The Living Dead Museum

The Living Dead Museum is a compact horror museum and retail space dedicated to zombies in film, television, comics, and games. It is located inside Monroeville Mall, a site with a direct place in genre history as the primary filming location for George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978). The setting gives the museum an unusual authenticity: a pop-culture exhibit embedded within the everyday architecture that helped define the modern zombie.

The displays focus on the visual history of the undead, using props, memorabilia, production material, and themed installations to trace how zombies evolved from niche horror to a mainstream cultural obsession. Alongside artefacts and collectibles, the museum leans into atmosphere—dim corners, lurid cover art, and familiar iconography—creating a space that resembles a curated fan archive as much as a conventional gallery.

Its darker interest comes from the contrast between context and content: the museum sits in a functioning shopping mall, yet it is dedicated to apocalyptic narratives built around collapse, consumption, and mass death. As a result, the location feels like a controlled echo of Romero’s original concept—commercial normality on the surface, and the imagery of the dead returning just a few corridors away.