Dawn of the Dead (movie review)

• Title: Dawn of the Dead
• Year: 1978
• Rating: NR
• Director: George A. Romero
• Writer(s): George A. Romero
• Cast: Ken Foree, David Emge, Scott H. Reiniger, Gaylen Ross, Tom Savini

Four survivors of the zombie apocalypse make a comfortable life for themselves in a suburban mall. But in a world with no future, can mere survival be enough?

Rewind . . .

. . . and, growing up, I had a friend who was big into horror films, and had all sorts of things on tape via his older brother. I, on the other hand, was never very much into the horror films that seemed popular at the time, the Halloweens and Friday the 13ths. Sure, they were scary, and I didn’t quite mind being scared. Nor was I particularly squeamish. But those slasher flicks were basically about leading lambs to the slaughter, and I couldn’t identify with the characters or situations in them. They didn’t have the sort of spark that captured my imagination, and seemed more or less to be mere pornographic depictions of murder (how some things never change). Aside from Stephen King and a few other writers I enjoyed, I mistakenly thought all horror was like that, and film horror especially was just an endless serious of masked psychopaths chasing teenage girls through midnight forests.

Then my friend introduced me to George A. Romero’s zombie films.

He did so with a connoisseur’s appreciation for effect, and with scrupulous adherence to chronology. I can’t remember if we watched all three films in the ‘Anubis Cycle,’ Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Day of the Dead, over the course of the same evening or not — I kind of doubt it. But what I do remember was the somewhat illicit thrill of watching these flicks on the VCR after my parents had gone to bed for the evening. At the age of ten or eleven (or twelve?) these grainy, unrated b-movies — dubbed copies gotten through conventions or mail order film clubs — had a dangerous feel to them. They were underground, not part of the mainstream, and more extreme even than the Freddy and Jason fare other kids my age might be able to talk their parents into letting them watch. They also felt more real, of almost documentary quality, which only added to the appeal — and to the slight fluttering in my stomach as I fed the tapes into the machine, conscious that I was crossing a line into unknown territory . . .

Night of the Living Dead was good, I thought, if a bit hokey at times and pretty limited in scope. Day of the Dead was good too, as it really laid the apocalypse on thick — and it was the ‘end of the world as we know it’ vibe of these films that really captured my imagination as an already dyed-in-the-wool aficionado of post-apocalyptic stories. But it was Dawn of the Dead, the middle film in what is loosely described as a trilogy, that really got me excited. It took the premise of Night of the Living Dead and made it bigger, but it was a lot more fun and had more appealing characters than Day of the Dead. Indeed the characters make this film, relying as it does on four actors to carry the whole piece (with some help from the zombies, of course).

Dawn of the Dead established the now-familiar premise of survival in the face of a zombie apocalypse — it is the film that cemented the concept and gave us its dominant tropes. Despite being Romero’s second zombie film, it really is the first ‘modern’ zombie movie, the movie that gave us zombie humor, suggested that our fellow humans were more dangerous than any walking corpse, and let us share in the vicarious anarchic thrills of the collapse of western civilization and its abundant material culture. Yes, the idea of a world devoid of rules where you can go and steal what you want and do what you want and be entirely justified in doing so is an intrinsically appealing one. Tinged as it is with the depressing prospect of the end of humankind as a species of living organism, and you have the classic push-pull thematic backdrop to a zombie apocalypse scenario. Dawn of the Dead, with its survivors who have managed to build a new life of comfort and material abundance in that most American of places, the shopping mall, manages to parlay the initial premise of monster horror into a kind of vast and melancholic dread which is, for me now and as a kid, one of the finest of cathartic experiences.

Maybe I was just a weird kid.

Fast Forward . . .

. . . to an era when today’s weird kids have zombie lunchboxes, and parents think nothing of letting their munchkins see horror films more gory and shocking than anything Romero and Savini could cook up with their 1978 low budget effects and make up. And we have video games and books and movies; all sorts of movies big and small. Breakfast cereal, childrens’ pajamas, and scented candles soon to follow, I’m sure — and all this commoditization of zombies is sort of amusing when you consider that one of the themes of the movie that gave birth to the genre was the commercialization of modern life. Sadly, Romero’s two further explorations into zombieland since his three core films, Land of the Dead and Diary of the Dead, both fell victim, in my opinion, to his awareness that people where saying he was a director with a message, and so he set out to deliver one above giving us a good story – rather than the reverse.

But what about Dawn of the Dead? “It’s about consumerism, man, and, like, how consumers are just zombies.” Sure, that’s in there, but is the film really about that? Of course not, and here is where the problem with Romero arose, the notion that he is a satirist or gore-spattered Mark Twain derailed him from what he did best, making great low-budget movies about zombies. Yes, he is sharper than most, and infuses his films with a certain symbolic depth that I suspect is more about the happy accidents that arise when one is in the throes of the creative act, than a great deal of forthright planning. Be wary of he who sets out to make art, because it’s likely the guy who believes passionately about his no budget zombie movie will end up shooting rings around the would-be artist, because his goal is to tell a story, not send a message. Romero’s messages were oh so much smarter when they were the incidentals of his terrific stories, and not the basis of them.

Anyway, in watching Dawn again after a space of many years — and many zombie movies — I was struck by a lot of things. First, how unbelievable most of the zombies were. In our age of hyper-effective make up and effects we are used to zombies that bleed and slough skin and look a mess in general. There are a few decayed looking zombies in Dawn, but for the most part they are people with gray face paint. They tend not to be as convincing as either the black-and-white zombies of Night of the Living Dead, or the more modern looking rotters of Day of the Dead, but this actually works well in conjunction with one of the movie’s main themes, and that’s the developing contempt for the zombie threat. Initially terrifying, the survivors learn that they can out run and out smart whole packs of zombies, and their ingenuity gradually sees them master their new environment of the mall and take it back from the undead. Zombies become a figure of fun, easily disposed of, and just as easily used for the venting of frustration and anger. It’s an uncomfortable but somewhat viscerally relatable exploration of the lines between life and death, and it rightly identifies that the most unsettling thing about a zombie is not that it is dead and hungry, but that its human dignity has been erased.

And I was reminded too of just how much cooler slow zombies are than the speed freaks of modern cinema. Firstly, there’s just the believability aspect, one expects an animated corpse to be a little less good at sprinting than it used to be (granted, many modern fast zombie films use the premise that the zoms are still alive, a concept most associated with 28 Days Later’s rage virus), but they are much more horrifying as well. One unsettling scene in Dawn of the Dead illustrates this nicely. The population of a tenement is being relocated by some civil defense guys during the initial outbreak, and two of our main characters, Peter and Roger, stumble upon an area in the basement where the building’s residents have been leaving their dead. In a fast zombie scenario this would have been a run and gun situation, maybe with some propane tank bombs going off for good measure. But in Dawn, the zombies in the basement are writhing around on the floor, some are eating the limbs and flesh of others, others can barely move, but they take little notice of the humans for the most part. Instead of an action scene we get an execution, and Peter and Roger have to off the zombies with their pistols. It’s a powerful scene, one that modern films don’t make the time for, but one that shows the transition between our normal world and one in which it is necessary to work extreme violence on vast numbers of what were once people in order to survive.

Dawn of the Dead was made for little over half a million dollars, which is stunningly low by any criteria. It is a b-movie, and indie movie in the truest sense, and one that essentially laid the foundation for one of our new modern myths. It no longer seems shockingly violent, indeed by today’s horror standards it’s practically tame. Nor does it present us with a wall-to-wall action film like many of the zombie apocalypse films to come after it have done. What it does is paint an unremittingly bleak picture of a world without a future that suggests that survival, even abundance, don’t count for anything when they are accounted the only thing. Locked inside a shopping mall stocked with every material desire while death pounds on the door to get in, this survivors’ tale can be seen as a parable for modern life — just so long as one doesn’t overlook that Dawn of the Dead is its own story and no allegory, it just happens to be one that lets us look at how we behave when the world is ending all around us.

• Nostalgia Rating: Undying
• Rewatch Potential: High
• Wilhelm Scream?: No
• Unexpected Cameo: None
• Verdict: The quintessential zombie apocalypse film.

What I Learned: The importance of head shots, and that “when there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the Earth.”

Top Marks: The cast. Four unknowns, who later achieved some small cult status by virtue of this movie but have rarely appeared in anything else of any consequence. But they do a hell of a job carrying this film with nary a false note, and give Dawn of the Dead a sense of reality not really felt in most films on the subject. The four play off each other well, and move the mostly character-driven story forward with real heart. Make-up artist Tom Savini’s later appearance as a crazed, saber-wielding biker leader was also a highlight, and heralded a long line of cameos in horror and monster films.

If (When) It’s Remade: It has been remade, or ‘rebooted’ in the modern parlance, back in 2004. Despite opting for fast zombies and creating an entirely new story only loosely based on the premise of the original, the reanimated Dawn of the Dead was quite well-done in all areas, and visually impressive. What it lacked was the original’s black humor and lingering sense of hopelessness, of the madness of trying to live when the entire world is dead.

Final Thoughts: There are some people that complain about the ubiquitousness of the zombie in modern pop culture. But zombies are here to stay, because zombies are the monster of the modern age. The zombie apocalypse combines our yearning for anarchy with our distrust of our fellow humans, our lust for consequence-free violence and our artificial relationship to death as a thing alien and antagonistic to the clean lives we live. Zombies are here to stay because zombies are us.

This review is part of an ongoing series entitled Movies of a Misspent Youth, that looks at all the great fantasy, science fiction, and horror films available to the generation of kids growing up in the boom years of the 1980s. For more in this series, please visit my Film & TV page.