Dawn of the Dead

These films were originally much darker than the versions you saw.

In the tradition of ScreenCrush series like You Think You Know Movies and You Think You Know TV comes a new YouTube series: Top Five! Each week (or so; we’ve got a lot of other stuff going on), ScreenCrush editor and critic Matt Singer will count down a particular topic from the world of movies (and probably write these introductory posts in the third person).

For myself, and for many fellow ink-stained wretches who cover, with joy, the world of film, September is the cruelest, craziest month. There's the Toronto International Film Festival and then -- less than a week after that meghilla of too many awesome movies and too many awesome Canadians is over -- there's Austin's Fantastic Fest, famously called "a film festival with the boring parts left out," replete with beheadings and behandings and bemusements. Plus, it's the informal start of Oscar season, which warms movieland up pretty fiercely even if you don't care about who exactly the Academy extends, with shaking hands, its awards to. And the biggest funny thing I can imagine is that I'm in the middle of all that and, of course, thinking of the one person, and one film, that combines the arty aspirations of the Oscar race, the Canadian-ness of Tiff's programming and the scares and shrieks of Fantastic Fest, and that's 2004's remake of 'Dawn of the Dead.'