Dawn of the Dead

Viewed today, one of the more startling aspects of writer-director George A Romero's Dawn of the Dead (at least when judged against modern, more blood-thirsty fare) is the notion that dealing with the reanimated bodies of dead human beings is inherently traumatic. When Ken Foree's Peter and Scott Reiniger's Roger - two Philadelphia SWAT officers tasked with clearing residents out of low income housing for the crime of defying martial law - come across a makeshift morgue in the basement of one building they discover bound and writhing bodies chewing on bones. A revolted Peter takes the lead, unholstering a sidearm to begin the process of exterminating these ghouls. What is absent in this sequence is any sense that this is the correct response to these pitiful creatures. The slow, precise headshots delivered by Peter take an obvious toll on the policeman, who seems to immediately slip into a depressive dither. 

Although merrily munching on human remains, these former people are not an immediate threat. So consumed are they with their feasting that they barely react to the bullets hammering into their rotted brains. Again and again the film reiterates, through dialogue and montage, that these zombies are not as distinct from us as we'd like them to be and are, in truth, a kind of arrested form of humanity. One that is trapped in a fruitless, consumptive routine. While Roger, Gaylen Ross' Fran and David Emge's Stephen dial into the abundance and excess offered by the kitsch kingdom they claim from the living dead, Roger remains thoughtful. The policeman attempting to make sense of why people are returning to life with a ravenous appetite and a deoxygenated hue. In the decades since, as the zombie genre has taken on aspects of action filmmaking and the strange, survivalist mentalities of American disaster preppers, these pleas for dignity have been deemed extraneous. 

The big (and little) screen undead have evolved in the years since Dawn's release into unthinking human targets who can be gleefully mulched for our entertainment. These newer zombies propose only violence and must be vanquished on sight. Romero though cannot help arranging his deflated figures in ways that deliberately straddle the line between the tragic and comic. He portrays a real sadness in their diminished state - cinematographer Michael Gornick's camera lingering on clumsy bodies that are trapped in an endless pantomime fired by flickering memory. This strange, hypnotic state emanates out into the rest of Dawn of the Dead, eventually infecting the principle characters to varying degrees. Roger and Stephen are bitten and succumb to their injuries - Emge delivering a fantastic physical performance as a body trying to power its way through the onset of rigor mortis - but Roger and Fran both end up entertaining suicide, by way of massive head trauma, as a solution to dealing with the sunken world they now inhabit. By Dawn's conclusion it is clear we have reached a point in time where nothing will ever be new again. This blaring mall stands as a museum piece, trumpeting an epoch that has ended and is now decaying. From this day forward what remains of mankind, living or dead, is doomed to shuffle in increasingly shambolic circles.