans to Monroeville, including Parsons, a 46-year-old X-ray technologist from Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. When she finally arrived at the mall after her wedding, Parsons began to cry.

The marriage didn’t last. But Parsons’s love for the movie, and for the mall, has endured.