Even as 'The Passion' nears the $300 million mark in North American ticket sales, box office analysts say Gibson's film about the last 12 hours in the life of Jesus is expected to see another week-to-week decline, leaving it vulnerable to an attack of the zombies.

'Dawn of the Dead,' an update of the 1978 chiller that carries the tag line 'When there's no room in hell, the dead will walk the Earth, opened Friday in 2,744 in theaters with an ensemble cast that includes Ving Rhames and Sarah Polley.

The R-rated film, the feature debut of director Zack Snyder, pits survivors of a worldwide plague holed up in a shopping mall against an onslaught of flesh-hungry undead. The film is released by Universal Pictures, a unit of Vivendi Universal.

Competing for attention are two other R-rated wide releases this weekend -- the crime thriller 'Taking Lives,' starring Angelina Jolie as an FBI profiler chasing a serial killer in Montreal, and the memory-erasing romance from writer Charlie Kaufman 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,' starring Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet.

Boding well for 'Dawn of the Dead' is the strong track record demonstrated by a string of recent horror films, said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box office tracking service Exhibitor Relations.

'Horror movies do really well at any time of the year, and last year they did very well,' he said. 'You can never count them out as a genre. They always find an audience.

Source: Reuters