Dawn of the Dead

Dawn of the Dead is a comedy, and understanding that is the difference between finding it dated and finding it the best thing in the subgenre.

The first twenty minutes are not funny at all. A television studio in a state of collapse, with staff shouting over each other about rescue-station lists they know are obsolete; then a SWAT raid on a tenement where the residents have refused to surrender their dead relatives, which is as ugly and as politically loaded as anything Romero filmed. By the time the helicopter lifts off, the film has established that the institutions are gone and that the people enforcing the emergency are the worst of it.

Then it lands on a shopping mall roof and becomes something nobody expected. Romero shot inside Monroeville Mall overnight for months, and the middle hour is four people with the keys to everything: fur coats, a gun shop, a skating rink, a bank vault full of useless money, television sets, hair dryers, chocolate. The dead shuffle past the fountains to muzak. It is funny, and it is funny on purpose, and it curdles exactly as intended.

"They're us"

Peter's line about the dead returning to the mall because it meant something to them in life is the most quoted sentence in zombie cinema and the film earns it structurally rather than by stating it. The survivors become indistinguishable from the shoppers: they stop planning, they accumulate, they furnish a hidden apartment behind a false wall and play poker in it, and Francine has to point out that they have built a prison and called it a home.

Tom Savini and the practical effects

Savini did the effects and plays a biker, and the work is both extraordinary and deliberately unserious: a machete into a skull, a helicopter rotor taking the top off a head, a screwdriver through an ear, a blood pressure that is clearly a pump. The grey-green zombie make-up was a lab mistake and Romero kept it. The Goblin score, recorded for Dario Argento's cut and reused here, is a huge part of why the mall sequences feel like a dream.

Where it is weak

It is two and a half hours in the director's cut and the middle sags. Stephen is written as a fool from his first scene and dies of it. The gender politics around Francine are handled better than most 1978 films and still unevenly. And the biker raid, which is the plot's engine, arrives very late.

For the film that started it, Night of the Living Dead; for the virus film that restarted the genre by rejecting it, 28 Days Later; for the Goblin score in its original setting, Profondo Rosso.

The short answer: a biker gang finds the mall, breaks the truck barricades and opens the building to the dead, not to take it but to loot and vandalise it. Most of them are killed in the chaos they create. Peter kills several in a running fight; Stephen is bitten in a lift, dies, reanimates and walks the dead straight to the hidden door of their apartment, because he still remembers where it is. Peter shoots the undead Stephen, then sits down with a pistol against his own head and tells Francine to go. He changes his mind at the last moment, fights his way to the roof, and gets into the helicopter beside her. It lifts off with very little fuel, no destination and the dead filling the roof below. Francine is pregnant. The film ends on the rotors.

Who survives in Dawn of the Dead?

Peter and Francine. Roger is bitten during the truck manoeuvre in the car park, deteriorates over several days and asks the others to wait for him to turn; Peter shoots him afterwards. Stephen is bitten in the lift during the biker raid. The ending is deliberately unresolved — the helicopter has minutes of fuel and nowhere to land — and Romero's original script had both of them die on the roof, Peter by suicide and Francine in the rotors.

What does the mall mean in Dawn of the Dead?

It is the film's argument made architectural. The dead come to the mall because consumption is the last behaviour they have, and the living move in and reproduce it: they take what they do not need, defend a space that cannot be defended, and stop trying to leave. Romero's satire is not a joke laid over a zombie film; the mall is the reason the siege fails, because comfort is what makes them stop planning.

Who are the bikers in Dawn of the Dead?

A large, armed, nomadic gang — Savini among them — who have been surviving in the open and who spot the helicopter. They are not trying to take the mall and they do not want the survivors dead. They break the barricades, let the dead in, and spend their raid looting jewellery, spraying fire extinguishers at the zombies and taking pies in the face. Their recreational vandalism is what kills them and what ends the siege, and it is the film's clearest statement that humans are the destabilising element.

Why does Stephen go into the lift?

Because he decides to fight the bikers alone, which is in character and fatal. He is shot at, trapped in the lift shaft, and bitten there. The structurally cruel part is what follows: as a reanimated corpse he retains enough of himself to lead the dead to the concealed door of the apartment they had kept secret all film. The hideout is given away by the person who built it.

How does Roger die?

He is bitten twice while clearing the car park — once on the arm and once on the leg, both because he is enjoying himself too much to be careful. He is nursed for days in the apartment, knows exactly what is coming, and makes Peter promise to wait until he has fully turned before shooting him. It is the most affecting sequence in the film and the only death in it played entirely straight.

Scored against the published rubric, here is what the numbers mean.

Viscera 078 is high — 91 works score lower. A head taken off by a rotor, a machete to the skull, a screwdriver through an ear, disembowelments, and a great deal of bright arterial red.

Era bias 008 is deep analog — only 9 works read more analog. 1978 16mm, latex appliances, a mall shot overnight on practical lighting and a score cut on tape.

Tone 058 is above the midpoint — 101 works score lower, which is high for an apocalypse. Long stretches are played as farce, two leads survive, and the film is frequently delighted with itself.

The threat at 060 leans human — 78 works score lower. The dead are an environment; the SWAT raid and the bikers are the film's actual violence.

Pace 062 is on the shock side, with 83 works slower, although the middle hour is deliberately becalmed.

Reality anchor 020 is grounded — 6 works score lower. One premise and then logistics: fuel, ammunition, doors, keys, blood pressure.

On jump scares: few. The film prefers to let you see the dead coming from a long way off.