While arguably the greatest decade in American film, the 1970s was also the Decade of Angry Cinema. It was a time when the horror film underwent a rapid evolution that continued until the early 1990’s. It was a time when Americans witnessed events including the expansion and eventual defeat of US involvement in Vietnam, the oil and energy crisis, the feminist movement, Roe vs. Wade, Watergate, and economic recession (the worst in America’s history since the Great Depression). It also gave us disco, home video marketing and the self-absorbed “Me Generation.” As the decade came to a close, other world events preceding the ‘80’s – the Soviet Army’s invasion of Afghanistan, upheaval in Iran, the beginning of Margaret Thatcher’s term in office, the Three-Mile Island incident, the accidental assassination of South Korea’s president by his own chief of intelligence, etc. – showed there was much to be scared about.

Dawn of the Dead (1978)

In the time between Night of the Living Dead (1968) and its first sequel, George A. Romero’s feature-film breakthrough from commercials had sparked an era of socially conscious neo-horror indies, many of which dominated the drive-ins and grindhouses while attempting to transcend their exploitation roots. Among them were Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974); Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left (1972) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977); David Cronenberg’s Shivers (1975), Rabid (1977), and The Brood (1979); John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), and Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm (1979). Even Hollywood followed Romero’s shock and horror, with studio-financed classics like William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976), Richard Donner’s The Omen (1976), and Phillip Kaufman’s 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Many of these films launched what would become long-running franchises. Even (arguably) Hollywood’s first blockbuster, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), was a horror film in it its own right. Clearly, Romero had to stand apart from his contemporaries, and with Dawn of the Dead he proved equal to the task, but not before hitting a few stumbling blocks.

Attempting to avoid being pigeonholed as a horror filmmaker, Romero followed Night of the Living Dead with The Affair, aka There’s Always Vanilla (1971), a bland drama about the counterculture and the growing independence of women. It was his last film for Image Ten/The Latent Image. He followed it with Jack’s Wife, aka Season of the Witch (1972), the tale of an oppressed suburban housewife resorting to witchcraft in order to improve her life. Both these films, allegories relating to the feminist movement’s attempts to put a permanent end to sexual discrimination, failed commercially and for a time were considered “lost” before being rediscovered and remastered for DVD.

Then came The Crazies (1973), described by Romero as “a cross between The Andromeda Strain and Invasion of the Body Snatchers”, although far darker and scarier than the two combined. A sort of unintentional remake of Night, it concerns a small American town contaminated by a bacteriological weapon code-named “Trixie”, which drives the civilian population into a blood-crazed rage prompting a military incursion into the town, resulting in even more violence. Most of the film follows the attempts of a ragtag team of survivors to break out of the quarantined zone, while the weapon’s creator attempts to find a cure. It would have been hard to watch the film in 1973 without seeing its obvious aesthetic and narrative references to the conflict in Vietnam.

The Crazies (1973)

Despite heavy promotion by its distributor Cambist Films (who also produced Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS), it failed to recoup its budget, and the film’s rushed production schedule (a 40-day winter shoot, 12-18 hours per day) landed Romero in the hospital. The debts Romero incurred whilst making his post-Night films – reaching a million dollars – resulted in his three-year hiatus from independent filmmaking.

Fortunately, hope came during the advertising campaign for The Crazies in the form of a journalist, Richard Rubenstein, who wanted to break into films. Romero and Rubenstein founded Laurel Entertainment, producing The Winners, a series of televised one-hour profiles covering major sports players that helped cover Romero’s debts. Romero was able to return to features with Martin (1977), a boldly original and controversial revisionist vampire tale focused on the scarring effects of religious fundamentalism and dysfunctional families. Although Martin didn’t appeal to a wide audience, it earned critical acclaim and a prize at the Sundance Film Festival.

Martin (John Amplas) going through an uncomfortable adolescent phase in Martin (1977)

Romero eventually acquired $640,000 budget for the next installment of his zombie saga from Italy’s giallo master Dario Argento, in exchange for the rights to an international version (titled Zombi). This time, Romero’s dead would be shot in widescreen color, and feature an original score by Argento’s partnering band The Goblins!

Dawn of the Dead succeeded in firmly cementing Romero’s vision of the zombie film as a genre capable of exploring profound socio-political metaphors. The first film’s zombie epidemic has not stopped – the dead are rising around the world and attempts to control the crisis in America fail miserably. In Pittsburgh, rescue stations set up to provide protection against the reanimated flesh-eating ghouls are being overrun, while SWAT teams and the National Guard are proving ineffective in culling the menace. People are fleeing the cities. At a local TV station struggling to keep the populace up-to-date on the locations of rescue stations as they are overrun, pregnant production assistant Fran (Gaylen Ross) and her boyfriend, weather reporter Steve (David Emge) abandon their posts and steal the station’s helicopter. They are joined by two SWAT guards, Roger (Scott Reineger) and his tall black fellow officer Peter (Ken Foree), who have gone AWOL following a gory fiasco involving a zombie cleanout in a packed tenement building.

Running low on fuel, the four escapees land their chopper on the roof of a shopping mall. Easily seduced by all that the mall has to offer, they decide to stay, turning the complex’s loft space into living quarters. They succeed – despite Roger getting bitten – in blocking off the main entrances using trucks, securing their position by wiping out all zombies inside, and gaining access to all stores through use of the air duct system. But following their victory as the mall’s tenants (a still-human Roger remarks “We whipped them and we got it all!”) and their early enjoyment of the mall’s luxurious inventory, the stagnant experience begins to sour as the weeks go by. Just as they are about to depart, a ragtag gang of raiding bikers spots the mall…

Peter (Ken Foree) and Roger (Scott Reineger) clear out the mall in Dawn of the Dead.

The first finished cut of Dawn ran 139 minutes when premiering at the Cannes Film Festival. For his international version, released in Italy in 1978, Argento reduced the running time to one hour and 59 minutes, emphasizing the gore quotient and cutting out most of the humor that he felt would be lost on Italian audiences. Romero’s own reduced final American cut – an epic, uncensored 127 minutes – ran into problems when the MPAA gave it an “X” rating, usually reserved for hardcore porn flicks that played grindhouses but generally never found mainstream acceptance. Despite demands from distributors to cut it to an “R” for wider release, Romero stood firm, and eventually, Salah Hassenein’s United Film Distribution (UFD) picked up the film and released it as unrated in spring 1979. It became a surprise blockbuster, one helping to settle Romero’s financial debts and establish him firmly as a talent to rival Hollywood. Grossing $55 million worldwide, it was praised by Roger Ebert as “the ultimate horror film.” Although Night of the Living Dead already had several imitators of its own (Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things [1972], The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue [1974]), Dawn firmly entrenched the modern zombie film as a commercially viable genre. This trend continued with the likes of Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond (1981), Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1982), Dan O’Bannon’s The Return of the Living Dead and Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator (both 1985).

Dawn of the Dead showcased Romero’s sociopolitical blue-collar style at its best, this time being carried to dizzying heights of murder and mayhem within a new institution – the shopping center. In the 1970s countless people sought out the new pastime of shopping, and for Romero this behavior seemed symptomatic of something unwholesome about contemporary culture. Romero attacks the mall head-on with a nifty turn on the “fend-off-the-mobbing-monsters” theme prevalent in Night.  Here our heroes, having firmly secured their new hideout, move from Spam in the loft spaces to fancier delicacies such as wine, caviar, and cheeses, and from regular work clothes to fishermen’s outfits, summer blouses and fur coats! The mall even has its own ice-skating rink.

The infamous Hare Krishna zombie in Dawn of the Dead.

But eventually, the sterile fulfillment of their aspirational consumerism takes its toll on the characters, resulting in a stifling and artificial environment. Roger, following zombie reanimation and execution, is buried in the planter box near the fountains under fake rhododendrons. Fran is unsatisfied by Steve’s marriage proposal, despite the diamond ring he picked up at Penney’s, and both lie naked in bed completely devoid of warmth or emotion. Fran later makes herself up to look like Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde, but comes closer to looking like a mannequin zombie (one zombie even pounces on our heroes posing as a mannequin!). Peter plays squash with tennis balls on the mall’s roof to pass time. The humans continue to ignore the world’s problems… in this case the growing hordes piling up at the front door. Steve himself, easily the weakest of the four, is so obsessed with his newfound possessions and materialism that when the bikers raid the mall, he doesn’t give it up (“We took it! It’s ours!”), which costs him more than his life. The mall here is presented as a physical microcosm of ‘70’s America… alluring but hollow, corrupt and ultimately unsatisfying.

The zombies in Dawn of the Dead all share one trait. Apart from craving human flesh, they are eager to get into that mall, driven by muscle memory to consume all that is inside. The mall, it is implied, is the most important place in their consumer-led lives, and they and are condemned to pursue this impulse eternally. Peter goes so far as to bring up, in one of the most chilling observations in horror film history, that “they’re us… when there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth.” Once a consumer, always a consumer. The zombies’ sad, vacant expressions adds to the bittersweet nature of their current state and surroundings, complete with infectious Muzak playing over the end credits as the zombies eventually lay both siege and claim to the edifice.

This day did not work out exactly as Stephen (David Emge) had planned.

For all the tragicomedy, there are moments of nausea-inducing gore as well. Upon receiving Romero’s telegram (“Hey, we have another gig – start thinking of new ways to kill people”), special makeup FX artist Tom Savini devoted himself to the development of new tricks to bring to life the horrific gore and carnage found in the film. A photographer in Vietnam, Savini had captured the conflict’s traumatizing effects through his camera lens, bringing the experience straight to Romero’s vision. Even today the effects gags amaze and sicken in equal measure. A man’s head explodes (one of film history’s first exploding heads). A zombie gets scalped by a helicopter blade. Another is cleaved down the middle by a machete. Hands and heads are chopped off. A screwdriver is plunged into a zombie’s ear. Zombies fight over entrails on the floor (they didn’t have food courts back then!). All of it in gaudy Technicolor, played at once for laughs, thrills, scares and even sadness, all while capturing much of the style of the EC horror comics Romero loved as a kid.

As far as drama is concerned, the four leads manage to keep the film grounded in realism. While some critics have suggested they deliver wooden performances, these are appropriate within the scenario. That their characters are consistent and far more likeable compared to their predecessors in Night is a plus. Ken Foree as Peter is a superb. Gaylen Ross (later to become a documentary filmmaker) as Fran believably helps to add what would be a trademark in the future Dead installments – the resolute female who becomes humanity’s hope for the future, evolving into a wholly independent, reasonable (“What have we done to ourselves?” she laments when the mall’s dehumanizing effects reach their peak) and resourceful mother figure. David Emge is superb as easily-seduced flyboy Steve, and Scott Reineger (later to appear in Knightriders and then perform exclusively on stage) as Roger adds to both the humor and humanity on display as the human world descends into darkness.

The cast of (largely) then-unknowns, coupled with Romero’s attention to detail, and the shift in tone from the bleak Night of the Living Dead to something more satirical and action-packed, all results in a monumental addition to the horror genre that still holds far more meaning and entertainment value than the vast majority of Hollywood blockbusters today. And it is the human pathos that the leads bring, along with the presentation of the whole world literally going to hell that makes Dawn of the Dead a true cinematic masterpiece. Romero had hit both a critical and commercial high in his career, one repeated with Creepshow in 1982. Sadly, it wouldn’t last…

Click here to check out more articles in our Living Dead Series:

• History of the Living Dead Part I: Night of the Living Dead
• History of the Living Dead Part II: Dawn of the Dead
• History of the Living Dead Part III: Day of the Dead