Dawn of the Dead

DAWN OF THE DEAD

(1978)

Dir - George A. Romero

Overall: GREAT

Many could view George A. Romero's enduring Night of the Living Dead follow-up Dawn of the Dead as a rare example of a sequel that surpasses its predecessor.  For a non-horror film, this is an impressive enough feat.  For an actual horror film, it is a bonafide impossibility.  A variety of factors play into such an otherwise impossibility where ten years after re-inventing the horror film via shocking drive-in movie-goers of the time and turning critic's heads to a new breed of independent genre filmmaking, Romero and another dedicated batch of collaborators made something that has once again stood the test of time.  Anyone labeling Dawn of the Dead as the quintessential zombie movie would be a difficult person to argue with.

After Night of the Living Dead was released, Romero tried for a few years to disassociate himself from the horror genre as to not seem like a one-trick pony.  His next film There's Always Vanilla was as far from horror as conceivable, being a straight-up romantic comedy instead.  Despite its title and certain elements of the premise, even the following Season of the Witch bares few similarities to conventional horror tropes.  The Crazies and Martin swing things much closer back though, with the former being zombie-esque as a viral outbreak movie while Martin remains one of the best psychological "vampire" films probably ever made.  Yet regardless of what thematic box any of these post-Night of the Living Dead movies can be placed into, none of them were commercially viable.  This is one of the prominent factors in his next project becoming an unequivocal return to not only horror, but to the the undead-munching-on-human-flesh-in-a-post-apocalyptic-landscape variety that proved ever so successful a decade prior.

 

Oddly he did not take the opportunity to make There's Always Vanilla about ice cream.

Before shooting could begin though, money had to be secured.  Which is where Dario Argento of all actually understandable people came on board.  An outspoken supporter of Romero's work as many other filmmakers where, (those who made horror movies or otherwise), Argento caught wind that both a Night of the Living Dead sequel was in the works and also that it was in need of financial backing.  He, his brother Claudio, and his producer Alfredo Como then reached out and offered to contribute funds in exchange for the European distribution rights, even going as far as to fly Romero out to Rome for a few weeks so that he could work on the screenplay.  By November of 1977, production was underway and shooting properly began.

As usual, the narrative inspiration for Dawn of the Dead came from yet another "It is who you know" scenario for Romero.  He just so happened to be old college friends with Mark Mason, whose company currently owned the Monroeville Mall in Pennsylvania, east of Pittsburgh.  While getting a behind the scenes tour of the place, Mason joked that one could hold up during a catastrophic event there, lighting the creative bulb in Romero's head as far as placing his protagonists in such a large, upscale shopping facility for his next zombie film.  Plus since he already had the personal connection, said mall became the actual shooting location as well.

Macy's and playplaces to the rescue!

With his cast and crew dedicating themselves to a vampire-esque schedule shooting between eleven PM to seven AM every day of the week during the mall's off-hours, they were given unprecedented free-reign of the place so long as everything was cleaned up and relatively undamaged once business resumed.  After taking a short break during the Christmas season as not to waste hours of time taking down and then putting back up holiday decorations, (a "break" in which they shot other location footage and Romero began editing what he already had), shooting resumed and was wrapped up by the end of February.

Much has been said about the premise of Dawn of the Dead and how, well, COOL it is.  It poses a question to the audience where if the world really was ending, what better place would you want to ride some of the apocalypse out than in an entire shopping mall, all to yourself?  Presenting such a vicariously stimulating prospect to the viewer is no accident.  The concept seems fun on paper and effortlessly draws the audience in to experience the more unpleasant, satirical aspects inherent in the story.  That is the deliberate, front and center commentary on mass consumerism and human depravity that clearly cohabitate within each of us.  Under the context of a zombie outbreak where society is no longer capable of functioning, the only thing left for us to do is to scream and argue at each other while finding temporary solace in superficial comforts.

 

Superficial comforts such as what carpet color to choose from when they are all on sale.

To further slam such unflinching cynicism home, there is a clear message present that human nature stays in respectful line only under the confines of unchallenged normalcy.  Dawn of the Dead is about how human beings are really only OK when things are OK.  Present us a situation where our jobs, our lifestyle, and our relationships no long fit into a functional society and the ever-present fear of death is relentlessly upon us, and people stop playing ball.  Furthermore, most people are shown to not have a clue how to actually play ball in the first place.

In the finale of Night of the Living Dead, we were briefly shown a twisted "survival of the fittest" mockery where the only people not only left standing but even seemingly enjoying themselves were large parties of good ole boys loaded up to their asses in firearms.  Out of the four main characters in Dawn of the Dead, only the two SWAT officers show themselves as being capable with weapons in the beginning.  Steve "Flyboy" Andrews and his pregnant girlfriend Fran Parker behave like either bumbling buffoons or deer in headlights when under siege from the undead.  Yet it does not take too long for such stereotypes to be broken.  Peter Washington spends the entire film trying to keep it together, coming within a split-second of permanently cracking by the end.  His well-trained partner Roger DeMarco snaps much earlier, recklessly yee-hawing his way towards getting bitten by two different zombies which ultimately seals his doom.

 

The lesson being, just because you tell yourself that you got this by the ass, that does not in fact mean that you have this by such an ass.

What Romero does here is present the inevitable downfall of those people who are similar to the gun-totting rednecks in the first film, (who make another appearance here in a montage to the tune of the Pretty Things "'Cause I'm A Man").  For some, the only way to hold-off insanity in such dire consequences is to not take the experience that seriously.  Yet by doing so, eventually our very fragile psyches will no longer be able to cope with the severity of what is truly going on and when that happens, accidents happen.  The conclusion of Dawn of the Dead features a reckless biker gang raiding the shopping mall while throwing pies and spraying water in the zombie's faces.  At the same time, Flyboy, (who has now learned to fend for himself with his own arsenal), becomes prideful and possessive of what he and his cohorts have fought and even died for.  By doing so, he fires at the motorcycle thugs, gives away their position, becomes a zombie himself, and forces the surviving Peter and Fran to flee their no longer fortified sanctuary.

Saying that George Romero is simply making a statement that all humans inventively suck under extreme, traumatized circumstances is obviously selling the man's vision and his film short.  If anything else, the 1970s were simultaneously a time of excess, a time of relying on modern conveniences, and a time of overall cynical distrust.  Both Vietnam and the Watergate scandal to name but a few instances had proven that our presumably noble politicians were leading us astray.  The late-60s counter-culture/free love movement had given way to rampant pre-AIDs sex and cocaine use, both of which were seemingly and incorrectly void of consequences.  Shopping malls just like the one in Monroeville were popping up everywhere to allow middle-class suburbanites enough comfort to ignore everything morally questionable around them.

Did someone say "Ignoring the things around them"?

With one independently-financed yet aggressively ambitious film shot in Pennsylvanian, George A Romero got to shine a bloody light on such things.  He also had the good sense to emphasize the right components to that film, namely the humor and the gore.  Whereas Night of the Living Dead had enough jokes to count on no hands, Dawn of the Dead makes its comedic elements hard to miss.  There are numerous scenes of either bug-eyed or comatose-looking zombies stumbling around a mall, falling into fountains, going down escalators the wrong way, getting trapped in cars, or ravaging department stores while jovial music plays around them.  Even our heroes get to let loose in a number of ways; robbing a bank, playing arcade games, ice skating, drinking olive juice, or doing practical things like learning to fly a helicopter and getting target practice on mannequins.

 

Just as funny are the practical yet occasionally over-the-top make-up effects from Tom Savini.  Now synonymous with such a trade, this stands as the first major work that would catapult his career, and rightfully so.  Whether it is cutting a zombie's head off with helicopter blades, blowing up another one's head in an apartment building, jabbing a screwdriver into another's skull by way of his ear, or having one guy get ripped out of a blood pressure machine while another gets his intestines forcibly gorged upon, the gross-out moments are both horrifically funny and memorable.

 

Even more amazing is how Tom Savini has managed to look exactly the same for several decades.

Romero is wisely aware that his entire concept here is somewhat ridiculous and he also knows that a bunch of blue/grey/green zombies spewing bright-red blood is going to produce more chuckles than frightened gasps from his audience.  Instead of pretending that such silly ingredients are not inherently there, they are embraced in total enhancement of the film's tone.  Dawn of the Dead is less horror and more of a tongue-in-cheek action movie that just so happens to have walking corpses munching on people.  The fact that these waking corpses are not actually the film's true villains is exactly the message that Romero intended to come through.  The zombies represent unavoidable, uncontrollable surrender to their natural existence.  They have no choice in their fate.  It is the people who have yet to turn over to the zombie side that are consistently their own worst enemies.  They are humbled, terrified, and stubborn all at once, and their own inability to cooperate and problem solve simply makes the flesh-eating ghoul catastrophe at hand seem helplessly perpetual.  Like much great art, Romero's film is timeless since it should be obvious today as much as any era how such naturally flawed human characteristics still run rampant among us.

 

The vision on display here is not obnoxiously nihilistic though.  After all, Fran and Peter do indeed live to fight another day and even manage to convey somewhat of a quasi-optimistic, "Well, we're still alive so fuck it, what's one more day gonna hurt?" attitude as they fly off into the sunrise.  The likelihood of them making it much longer may be understandably nil, but that is not the point.  The point is that we are all people and warts and all, we all want the same thing; to survive.  How we go about achieving such a thing and how we treat each other in doing so is what we need to work on.  As the film clearly demonstrates, we need to do this even more so when our chances of success are detrimentally compounded by the universe throwing us a cuvre-ball.  That universe in this case simply having "No more room in hell".

 

No more room in hell, yes.  Room to appear in lots of Rob Zombie's movies, also yes.

George A. Romero managed to make the entire thing knowingly entertaining from a pure popcorn horror standpoint for the era, be it an aggressively button-pushing and violent one.  His ever-present social commentary is as on-the-nose and sly as it was in Night of the Living Dead, but this is a remarkably different movie.  It does not so much as explore the exact same themes as it does expand upon them with a more dominant nod and a wink.  Zombies are still everywhere, humanity is still doomed, and audience members still had to be uncomfortable in their seats at the time of its initial release.  While delving deeper into such an apocalyptic scenario and witnessing how we are all seemingly programmed to continue to jack it up if we stick to our naturally ill-equipped methods though, it sure comes off as a lot more fun that it logically should.

 

As mentioned earlier, for a single director to accomplish such a thing once in a career is largely unheard of.  For it to happen twice?  Well, there is a reason Romero is considered not only the godfather of the modern zombie but also, (and far more admirably), one of the horror genres most cherished and outstanding filmmakers.  Night of the Living Dead changed the game, but Dawn of the Dead set the bar in that very game.  Zombie make-up and gore effects may have gotten more realistic, the zombies themselves may have gotten faster and more aggressively terrifying, we may as a cinematic culture be utterly burnt-out on them as a go-to movie monster, yet none of this diminishes the impact that George Romero's other masterpiece still very much has.

You sir nailed it.  Both times.