This movie is so good, you guys.
I kind of assumed I had seen Dawn of the Dead before. My brain must have taken scenes from the 2004 re-make, Day of the Dead, and Chopping Mall to piece together a vague, false recollection. I would have definitely remembered if I had watched this movie before, because it is one of the best horror movies I have ever seen. It sets the example for nearly every theme that would be explored in zombie movies for the following forty years. It has moments of campy mayhem, bald satire and deeply disturbing violence. It has outstanding lead performances portraying a group of three-dimensional characters, plus some over-the-top, one-dimensional supporting characters befitting any good pulpy genre film. It is long (over two hours) but never less than entrancing. It has like half a dozen montages. It is the perfect zombie movie.
The film grabs you immediately with two different American institutions in chaos. First is a television studio which is struggling to maintain orderly reporting on what appears to be some national crisis. Of course we know what the crisis is, but the film doesn’t wait long to tell us anyway. In the second scene, a militarized police team is storming a project tenement. The motivations are not laid out explicitly, but they involve flushing out an armed gang, sweeping for infected occupants, and ushering the living to safe zones. The scenes are anarchic, dis-orienting and absolutely captivating. In them, we meet our four primary protagonists: Roger and Peter, two of the SWAT members who can handle themselves in a fight; Francine, an even-keeled manager at the television station; and Stephen, her boyfriend who also happens to fly the tv station’s helicopter. Eventually, they all end up in the chopper, and stop at a shopping mall to re-supply. The mall is swarming with zombies, and that brings us to the primary setting of the film.
Dawn of the Dead explores the horror of the zombie apocalypse, but more impressively it explores the fantasy of it. Underneath the anxiety over the break-down of society’s infrastructure, the concerns over meeting basic means of survival, and the threat of violent death, there is an undeniable appeal to such a scenario. There’s no time-clock to punch, no boundaries or laws to abide by, and all of a person’s day-to-day responsibilities evaporate. By setting the quartet loose in a mall, that fantasy is brought to life. There are the logistics of dealing with the zombies, of course, but these are capable people and the zombies of Romero’s day were the lumbering, slow-reacting kind. After a while, it almost seems like it’s worth dealing with walking dead to have unlimited time and unlimited access to all of these consumer goods. They assemble fancy wardrobes, eat caviar and play poker with $100 bills. They take turns playing barber and waiter for each other. Yet, the emptiness of it all inevitably sinks in like a dark malaise, and that’s Romero’s broader point. Consumerism is what we distract ourselves with, but it isn’t a substitute for actual living. The zombies aimlessly shuffling around the mall’s courtyard are the blunt, visual representation of consumer culture, but the human characters are the ones that play things out to their natural conclusion.
That’s not the only theme addressed. Night of the Living Dead carried some heavy racial overtones, and Romero continues that here. During the opening raid on the tenement, one of the cops is a vile and racist bastard, and that leads to one of the most disturbing scenes I’ve ever seen in any film. While his squad-mates are destroying the zombies that they encounter throughout the residences, he is just kicking open doors and blasting indiscriminately, at one point killing a surprised but very human man who is in his apartment with his family. FX artist extraordinaire, Tom Savini, captures the moment with a savagely graphic exploding head shot that made my stomach jump into my chest. The message is clear: We cheer when our heroes destroy the zombies because we see them as less than human, and that’s exactly how this man sees the mostly minority residents of the projects. It is far more horrifying than even the most gratuitous orgy of zombies feasting on human flesh (of which there is a plethora in this film) because it is something that really happens today in real life. Romero doesn’t really push on the racial theme throughout the rest of the film, nor does need to because he has just made his point perfectly.
Ok, before this turns into some kind of dissertation that does more to dissuade you from watching the film than the other way around, let me just say that it is exactly as heavy as I am describing it, but it is also engaging, entertaining and even humorous throughout. There is a scene with a biker gang fighting zombies that devolves into vaudeville at points, yet ends with some of the most gory deaths ever committed to celluloid. There are strong, elegantly played human relationships at the core of the movie. There are thrilling capers that our protagonists get up to that resemble heist movies. We lose beloved characters. We lose a guy in a sombrero who really wants his blood pressure taken. It is a cornucopia of creativity, and it belongs next to the likes of Jaws, Alien and The Thing as one of the absolute finest horror movies I’ve ever seen.
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