Dawn of the Dead (1978)

Tagline: “When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the Earth”
Running Time: 125 minutes (theatrical version)

Film Quality: 5/5
Gore Content: 5/5
Entertainment Value: 5/5
Originality: 4/5

Introduction

Struggling to get the financing for a follow up to the seminal ‘Night of the Living Dead’ word got back to a young, up and coming Italian horror director by the name of Dario Argento that George Romero was trying to get backing for a sequel to one of his favourite movies. Inviting Romero over to Italy, the pair worked on the screenplay and Argento agreed to produce, retaining the rights to edit and distribute the film across Europe, Romero would do the same in other territories. With the pairing of those two names there should have been no doubt about the success of the film but what was finally created was the ‘Ben Hur’ of horror films!

In a Nutshell

The world is beginning to change in the early stages of a zombie outbreak with society corroding and anarchy setting in. A helicopter pilot, journalist and two members of a SWAT team decide to run, hijacking the radio station travel chopper they happen upon a shopping mall. Realising they have a chance to survive there, they must also face up to a menace every bit as dangerous as the undead…mankind.

So what’s good about it?

What a stroke of true genius to make a shopping mall the location. Romero uses it to create an absolute juggernaut of a satire in which he is able to commentate on our society on so many levels from consumerism and greed to gang warfare and issues of race and gender. The zombies represent mankind, blindly going about their business, completely oblivious to what’s happening around them other than an unquestioning need to consume. Next time to you find yourself in a shopping mall, grab yourself a coffee, stand on the top level and look down...I guarantee you will be presented with a scene from ‘Dawn of the Dead’.

The film has a running time that, at a glance, may appear bloated but Romero crams an awful lot into that two and half hour running time. His pacing is so unerringly accurate that we don’t notice that it takes a good 45 minutes before they even arrive at the mall. That’s because Romero is also interested in exploring the world within which this film takes place. That means plunging us into a world of chaos and an all-out assault on the senses for the incredible first 20 minutes where we see TV interviews desperately trying to make sense of what’s happening, people running around like headless chickens and a SWAT team assault on a tenement building. It paints a picture of a society clinging on to itself and very quickly losing its grip. We also see gun-toting rednecks enjoying themselves, treating the zombie apocalypse like a shoot-a-duck stall at a fairground and a deserted aircraft hangar, looted for anything of worth. It’s apocalyptic in its execution and presents a world from which you would want to run, putting us firmly on the side of our four protagonists.

It’s very easy to forget that this was only Tom Savini’s fourth film as a special effects artist. He puts in one hell of a shift here with some truly breathtaking practical effects that include rib cages getting ripped out, bodies ripped entirely to pieces, the machete in the head scene (left) and an unforgettable exploding head. The word ‘legend’ is bandied about far too often but it is impossible to overestimate the impact Savini’s effects have on this and many other films.

‘Dawn’ is rightly revered for its effects but for me it’s Romero’s direction that truly ‘makes’ the film. There’s a very intentional comic book look and feel throughout the film that cleverly balances the violent excesses. When the fake blood arrived and it wasn’t what you might call a natural colour, Romero stayed with it, against Savini’s initial wishes, as he felt it would heighten that appearance of a graphic novel on film. Remember the scene where one of the bikers falls his bike escaping from the mall and starts firing his gun towards the camera as the zombies close in behind him (left)? There are no zombies in front of him; that shot is specifically set up to look like a comic book frame. I really can’t enthuse enough about Romero’s direction at turning out a two hour plus zombie film that never once outstays its welcome. There is so much happening and it’s done with such style and finesse that we should thank our lucky stars that Dario Argento fronted up the money to allow this man to helm such an incredible movie.

Stephen finds his way home

The zombies are also further developed and we move a step closer to ‘Bub’ from ‘Day of the Dead’. There’s the ‘Hare Krishna’ zombie who is smart enough to realise that there are people upstairs, the zombie that stares wistfully at Francine through the shop window, the zombie at the end that is more interested in Peter’s gun and of course Stephen who remembers the way home after his death. It’s that subtle continuation and evolution of the zombies, continuing in ‘Land of the Dead’ with ‘Big Daddy’ that makes Romero’s universe so intriguing.

What about the bad?

Francine isn’t given a huge amount to do but then again she is pregnant, my main issue with that is that not enough is made of it. Other than that I can’t think of a damn thing! You could perhaps argue that not all of the acting is what you might call top notch and some of the 70s fashions and haircuts leave something to be denied but can you really grumble? This is a monumental movie and ANY attempt by me to belittle it would be little more than nitpicking.

Any themes?

This has been covered to death and it’s been well documented elsewhere that Romero’s film represents a savage commentary on the nature of consumerism and greed. The Mall setting was the catalyst for Romero to hold a mirror up to ourselves to show us that we’re drawn blindly and almost subconsciously to shops with a desperate desire to consume more and more whether we need it or not. Combine this with the literal metaphor of mankind eating itself and the film serves as a pitch perfect analogy for what actually happened in the 80s! A society that favoured wealth, possession, status and opulence over morality, substance and meaning with a blinkered, overoptimistic outlook on life.

There’s some racial and class subtext as well with the opening SWAT team raid on a Puerto Rican settlement and how their outlook on life and the dead differs from ours in terms of respect and treatment. We also see it very briefly with the ‘good ol’ boys’ having a great time shooting the undead as if it were a game with no concept of the danger and context of the upcoming apocalypse. Their love of guns and the feeling of invincibility that holding a firearm gives them is in sharp contrast to the reality that it’s ultimately meaningless and they’re completely oblivious to the true fragility of mankind.

Release history

In the climate this film was released it’s a surprise the film wasn’t placed on the nasties list, such is the level of gore on display. It’s certainly more gruesome than ‘Zombie Flesh Eaters’ which suffered the wrath of the authorities, however that isn’t to say that it wasn’t given a rough ride. A total of 55 separate cuts were requested totalling just under two minutes. The subsequent resubmission saw Romero’s masterpiece suffer further requests to edit a total of 3m 46s of Savini’s splatter to leave a theatrical release and pre cert VHS from Intervision clocking in at a knat’s knob over 120 minutes. Shots removed included the exploding head, screwdriver in the ear, machete in the head and an incredible 19 shots of a biker having his intestines removed and eaten!

It’s worth pointing out here that the censors relayed their dismay and dislike for the film which for me is disgusting and suggests that their personal taste for the film dictated their treatment of it. Why should their complete lack of understanding and comprehension for a film prevent the rest of society from watching the complete film. This group of bell ends considered themselves educated and sophisticated yet were completely unable to see past the onscreen violence to what the film was really about, completely missing the point. They even believed that cutting the film improved it, James Ferman had the audacity to say so in a letter to the distributers accompanying the requested cuts. For me this goes over and above the remit for a ‘classification service’ and just highlighted what an outdated and patronising authority it had become.

As well as doing the effects, Savini plays one of the bikers

It gets worse!

In 1989 Entertainment in Video submitted the same truncated version to Ferman’s BBFC and their attitude to the film hadn’t been diluted. They requested a further 12 seconds of cuts, relatively small but still accounting for seven separate edits…this absolutely beggers belief!

Thankfully (sort of), a reappraisal of the film followed in the 90s when BMG VHS submitted a new, extended version (dubbed the Director’s Cut) which the BBFC passed with just six seconds of cuts. We were still missing the shoulder bite and exploding head from the opening SWAT raid along with the shooting of two zombie children in the airport hanger. To be fair to the BBFC that final scene would most likely have remained in the film but, coming so soon after the Dunblaine Massacre, it was considered culturally inappropriate to explicitly show the children being shot so the scene was shortened rather than edited out completely.

It wasn’t until 2003 when a full uncut version was finally passed, also released by BMG, along with the Argento Cut, a separate edit totalling 114 minutes that was prepared by Argento for many of the European territories removing several scenes of dialogue, adding much of The Goblin score and quickening the pace significantly.

There are five known versions of the film. The 114 minute Argento Cut, the 125 minute theatrical version, 139 minute Directors or Extended Cut, a 142 minute ‘Perfect Cut’ released in Japan and a 149 minute bootleg version, a composite cut which pretty much includes everything present in each of those other four versions. Romero reportedly prefers the theatrical cut, his first edit, although Argento’s Cut was the first to be released in terms of worldwide chronology.

Cultural Significance

Despite the cult hit that was ‘Night of the Living Dead’, there really hadn’t been a massive influx of zombie movies. If ‘Night’ sowed the seed as the first film to feature flesh eating zombies, and there had been a few since then to pick up the batton, most notably ‘The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue’ and Armando D’Ossorio’s ‘Blind Dead’ series (although they were less zombies in the Romero sense and more ghosts in skeletal rotting flesh form!), then ‘Dawn’ was the sunshine and rain that allowed the jungle of zombie movies that followed to flourish. It was the runaway critical and financial success of ‘Dawn’ that really opened the floodgates and it was only fitting that Romero was at the helm to realise that.

The sheer number of Italian knock offs that ranged from the piss-poor (‘Zombie Creeping Flesh’) to the really very good (‘Zombie Holocaust’) echoes that sentiment. It also ushered in a couple of unofficial sequels with Dan O’Bannan’s ‘Return of the Living Dead’ positing that the original ‘Night’ was based on a real event and Lucio Fulci’s ‘Zombie Flesh Eaters’, retitled ‘Zombi 2’ in some areas to mislead people that it was a sequel to the similarly titled ‘Zombie: Dawn of the Dead’, an alternative title in some countries.

Romero’s zombie-lore is still adhered to today, though some films favour Usain Bolt-esque versions of the undead, and as popular as ever in the guise of ‘The Walking Dead’ on TV and ‘World War Z’ in both literature and movies. Quite simply, along with ‘Night’, this one of the most influential movies of all time.

Final Thoughts

This is the ‘Citizen Kane’ of zombie movies and can lay a claim to be the best horror film of the 70s, facing very stiff competition from the likes of ‘The Exorcist’, ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ and ‘Halloween’. A triumph in almost every area of film making it is one of the few examples of a sequel that surpasses the original in almost way, despite the original also being considered a ground breaking classic.

Peter: "Scary, isn't it?

Memorable Quotes

Peter: ‘When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the Earth.”

Stephen (talking about the Mall): “A memory, some kind of instinct…this was an important part of their lives.”

Dr Foster: “Every dead body that is not exterminated becomes one of them and gets up and kills. The people it kills get up and kill.”

Priest: “When the dead walk, senores, we must stop the killing or lose the war.”

You’ll like this if you enjoyed…

‘Night of the Living Dead’, ‘Day of the Dead’, ‘The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue’, ‘The Crazies’