Dawn of the Dead (1978)
George Romero
"You are stronger than us. But soon, I think they be
stronger than you."
stronger than you."
When I think about my top five favorite films of all time, there are only a couple that I'm sure would make it right away: The Shining and Dawn of the Dead. It's not the most polished film, but the combination of apocalyptic horror, social commentary, and workmanlike filmmaking combines to make something that transcends the genre and has always stuck with me.
I'm not exactly sure when my dad bought our first DVD player, but I remember being at Best Buy when he picked it up. He suggested that we walk around and get some DVDs to bring home as well, but the selection was pretty limited. We came away with one of the Pierce Brosnan James Bond movies (maybe The World is Not Enough, but does it really matter?) and the Anchor Bay special edition release of the Dawn of the Dead director's cut. To give you an idea of how old it is, the DVD doesn't have a menu and you need to flip it over halfway through the film. The only extra is the original theatrical trailer (which is pretty cool) but it starts automatically after the credits are over at the end. This tells me that Anchor Bay just ripped some Laserdisc version and released it quick and easy at the beginning of the DVD craze.
It's a version that quickly went out of print. In fact, all versions of Dawn of the Dead seem to go out of print rather quickly, and it's never received the loving touch that some other older cult films have gotten (there's no reason why Samurai Cop should have a beautifully remastered Blu Ray while Dawn of the Dead remains impossible to find in stores). For a while, the exact version that I own became a bit of a collector's item. I recall it going for over a hundred dollars on eBay a decade or so ago.
I'd never dream of selling it though, because my copy is signed by both Ken Foree (who plays Peter in the film) and Tom Savini (blue collar special effects master). I got their signatures while at a comic book convention in the early 2000's. In fact, the only reason I went to the convention was because those two were specifically going to be there, and I really wanted to meet Savini. I regret not talking to him for longer, but I didn't want to be a bore. He did sign my DVD for free (unlike Ken Foree), so maybe he could sense my adoration. Also when I walked up to him, he was smelling a rose with a contemplative look on his face. Mad geniuses are so cool.
Here I am standing in the same place where the "no more room in hell" line is delivered
The Penney's was long gone, but trust me. It was the same spot.
Here's where the motorcycle gang bursts in at the end of the film
It's a plaster head filled with fake blood, apple cores, and pig guts. To blow it up, Tom Savini stood off camera and blew it apart with a shotgun. That's what I mean when I say blue collar filmmaking.
II) The Escape
Fran and her boyfriend Stephen (who is also the traffic copter pilot for the TV station) wait at a local police dispatch center on the river to fuel up their escape chopper. They're also waiting for Stephen's friend Roger to show up, and they meet Peter when they arrive from the apartment raid. We see that other police officers (or maybe just opportunistic raiders dressed like police, the film isn't clear) are taking the opportunity to leave town as well. Things are tense, but everyone understands that this is their last chance to get out.
Our heroes fly out of the city and into the country, coming across the National Guard and a bunch of rednecks doing some zombie hunting. This is the first time we see things going well for the warm, breathing humans, and it's a funny aside to the grim urban hellscape we just left. But it's also a sign that people aren't taking the zombie apocalypse as seriously as they should.
I enjoy when the team lands at a small rural airfield to refuel the helicopter. We get a glimpse of what wide tracts of the country probably look like now: abandoned and eerie. Each of the characters are attacked by zombies in this scene, but the best is the one who attacks Roger:
It's a classic film zombie death, and you're not going to believe how they pulled it off. Tom Savini found an extra with a particularly squat head, and built him a fake forehead out of putty and red paint. He then carefully measured the man's height, and figured out exactly how high to make the crate he climbs on. That way just the fake part of his head is chopped away by the ACTUAL FUCKING SPINNING HELICOPTER BLADES! That's ballsy and insane and probably illegal, but the effect works perfectly, and it's one of the most memorable scenes in any horror movie.
Our heroes continue traveling westward by helicopter, and are desperate to find a place to stop and rest. Luckily, Monroeville was ready to provide, and they discover the shopping mall. In 1978, malls were fancy centers of culture for suburbanites, and were still fairly new. It's a great setting for a horror film, and would be a perfect place to try and wait out the apocalypse.
III) The Mall
One of the best aspects of Dawn of the Dead is how realistic the motivations and actions of the characters are. They get out of dodge when things turn shitty, they travel by helicopter to avoid the roads, and they know when they've got a good opportunity in front of them. There's no need to shout advice to the screen, as they're doing what any normal person would do in their situation. After resting briefly in an upstairs office, Peter and Roger decide to survey the mall and see what they can help themselves to.
When they're running through the department store, we see Peter and Roger happy for the first time in the movie. This is about an hour in, and they had not shown any joy whatsoever before this point. And it's because they're back in their modern comfort zone: surrounded by consumer goods and shielded away from the brutish reality of the world outside. Who doesn't feel good surrounded by earthly possessions?
There are two scenes in this film that I feel really don't work, and the first is in this act. When Stephen leaves Fran to go see what Peter and Roger are up to, he ends up in a boiler/control room with a random wandering zombie.
This act also features our first zombie bite on one of the main crew, when Roger is showboating and gets nibbled on. I dread this scene each time I watch the movie, because it's so disappointing. Roger has developed into the brave but good natured guy we'd all want to be in our apocalypse group, and it sucks that he's going to zombie-fie. It's also around this point that we learn that Fran is pregnant with Stephen's child. This does not stop her smoking or drinking, but it gives the team a sense of purpose at least.
This is a probably a good time to talk about filming in the mall. The only way Romero and his crew could use the Monroeville Mall is if they filmed in the middle of the night, when the mall was closed, and clean up after themselves before it opened in the morning. There are stories of them cutting it pretty close, and crossing paths with the old folks coming in to do their early morning indoor walk. There was a lot of fake blood to mop up, and an army of extras to wrangle into makeup.
I love the extras in this movie. They're just everyday people from the Pittsburgh area who wanted to play zombies in a Romero movie, only getting $1 and a t-shirt as a reward. This involved super late nights and no actual guarantee they'd get screen time. Romero famously told extras that if they went the extra mile by actually putting the pig entrails and assorted animal viscera Savini used for human gore in their mouths, they'd get a scene in the movie. More than a few obliged.
This sounds like a lot of effort for a few seconds of screentime in an X rated cult horror film, but interviews I've read with extras over the years indicate most were drunk from tailgating hard before shooting. This benefited their performance (it's so much easier to do that zombie shuffle while tanked) and gave them the liquid courage they needed to eat raw pig guts.
IV) Complacency
After enough time in the mall, our four heroes become complacent. Following Roger's death they get comfortable and happy, enjoying luxuries that have probably been forgotten by the outside world. This is when we get the most famous scene and line in the whole film:
There's obviously an anti-consumerism message here, but I think it works both ways. Yes, the mindless consumers who flood malls each day are zombies, but you also have the three of them trying to shroud themselves in luxury goods and ignore the problems of the world. It's a theme Romero would touch upon again in Land of the Dead, but not nearly as effectively.
This sequence also does a good job of highlighting their laziness. They worked diligently on making the upstairs office at the mall into a cozy home, filling it with various luxuries from the mall. But they could have been fortifying the outside doors, barricading the hallway leading to their home, or preparing for a siege they should have assumed was going to come at some point.
One of my favorite parts of Romero's first two zombie movies are the news broadcasts that play in the midst of the chaos. They provide a cheap way to do some world building, and give us an example of how bad things must be getting. Initially the news comes from a professional looking studio, with proper sets and lighting, but at this point in the film, it's just a man drinking a pint of liquor on air in a very improvised studio, giving harried information of dubious quality.
I love the "expert" that is being interviewed here. He's such a pedantic asshole, and that eyepatch somehow tells you everything you need to know about his character. His plans for fixing the problem sound insane (feed the zombies to satisfy them, and drop nuclear weapons on every big city in the US), but he appears to be the only expert left. Fran understands what's going on before anyone else: humans have already lost this war.
Eventually, broadcasts cease completely, but Stephen still keeps looking for a station on the air. Fran has given up and moved on, but Stephen can't let go. It's an interesting dynamic where the expectant mother has trouble seeing hope for the future, but the father can't give up hope. There's a scene in the director's cut where we find them post-coital in bed, and they look miserable together. I think the implication here is that they likely wouldn't be a couple if they weren't forced to be by apocalyptic circumstances. They can't even look past their own petty problems in the face of armageddon.
V) Things Fall Apart
Reality comes back to our heroes in the form of a roving motorcycle gang. The gang sees our heroes using the helicopter and decides to raid the mall for supplies. Rather than just letting the bikers come through and take what they wanted, staying in their hidden enclave, they decide to go out and fight to protect what's "theirs." Stephen takes more personal offense than Peter does, and begins to jealously guard what he believes they earned. This is what leads to his death, and zombiefication. He then leads the undead horde to their secret home, which forces Peter and Fran to flee in the chopper.
This last act is most memorable for how ballsy and crazy things get filming in the mall. It's not just a few shambling zombies anymore, they are driving dozens of motorized vehicles through the walkways and the department stores, causing mayhem wherever they went. I have no idea how the mall officials let them do this, or if they even knew what happened until the movie came out, but it's amazing.
The grossest kills in the film happen here at the end. There are brutal eviscerations, tearing of limbs, and realistic flesh biting. The disemboweling is particularly gruesome, and the bravest of the extras get their well-earned screentime.
The second truly weak scene in the movie comes as the bikers are running rampant through the mall, and start throwing cream pies at the zombies and spraying them with seltzer water. It's goofy, but not really funny after the third or fourth time you see it, and I don't think it works with the serious turn the film takes in this final act. I wish there was a version where this was cut out completely, but I gather that Romero particularly liked it.
Speaking of versions of the film, there are a ton. What I have is a one-off special edition that contains about 12-15 minutes of extra footage over the theatrical release, but there are multiple variations, including one that clocks in at over 2.5 hours, with 30+ minutes of extra footage.
There's even a European cut that was put together by Dario Argento, which I watched last year. It cuts out a lot of the exposition and character development, reducing or excising completely a lot of the happier scenes in the film. He also changes up the soundtrack, exclusively utilizing Goblin's synth-driven prog rock, rather than mixing it up with the amazing Muzak style songs Romero sprinkled in. Strangely enough, Argento keeps the pie scene intact when it seems like an obvious cut if you're going for a more serious film, but what do I know?
One thing that I've never seen in any version, which means Romero probably never filmed it, was the original grimdark ending. Instead of taking off in the helicopter together, Peter kills himself as the zombies burst into his room, and Fran jams her head into the helicopter blades, like the zombie from the beginning. In fact, the exploding head in the SWAT raid scene is modeled to look like Galen Ross, the actress who plays Fran (only they painted it brown and put a fake beard on it) so they could lift it into the blades. As the credits wrapped up, the helicopter engine was going to sputter and the blades would have stopped spinning, indicating that even if they had tried to take off, they wouldn't have made it very far. Real dark stuff.
Instead, we get a modicum of hope, as Fran and Peter fly off to an uncertain future. While I'd love to see the alternate ending sometime, the ending Romero chose really does work best. Even though it's not a total bummer, I'd never call it a happy ending.
I'm not exactly sure when my dad bought our first DVD player, but I remember being at Best Buy when he picked it up. He suggested that we walk around and get some DVDs to bring home as well, but the selection was pretty limited. We came away with one of the Pierce Brosnan James Bond movies (maybe The World is Not Enough, but does it really matter?) and the Anchor Bay special edition release of the Dawn of the Dead director's cut. To give you an idea of how old it is, the DVD doesn't have a menu and you need to flip it over halfway through the film. The only extra is the original theatrical trailer (which is pretty cool) but it starts automatically after the credits are over at the end. This tells me that Anchor Bay just ripped some Laserdisc version and released it quick and easy at the beginning of the DVD craze.
It's a version that quickly went out of print. In fact, all versions of Dawn of the Dead seem to go out of print rather quickly, and it's never received the loving touch that some other older cult films have gotten (there's no reason why Samurai Cop should have a beautifully remastered Blu Ray while Dawn of the Dead remains impossible to find in stores). For a while, the exact version that I own became a bit of a collector's item. I recall it going for over a hundred dollars on eBay a decade or so ago.
I'd never dream of selling it though, because my copy is signed by both Ken Foree (who plays Peter in the film) and Tom Savini (blue collar special effects master). I got their signatures while at a comic book convention in the early 2000's. In fact, the only reason I went to the convention was because those two were specifically going to be there, and I really wanted to meet Savini. I regret not talking to him for longer, but I didn't want to be a bore. He did sign my DVD for free (unlike Ken Foree), so maybe he could sense my adoration. Also when I walked up to him, he was smelling a rose with a contemplative look on his face. Mad geniuses are so cool.
My #1 true love
There's no other movie that I know more about (at least behind-the-scenes wise) than Dawn of the Dead. I'd read a full book about its production if one existed, but I've watched every making-of documentary I could find, read all of the articles, and I've even visited the mall in Monroeville, PA where it was filmed. I tried to make it a surprise for Zach while we were on our spring road trip to D.C., but since he's also a degenerate nerd, he realized what town we were headed toward, and asked about the mall. I'm just glad he was excited to go see a suburban mall that's gone through numerous renovations since 1978 and looks very little like its former glory!
It's hard to know exactly why this film resonates with me. I was introduced to it at a fairly young age (as I said in another review, I think my dad knew what I was going to become and didn't worry too much about things warping me), so maybe that has something to do with it. But every time I watch it, I'm reminded of how well it's made, and how great the story truly is. It's a masterpiece and probably the greatest independent film that will ever be made.
Dawn of the Dead is a story told in five acts: 1) the degradation of society, 2) the escape of our heroes, 3) discovering and taking control of the mall, 4) getting comfortable in their new home, 5) attack of the bikers. Rather than go beat by beat, I'll try to break this up into these acts and talk about what I like most about each.
I) Degradation of Society
The opening shot of the film is so simple and evocative. Rather than running the title screen and opening credits over black, Romero starts with a close up of a rough, red surface, maybe giving us a premonition of the horror we're about to step into. The camera pans over to Fran, one of our four heroes, sleeping fitfully in a local television studio. She wakes up to a world descending into total chaos. The local news is trying to stay on the air, to give viewers information and lists of "safe" places to flee to. Nobody seems happy, and it turns out that the sleazy producer of the station is putting out wrong or outdated information because he doesn't want people at home to turn the channel. Greed still holds sway during the zombie apocalypse.
The movie never makes it clear who the two broadcasters are in this scene, but I get the sense that the black guy is a newscaster, and the white guy is a government official trying to disseminate information. This is when we learn specifically that the bodies of the dead are coming back to life and killing people.
Dawn of the Dead is a story told in five acts: 1) the degradation of society, 2) the escape of our heroes, 3) discovering and taking control of the mall, 4) getting comfortable in their new home, 5) attack of the bikers. Rather than go beat by beat, I'll try to break this up into these acts and talk about what I like most about each.
I) Degradation of Society
The opening shot of the film is so simple and evocative. Rather than running the title screen and opening credits over black, Romero starts with a close up of a rough, red surface, maybe giving us a premonition of the horror we're about to step into. The camera pans over to Fran, one of our four heroes, sleeping fitfully in a local television studio. She wakes up to a world descending into total chaos. The local news is trying to stay on the air, to give viewers information and lists of "safe" places to flee to. Nobody seems happy, and it turns out that the sleazy producer of the station is putting out wrong or outdated information because he doesn't want people at home to turn the channel. Greed still holds sway during the zombie apocalypse.
The movie never makes it clear who the two broadcasters are in this scene, but I get the sense that the black guy is a newscaster, and the white guy is a government official trying to disseminate information. This is when we learn specifically that the bodies of the dead are coming back to life and killing people.
Shit's real bad
The chaos in the station is a microcosm of what's going on in the rest of the world: nobody can agree what to do, nobody's heeding logic, infighting rages, people are still making selfish decisions, and the sensible ones are just looking to get the fuck out.
In another part of the city, the Philadelphia SWAT team is about to raid a tenement building to, presumably, extract the residents inside. We learned from the TV broadcast that per government decree, no person can occupy a private residence within the city any longer (imagine the shit show an order like that would cause). The SWAT scene is probably the best social commentary in the film, and something that I missed while watching this movie years ago.
At the beginning of the scene, we meet one of the SWAT cops, Roger. He's been through this a few times before, and knows his commanding officer's standard speech by heart. We also meet a clearly unhinged cop who pumps his shotgun, and screams a blue streak of racial epithets at the building. I used to think this scene was a little dated, but now I realize that racist cops would only get more blatant as the social order breaks down.
While the purpose of the tenement raid is to establish the characters of Roger and Peter, and to show the continued collapse of civil society, I think there's something more profound going on. This tenement is exclusively populated by African American and Latino residents, and it's reasonable to assume that as society crumbles, poor people of color would suffer exponentially more than affluent whites, and would be treated far more harshly by police and government officials. Poor POC would likely turn to informal power structures (such as local criminal organizations or by forming building-wide militias) to protect themselves from outside threats, both living and dead. I believe that's what the SWAT team is there to disrupt, and they've been doing this all over the city.
Heads up: STRONG racist language in this scene
A little filmmaking note here: the rooftop that this scene is filmed on was the roof of George Romero's production office building. It's a pretty small roof, but through clever editing and lots of cuts, Romero makes it look huge. His true genius has always been in the editing bay, and this is a perfect example of his expertise.
When the police do take the building, things go horribly wrong. It appears like the residents of the building figured out a temporary solution to their zombie problem, locking the undead in their apartments, or bundling them up and sticking them in the basement. In a misguided plan, the police end up freeing the zombies, which do what zombies do, and the situation turns to pure chaos. Peter and Roger handle the grim business of killing all of the tied-up zombies in the basement, and make the decision to flee the city together. Who could blame them?
As we leave Act 1, let's take a moment to appreciate one of the greatest head explosions in movie history:
When the police do take the building, things go horribly wrong. It appears like the residents of the building figured out a temporary solution to their zombie problem, locking the undead in their apartments, or bundling them up and sticking them in the basement. In a misguided plan, the police end up freeing the zombies, which do what zombies do, and the situation turns to pure chaos. Peter and Roger handle the grim business of killing all of the tied-up zombies in the basement, and make the decision to flee the city together. Who could blame them?
As we leave Act 1, let's take a moment to appreciate one of the greatest head explosions in movie history:
It's a plaster head filled with fake blood, apple cores, and pig guts. To blow it up, Tom Savini stood off camera and blew it apart with a shotgun. That's what I mean when I say blue collar filmmaking.
II) The Escape
Fran and her boyfriend Stephen (who is also the traffic copter pilot for the TV station) wait at a local police dispatch center on the river to fuel up their escape chopper. They're also waiting for Stephen's friend Roger to show up, and they meet Peter when they arrive from the apartment raid. We see that other police officers (or maybe just opportunistic raiders dressed like police, the film isn't clear) are taking the opportunity to leave town as well. Things are tense, but everyone understands that this is their last chance to get out.
Our heroes fly out of the city and into the country, coming across the National Guard and a bunch of rednecks doing some zombie hunting. This is the first time we see things going well for the warm, breathing humans, and it's a funny aside to the grim urban hellscape we just left. But it's also a sign that people aren't taking the zombie apocalypse as seriously as they should.
I enjoy when the team lands at a small rural airfield to refuel the helicopter. We get a glimpse of what wide tracts of the country probably look like now: abandoned and eerie. Each of the characters are attacked by zombies in this scene, but the best is the one who attacks Roger:
It's a classic film zombie death, and you're not going to believe how they pulled it off. Tom Savini found an extra with a particularly squat head, and built him a fake forehead out of putty and red paint. He then carefully measured the man's height, and figured out exactly how high to make the crate he climbs on. That way just the fake part of his head is chopped away by the ACTUAL FUCKING SPINNING HELICOPTER BLADES! That's ballsy and insane and probably illegal, but the effect works perfectly, and it's one of the most memorable scenes in any horror movie.
Our heroes continue traveling westward by helicopter, and are desperate to find a place to stop and rest. Luckily, Monroeville was ready to provide, and they discover the shopping mall. In 1978, malls were fancy centers of culture for suburbanites, and were still fairly new. It's a great setting for a horror film, and would be a perfect place to try and wait out the apocalypse.
III) The Mall
One of the best aspects of Dawn of the Dead is how realistic the motivations and actions of the characters are. They get out of dodge when things turn shitty, they travel by helicopter to avoid the roads, and they know when they've got a good opportunity in front of them. There's no need to shout advice to the screen, as they're doing what any normal person would do in their situation. After resting briefly in an upstairs office, Peter and Roger decide to survey the mall and see what they can help themselves to.
When they're running through the department store, we see Peter and Roger happy for the first time in the movie. This is about an hour in, and they had not shown any joy whatsoever before this point. And it's because they're back in their modern comfort zone: surrounded by consumer goods and shielded away from the brutish reality of the world outside. Who doesn't feel good surrounded by earthly possessions?
There are two scenes in this film that I feel really don't work, and the first is in this act. When Stephen leaves Fran to go see what Peter and Roger are up to, he ends up in a boiler/control room with a random wandering zombie.
Watch until 53:15
It's pretty clunky, and feels bloated. I know that Romero wanted to put Stephen in some danger, while also giving Peter and Roger a heads up that he's coming by hearing his gunshots. The ricochet shots and sound effects are particularly bad here. But this scene could be so much better if he was ambushed, pushed to the ground, and had to load his gun and kill the zombie. It would've built tension for that scene, while also providing the gunshot that Peter and Roger would hear. I'm sure it was a total pain in the ass to film in that shadowy back room, and I'm guessing Romero hated to get rid of hard-earned footage.This act also features our first zombie bite on one of the main crew, when Roger is showboating and gets nibbled on. I dread this scene each time I watch the movie, because it's so disappointing. Roger has developed into the brave but good natured guy we'd all want to be in our apocalypse group, and it sucks that he's going to zombie-fie. It's also around this point that we learn that Fran is pregnant with Stephen's child. This does not stop her smoking or drinking, but it gives the team a sense of purpose at least.
This is a probably a good time to talk about filming in the mall. The only way Romero and his crew could use the Monroeville Mall is if they filmed in the middle of the night, when the mall was closed, and clean up after themselves before it opened in the morning. There are stories of them cutting it pretty close, and crossing paths with the old folks coming in to do their early morning indoor walk. There was a lot of fake blood to mop up, and an army of extras to wrangle into makeup.
I love the extras in this movie. They're just everyday people from the Pittsburgh area who wanted to play zombies in a Romero movie, only getting $1 and a t-shirt as a reward. This involved super late nights and no actual guarantee they'd get screen time. Romero famously told extras that if they went the extra mile by actually putting the pig entrails and assorted animal viscera Savini used for human gore in their mouths, they'd get a scene in the movie. More than a few obliged.
This sounds like a lot of effort for a few seconds of screentime in an X rated cult horror film, but interviews I've read with extras over the years indicate most were drunk from tailgating hard before shooting. This benefited their performance (it's so much easier to do that zombie shuffle while tanked) and gave them the liquid courage they needed to eat raw pig guts.
IV) Complacency
After enough time in the mall, our four heroes become complacent. Following Roger's death they get comfortable and happy, enjoying luxuries that have probably been forgotten by the outside world. This is when we get the most famous scene and line in the whole film:
There's obviously an anti-consumerism message here, but I think it works both ways. Yes, the mindless consumers who flood malls each day are zombies, but you also have the three of them trying to shroud themselves in luxury goods and ignore the problems of the world. It's a theme Romero would touch upon again in Land of the Dead, but not nearly as effectively.
This sequence also does a good job of highlighting their laziness. They worked diligently on making the upstairs office at the mall into a cozy home, filling it with various luxuries from the mall. But they could have been fortifying the outside doors, barricading the hallway leading to their home, or preparing for a siege they should have assumed was going to come at some point.
One of my favorite parts of Romero's first two zombie movies are the news broadcasts that play in the midst of the chaos. They provide a cheap way to do some world building, and give us an example of how bad things must be getting. Initially the news comes from a professional looking studio, with proper sets and lighting, but at this point in the film, it's just a man drinking a pint of liquor on air in a very improvised studio, giving harried information of dubious quality.
I love the "expert" that is being interviewed here. He's such a pedantic asshole, and that eyepatch somehow tells you everything you need to know about his character. His plans for fixing the problem sound insane (feed the zombies to satisfy them, and drop nuclear weapons on every big city in the US), but he appears to be the only expert left. Fran understands what's going on before anyone else: humans have already lost this war.
Eventually, broadcasts cease completely, but Stephen still keeps looking for a station on the air. Fran has given up and moved on, but Stephen can't let go. It's an interesting dynamic where the expectant mother has trouble seeing hope for the future, but the father can't give up hope. There's a scene in the director's cut where we find them post-coital in bed, and they look miserable together. I think the implication here is that they likely wouldn't be a couple if they weren't forced to be by apocalyptic circumstances. They can't even look past their own petty problems in the face of armageddon.
V) Things Fall Apart
Reality comes back to our heroes in the form of a roving motorcycle gang. The gang sees our heroes using the helicopter and decides to raid the mall for supplies. Rather than just letting the bikers come through and take what they wanted, staying in their hidden enclave, they decide to go out and fight to protect what's "theirs." Stephen takes more personal offense than Peter does, and begins to jealously guard what he believes they earned. This is what leads to his death, and zombiefication. He then leads the undead horde to their secret home, which forces Peter and Fran to flee in the chopper.
This last act is most memorable for how ballsy and crazy things get filming in the mall. It's not just a few shambling zombies anymore, they are driving dozens of motorized vehicles through the walkways and the department stores, causing mayhem wherever they went. I have no idea how the mall officials let them do this, or if they even knew what happened until the movie came out, but it's amazing.
The grossest kills in the film happen here at the end. There are brutal eviscerations, tearing of limbs, and realistic flesh biting. The disemboweling is particularly gruesome, and the bravest of the extras get their well-earned screentime.
The second truly weak scene in the movie comes as the bikers are running rampant through the mall, and start throwing cream pies at the zombies and spraying them with seltzer water. It's goofy, but not really funny after the third or fourth time you see it, and I don't think it works with the serious turn the film takes in this final act. I wish there was a version where this was cut out completely, but I gather that Romero particularly liked it.
Speaking of versions of the film, there are a ton. What I have is a one-off special edition that contains about 12-15 minutes of extra footage over the theatrical release, but there are multiple variations, including one that clocks in at over 2.5 hours, with 30+ minutes of extra footage.
There's even a European cut that was put together by Dario Argento, which I watched last year. It cuts out a lot of the exposition and character development, reducing or excising completely a lot of the happier scenes in the film. He also changes up the soundtrack, exclusively utilizing Goblin's synth-driven prog rock, rather than mixing it up with the amazing Muzak style songs Romero sprinkled in. Strangely enough, Argento keeps the pie scene intact when it seems like an obvious cut if you're going for a more serious film, but what do I know?
One thing that I've never seen in any version, which means Romero probably never filmed it, was the original grimdark ending. Instead of taking off in the helicopter together, Peter kills himself as the zombies burst into his room, and Fran jams her head into the helicopter blades, like the zombie from the beginning. In fact, the exploding head in the SWAT raid scene is modeled to look like Galen Ross, the actress who plays Fran (only they painted it brown and put a fake beard on it) so they could lift it into the blades. As the credits wrapped up, the helicopter engine was going to sputter and the blades would have stopped spinning, indicating that even if they had tried to take off, they wouldn't have made it very far. Real dark stuff.
Instead, we get a modicum of hope, as Fran and Peter fly off to an uncertain future. While I'd love to see the alternate ending sometime, the ending Romero chose really does work best. Even though it's not a total bummer, I'd never call it a happy ending.
Summary:
Dawn of the Dead represents the best of independent filmmaking, and was an inspiration to dozens of directors who were struck by Romero's ballsy attitude and quest to elevate something that could easily be d-level trash cinema into something for the ages. There's insightful social commentary, a compelling story, great characters, an amazing setting, and the best zombie apocalypse world-building in film history. It's easily one of the two best horror movies ever made, and I'll watch it every year until the zombies feast upon my flesh.
If you've never seen it, now's the time. There are multiple versions of decent quality on YouTube. Or you could swing by my house and check out my copy!
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