Schlock and horror anniversary
‘Ilike the zombies,” George A. Romero said in 1977. “You have to be sympathetic with the creatures because they ain’t doin’ nothin’. They’re like sharks: They can’t help behaving the way they do.”
Romero had good reason to like the zombies — they gave him a career and a legacy. He memorably dramatised the exploits of the undead in the 1968 chiller Night of the Living Dead, the first of six films in his “dead” cycle (which continued through his final film, Survival of the Dead in 2010). The second of those films, Dawn of the Dead, was released in the US 45 years ago this month. It remains one of the most influential (and profitable) horror films of all time.
As identifiable as he would become with genre movies, Romero went through what he called “a paranoid phase of not wanting to be a horror moviemaker” after the success of his first zombie feature. But, “gradually, as I became comfortable with what Night of the Living Dead was, and with what my reputation was, I finally got the idea” for a sequel.
What really sparked Romero’s imagination was the location. He was friends with Mark Mason, one of the owners of the Monroeville Mall, east of Pittsburgh — then one of the largest shopping centres in the country. Romero worked out a deal to start shooting when the mall closed at 11pm and stop when cleaning crews (and cardiac patients on therapeutic mall walks) arrived at 7am.
“I wrote a treatment, and it was very heavy, ponderous,” he said. “But then I realised that the place itself, the mall, was too funny to serve for a nightmare experience.” And thus, Dawn of the Dead became a consumerist satire, with zombies shuffling mindlessly through the mall and up the down escalators as bland Muzak blared through the shopping centre’s loudspeakers.
To provide the film’s considerable gore, he called upon his frequent collaborator, Tom Savini, the makeup man whose experience as a Vietnam combat photographer informed his grisly and convincing effects.
There was so much bloodshed, in fact, that the Motion Picture Association slapped it with an “X” rating for extreme violence — which for most mainstream distributors would make it unreleasable, as that rating restricted its play dates and advertising. Luckily, Romero and his producer Richard P Rubinstein were independents, so they could release Dawn unrated instead.
“We rented a theatre in New York and took an ad in the paper and said we were showing it, and a few distributors came and saw the audience reaction, and that’s how UATC picked it up,” he said, referring to the distributor United Artists Theater Circuit Inc. The film opened in New York and other major markets April 20, 1979, and became one of the year’s runaway commercial hits, with worldwide grosses of US$55 million, unadjusted for inflation.
Though some mainstream critics appreciated Dawn at the time, the New York Times’ Janet Maslin was not among them. “I have a pet peeve about flesh-eating zombies who never stop snacking,” she wrote in her review. “Accordingly, I was able to sit through only the first 15 minutes of Dawn of the Dead.” But in 2020, Maslin posted on Twitter, “Walking out of
Dawn of the Dead was an unprofessional and stupid thing to do, and anyone offended by my review is right. It’s a mistake I never made again.”
Not that Romero probably minded much. The commercial success of “Dawn” ensured his financial stability and artistic freedom in the years to come, and though he would later acknowledge the film’s messaging — which can be read as antigovernment, anti-colonialist or anticapitalist — he knew what to say in 1979 to get butts in seats. “It’s really meant to be a schlock film,” he told
Variety, “and that’s what it is.”
There was so much violence the Motion Picture Association slapped it with an “X” rating.