Dawn of the Dead (1978) | 31 Days of Horror: Oct 3

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After the night comes the dawn. And with it, more shambling zombies.

Ten years after Night of the Living Dead, George Romero returns with a sequel to his apocalyptic zombie film. Get up early, and make sure you’re armed. The Dawn of the Dead is here for you!

Before Viewing

Dawn of the Dead was one of the early sequels to a classic horror film, and the trailer wants to be sure the audience understands that. It depicts characters, from people at a television station, bikers, and SWAT team members trying to avoid the re-animated dead that are still wandering around America. The trailer also features a chilling voiceover by Don LaFontaine, one of the classic narrators of film trailers. His descriptions of the horror presented by the undead monsters works in concert with the shocking imagery shown. Let’s get into the film.

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

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After Viewing

Near Philadelphia, sometime after the outbreak of the zombie infection, a television station erupts in chaos as they attempt to stay on the air and provide information to their viewers.  Helicopter news reporter Stephen (David Emge) tells Fran (Gaylen Ross) to meet him on the roof at 9pm to get out of town. Elsewhere in town, a SWAT team is waiting to go into a tenement to make arrests on a group of Puerto Ricans. Some of the cops are too eager to shoot at anything, either zombie or immigrant. SWAT team member Roger (Scott Reiniger) is cornered by a zombie but saved by fellow SWAT member Peter (Ken Foree). He asks Peter if he wants to join him in running tonight.

The two policemen join Fran and Stephen in the helicopter as they escape west out of town. Somewhere over Johnstown they see groups of rednecks joining with the army in target practice on various zombies roaming the countryside. After being attacked by various undead when they set down for fuel, they continue on towards Cleveland, but everyone is cranky and tired. They spot a shopping mall below them and decide that this could be a place with supplies where they could hole up for a while.

The first few days are harrowing as they make sorties from a small back room, into the mall for supplies. Each character is nearly attacked including Fran, who is revealed to be three to four months pregnant. She wants to head for Canada, but Stephen worries about having enough fuel and running into other, more dangerous, survivors. Peter and Roger hotwire tractor trailer trucks and use them to block the entrances to the mall. During their second trip, Roger is attacked when he goes back for his tool bag and gets bitten by a zombie. Fran tends to his wounds while Stephen and Peter grab all they can in the mall’s gun store.

With the main entrances mostly blocked, the men hotwire a display car inside the mall and drive to all the doors, locking them to prevent more zombies entering. They then proceed to “clean house” of any zombie left inside. Along with cleaning up the dead bodies and putting them into a restaurant freezer, they build a false wall in front of the hall that leads to their shelter. They take a shopping spree, gathering anything their hearts desire, as well as play video games in the arcade and treat themselves to delicious meals.

Roger soon gets sick and turns. Peter kills his friend before they can be hurt by him. Stephen proposes marriage to Fran, but she declines. After some time passes, the three begin to get on each other’s nerves, particularly Stephen and Fran. But they soon work it out, and Stephen decides to give Fran flying lessons on the helicopter in case anything happens to him. A biker gang sees the helicopter and decides to attack the mall that evening. The gang of 15-20 bikers move the trucks and bust the doors open allowing the zombies to stream back inside. They aggressively destroy and take things destroying the otherwise pristine mall.

Stephen gets territorial seeing the bikers trash the place he’s lived in for the past couple of months. Peter begins shooting the bikers, including one that carries a machete (Tom Savini). As Stephen attempts to avoid the bikers he is cornered by a group of zombies in the elevator and bitten. He quickly turns and, resorting to the familiar, returns to the hidden room. The zombies break down the fake wall coming for Fran and Peter, who has returned. Peter instructs Fran to fly away as he contemplates suicide. But he soon regains his senses and pushes through the zombies, who have made their way to the roof. Fran hovers the copter while Peter gets on board and they set off with little fuel as the dawn breaks.

“When there’s no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the Earth.” – Peter

Dawn of the Dead was one of the first modern sequels to a successful horror film. A follow-up to the decade old Night of the Living Dead, the film thematically continues the events of the previous film, even without including any previous characters. The resurgence of horror films as popular entertainment in the mid-70s, following The Exorcist, Carrie, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, led to studios and producers creating sequels to expand the franchise possibilities of popular films. Exorcist II: The Heretic in 1977 and Damien: Omen II in 1978 were the first numbered sequels building on their popular predecessors. It wouldn’t be until the 1980s that filmgoers would see an explosion of horror sequels, both numbered and unnumbered, all intending to grow one successful film into a franchise.

George Romero returned as director working with producers Claudio and Dario Argento (the latter having released the horror classic Suspiria the year before), as well as Richard Rubenstein, who had produced Romero’s two previous films and would continue working together on his next three. While his budget was higher for this sequel, allowing for a longer film, shot in color, and expanded special effects, he still chose to film in a more guerrilla and low-budget style. Lots of the extras and crew were made up of friends and family, and the film was shot in the Pittsburgh area, specifically the Monroeville Mall.

As explained in Scream 2, the rules for horror sequels are pretty simple.The body count should be bigger and the death scenes are more elaborate. Dawn of the Dead ticks both of these checkboxes with the increased zombie mayhem of this sequel. Since there are only four main characters (and only two that die), the body count number includes the various deaths of people in the tenement and dismemberments of the zombies–plus a biker or two. It also makes good on the second rule, as the gore was much more visceral than any other film out there. Special effects wizard Tom Savini joined the crew to create the zombie and makeup effects. His work heralded new levels of realism as the zombies were seen eating human entrails, or getting parts of their heads blown off with guns. The film also takes elements of the first film and amplifies them. More zombies, more tension, and more anarchy.

Thematically, Dawn of the Dead follows the lead of its predecessor by further showing the collapse of society. The zombie apocalypse is well underway as employees of the local Philadelphia television station attempt to stay on the air. Everyone is tired and cranky, but Fran is the only one who has the decency to pull outdated rescue shelter information off the air. The station manager yells at her for removing the chyron, because if they don’t run the lists, people won’t tune it. The dead are roaming the earth, and people are still stuck in the molds of doing their jobs. On the flip side, members of the SWAT team, specifically Wooley, sees the anarchy of the situation as an excuse to indiscriminately shoot people in the tenement building they are storming. It doesn’t matter if they’re zombies or not. Between those trying to impose order (like the people at the TV station staying on the air) and those sowing chaos (some members of the police as well as the biker gang), it’s no wonder that people like Fran and Stephen want to escape and leave the broken society for something different, and potentially better.

The haven that the refugees take shelter in is the best choice considering their location and the alternatives. Finding a mall, fully stocked with food, weapons and ammunition, and other distractions allows this small tribe to survive for months with little to no hassle. Romero takes the shrine to modern consumerism and uses it as the central hub in a film about the breakdown of society. Zombies wander the hallways of the shopping plaza, drawn to this location by memories of the life they once lived. Its familiarity comforts them in some unknown way, as they search for the flesh of a living being to sustain their bodies. Literally zombies shuffle through their days in the mall, but these walking dead don’t partake of its riches. Only the humans do. Stephen, Fran, Roger, and Peter enjoy the prosperity of being able to have anything they want, but only for a little while. The novelty of  the situation wears off rather quickly as they realize they are just as trapped in this giant commercial edifice, as they would be elsewhere. When the biker gang invades and begins to wantonly destroy their “home,” Stephen feels rage as if his home was being invaded. Even in this new America, he is tied to the material possessions the mall offers him. And it distracts him just enough that he is unable to avoid a horde of zombies, succumbing, and becoming one of them.

A Spanish priest near the beginning of the film offers Roger and Peter the following advice, “when the dead walk, we must stop the killing or lose the war.” His words ring true, but also provide no relief in light of the situations. The dead walk, and killing them stops their feeding. But the real killing that needs to stop is the person-on-person violence as seen in the cities. Citizens turning on themselves, looking out for only (or mainly) themselves. The priest’s words provide a bleak future that only gets bleaker as the film runs on. Fran, revealed as pregnant halfway through, must deliver her baby into this nightmarish world, without a father, and without much hope. Even though she and Peter were able to survive their time in the Mall, their escape North offers little expectation. Their gas is low, and much time has passed from their initial exodus. Resources may be even scarcer in the wild. The dawn may be rising on their new day, but the future is darker than ever as they fly off.

This would not be the last of Romero’s zombie films. He would follow Dawn with Day of the Dead in 1985, before taking a 20 year hiatus and returning in 2005 with Land of the Dead. The year prior to that, Zack Snyder released a remake also under the name Dawn of the Dead, which was written by James Gunn. It followed a 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead. Both remakes loosely followed the plots of the originals, and featured better, and more graphic, effects. The modern stories of The Walking Dead (both in print and on television) owe much to Romero’s series in general and to this film in particular. Even after 45 years, Dawn of the Dead still creates a feeling of dread and hopelessness in viewers.

Assorted Musings

• Don LaFontaine, voice over actor, provides his amazing tones in the original trailer for this film. He is also the voice for trailers like Jaws, The Exorcist, The Omen, and Creepshow.
• Romero revisits the end of Night of the Living Dead but in a grander scale with Army soldiers and a bunch of “rednecks” taking target practice on the undead out in the country. They grab some coffee, donuts, and a rifle to hunt undead rather than deer.
• Best Zombie Death: As the heroes refuel at a remote airport, one zombie climbs up on some crates to attack Roger, who is filling the gas tank of a running helicopter. The zombie loses the top of his head in the blades of the copter, not realizing the mistake for a few seconds!