Life & Mortality Quote by Sarah Polley

Polley’s take on Dawn of the Dead is doing something sly: she’s smuggling a messy, post-9/11 global mood into the language of a popcorn horror remake. Zombies aren’t just monsters here; they’re the perfect metaphor for a threat you can’t negotiate with, can’t reason with, can’t even properly see until it’s everywhere. By stressing that it “can take place anywhere” and that “the entire planet is contaminated,” she’s pointing to the way modern crises feel borderless: pandemics, terror networks, climate catastrophe, algorithmic misinformation. The genre’s old pleasure - a localized outbreak, a survivable perimeter - gets revoked.

The phrase “new face of our world” is the tell. She’s framing the film less as escapism than as a diagnostic tool, a story that makes visible the ambient anxiety of interconnected life. Even the hopeful pivot, “one person, one race, united,” carries subtext. It’s aspirational, almost defiant, because the movie itself (and the era that produced it) is crowded with evidence that people rarely unite cleanly under pressure. Horror thrives on that gap between what we want to believe about solidarity and what panic actually produces.

Her wording also reflects a celebrity-cultural moment when actors were increasingly expected to sound politically literate about their projects. Polley, an actress with a reputation for seriousness, uses the franchise’s mass appeal to argue that the real threat isn’t “them” but the contamination we all share - an “invisible destructive force” that makes scapegoating feel childish and community feel urgent.