It's Zombie Time! Part 4: Dawn of the Dead

Dawn of the Dead (1978)

The opening shots of Dawn of the Dead, in fact, are in a television newsroom, full of people panicking, and thinking that they are dreaming. We hears snippets of information about what's going on—over the chatter and shouting in the newsroom. There’s a national emergency; rescue stations have been set up; it’s not clear how long the television station will be able to continue to broadcast. On one program, a man is asking whether the dead are coming back to life to attack the living; we learn from a member of the team that the station has been running “old information for the last 12 hours.” This is interesting, right? We’re not in a police station; we’re not with the army; we’re not on a crowded highway with other evacuees; we’re not in a hospital emergency room—those are the locations we’d expect to be in a contemporary zombocalypse film (e.g.: World War Z, the opening episodes of The Walking Dead or the pilot of The Last of Us). We’re in a newsroom. Access to information and truth is where Romero is making us feel the pinch of apocalypticism. Not in streets or tanks or cars or ERs, but in a newsroom, where everyone is doing their best to get the truth out to people.

And the truth is this: no one wants to decapitate their dead relatives, but they gotta. One talking head, trying to drill this into his listeners’ heads says, “Every dead body that is not exterminated becomes one of them. It gets up and kills.” He also informs his viewers—and us—that the only way to stop the creatures is by severing the head from the body or destroying the brain, and he points out that “issues of morality” that prevent people from “checking the spread” will end in disaster. We can’t scruple to brutalize our dead. The dead are truly dead; the zombies are not vessels of the soul of the once-living loved one, but machines or animals bent on ravage and destruction. The man on TV is urging people to abandon the idea that any shred of what once made the zombie a person resides in them, and to kill the zombies through the brain on sight. (You can see seed crystals of the third season of The Walking Dead in this opener—the governor’s refusal to understand that his daughter was truly gone, for example.) Like Romero’s earlier film, this one isn’t just a zombie movie, but a zombie apocalypse movie—by far the most popular instantiation of the zombie genre through the present day.

As the newsworkers learn that the rescue stations are closing, people start abandoning their posts, going home. One newsworker—a higher-up exec of some kind, and a woman—named Fran is trying to hold it together. But her boyfriend takes her aside and says they need escape by helicopter that night in order to survive.  

Meanwhile, at another location, the police and SWAT prepare to enter a building that’s holding a group of terrorists of some kind. We’re briefly supposed to line up with the police, until one team member starts absolutely peppering us with racial slurs, and shooting the Black and Latino residents of the building without hesitation or mercy—citizens, mostly, not terrorists or even armed in any way. The siege of the building devolves into a race-based mass murder. The other police try to stop this one murderous racist. Before they succeed, he blasts open a particular door—a Black resident of the building shouts in warning, “Not that room! Not that room!”—and reveals that that apartment is full of zombies. One of them—Miguelito—tracks down his wife in another apartment, and we see him viciously tear into the flesh of her neck and arm. It turns out that the people of the building have been hiding their dead and zombified loved ones and neighbors in the basement, “because they still believe there’s respect in dying.” At the moment of this revelation, a young Black officer shoots the last surviving zombie from the basement in the brain.

The film forces viewers to grapple with the question of what makes people human. The basement scenes show a heap of zombies, feasting gruesomely on the flesh of other dead people. One man sucks a femur bone; another chews through a severed forearm. It’s very, very grisly. Through this scene, we are made aware that people—once dead—are meat. Food for other animals; biological leftovers, and no longer human in any real sense. And at the same time, we’re made aware that the zombies—however “animated” they are—do not have consciences or souls. They are cannibalistic animals, driven to feed, and are not human either. But the people in the film have trouble accepting that—among the nonmilitarized part of the population, there’s a strong urge to preserve the dignity of the dead, or, at least, not to execute them. That fundamental misprision—that the zombies retain their humanness—is what has allowed the zombocalypse to get out of control. Released ten years after Rosemary’s Baby showcased the Time magazine cover with the headline Is God Dead? This film pretty decisively answers, It doesn’t matter, but we should assume that the dead have no mystical power or significance; the dead are meat, and meat alone.  

As our four main characters—two white males, one Black male, and one white female—escape in a helicopter, they see militias roving the countryside, lines of army trucks on the roads. It’s a bleak picture. While the four gas up their helicopter, the Black man, Peter, is forced to machine gun to death two small children who have been zombified. Why does this matter? From a film history standpoint, it matters because the killing and torturing of children in horror films was—and still is (and should be, in my opinion)—the last threshold of violence. We don’t like to see children or babies get tortured or murdered (nor should we). Even in ultra-violent contemporary zombie TV serieses like The Walking Dead, there are almost zero scenes of people shooting zombified children—the killing of Sophia is a marked, pointed exception to this rule. But in Dawn of the Dead, the child zombies must die. Peter has to gun them down to prevent them from biting him. Because children are not special in this film. Not only does Dawn of the Dead seek to demystify the dead human body, it also seeks to demystify the special ontological status of children.

The four survivors take shelter in a well-stocked emergency attic at a shopping mall. While Stephen, the helicopter pilot and Fran’s boyfriend, sleeps, the two SWAT men—Peter and Roger—decide to go down into the mall and look for other supplies, even knowing it’s full of zombies. Fran is understandably panicked a their leaving, so—in a clear reprise of the scene from the 1968 film—Peter (the Black SWAT guy) hands Fran a gun, and tells her how to use it. Just as Ben tried to help Barbara protect herself in Night of the Living Dead, so here Peter tries to help Fran. Romero’s films persistently make an alliance between the hard-won survival skills of Black people and the necessity of teaching women how to make it in a world where protection by males has become unreliable. As Peter and Roger walk down the stairs, Peter calls back to Fran, “You’ll probably hear some shooting. Just don’t panic, ok?” He has confidence in her ability to stay cool and stick to a plan. He enlists her as an ally, rather than pigeon-holing her as a weak, indecisive, irrational fool.

But Dawn doesn’t reboot every dynamic of Night: the zombies in Night were relatively quick, relatively coordinated, and not totally stupid. The zombies in Dawn are slow-moving, easily outrun, relatively uncoordinated (they sometimes fall down for no reason while walking), and totally stupid. (The germ of zombie comedy is born: it’s no accident that the greatest zomb-com of all time [and yes, I made up that term] is Shawn of the Dead, which is a clear riff on Dawn of the Dead.) There’s a campy scene of zombies trying to navigate an escalator, and another of a zombie falling into a wishing fountain in the mall, and becoming fixated on the shiny pennies there. These zombies may be numerous, violent, and hungry, but they’re also not very impressive predators. The soundtrack changes from ominous to circus-like. There seems a very reasonable chance that these four people will be able to survive for a very long time in the mall, given their ready access to food, supplies, power, and water.

But wait for it: the white male pilot can still fuck it all up. When Fran tells him that Peter and Roger have gone on a supply run, he takes Fran’s weapon, and goes after them. Good idea: leave Fran unarmed, and—perhaps more troublingly—stripped of her brief sense that she might be able to take care of herself in this situation. Stephen heads off alone, and Peter has to intervene to save him. As in Night, so in Dawn: this Black man has far better survival instincts than any of the white characters, and he becomes the leader of the group quickly. Even when it’s revealed that Fran is pregnant, Peter has a plan. He asks Stephen, “Do you want to abort it? It’s not too late, and I know how.” We then cut to Fran, who asks Stephen, “Are your decisions made? Do you want to abort it?” The film is highlighting, now, Fran’s reproductive entrapment: in the zombocalypse, it will be the men who decide about pregnancy and reproduction, not Fran. “Nobody cares about my vote,” she notes.

While viewers are left to ponder how Fran is more deeply imprisoned than any other character, the film presents a TV broadcast, that reveals that the zombies retain some instinctual memories of their human lives—they appear able to use tools to some degree—but to a degree of dexterity no better than some animals. “These creatures are nothing but pure, motorized instinct. We must not be lulled by the concept that these are our family members or our friends.” The news also reveals that scientists are studying the zombie phenomenon “from the point of view of a viral disease,” with the goal of engineering “some kind of a workable vaccine.” The virogenetic theory: seed crystal there for the vast majority of post-2000 zombocalypse stories.

As they listen to this report, Fran says her piece. She says she doesn’t want to be treated differently, just because she’s pregnant. She also says she won’t be “den mother” for the men, but wants to have a vote in choices, and wants to know what’s going on at all times. Her boyfriend—Stephen—says, “Jesus, Fran.” But Peter says, without hesitation, “Fair enough.” She asserts that she wants to learn how to fly the chopper, in case Stephen dies; Stephen rolls his eyes, but, again, Peter says, “She’s right, man.” When she asks them to leave her with a gun, Stephen slams a rifle and ammo down on a desk; evidently, little Stevie doesn’t like having his status as Lord Protector taken away from him. He thinks that, as she advocates for herself, he is weakened somehow—demeaned. But Peter gets it: everyone benefits if everyone gets some training and power. Dawn goes one step further than had Night in making us feel a hint of what we now call toxic white masculinity.

That hint becomes overpowering in the next scene, when Roger—shaken by a particularly close call with a zombie—goes nuts and goes rogue, unable to stop himself from assaulting and shooting zombies, when the object of their mission is about resource security. Peter keeps urging him to leave off shooting, “Come on, man, come on!” But Roger didn’t much like feeling vulnerable, and he’s not about to let it happen again. Because of his bloodlust, he makes a mistake, the result of which is that he gets bit. The infection spreads quickly, though the others try to take care of him, allowing him to stay alive and with them to the end and administering morphine for his pain as needed.

Meanwhile, Peter and Fran hatch an ingenious plan to lockdown the entire mall, and kill the zombies inside. The plan succeeds, so now the mall has become, in effect, a safe zone: full of food, clothing, ammo (there’s a gun store), medicine (pharmacy), and all sorts of other resources. They even stop to grind some fresh coffee and play video games. During this brief reprieve, Peter reveals that his grandfather was a voodoo practitioner, who predicted that when there was no more room in hell, the dead would “walk the earth.” That’s the only mention of voodoo in the film, but it’s fascinating: Romero appears to want to nod toward the most important origin story of the zombie film genre, but without letting it take over the narrative logic of the film.   

After Roger dies, resurrects, and is shot in the brain, Fran, Stephen, and Peter attempt to enjoy their “life.” They get fancy clothes and Peter uses a mall restaurant kitchen to make a fancy meal for Stephen and Fran. They practice their sharpshooting skills by targeting mannequins across an ice rink. Fran eyes maternity clothes. They turn their attic hide-out within the mall into a home: plants are brought in, nice beds are made, plates and silverware organized.

But not even this tiny slice of normalcy can last for long, because raiders arrive and want to break in and steal resources. The raiders are a large biker gang, but with many other people mixed in, and some paramilitary equipment and people. They ride their hogs into the mall and begin looting, letting hundreds of zombies in along with them. The following scene is an absolute blood orgy of violence: the raiders assault the zombies, our heroes assault the raiders, the raiders assault Stephen, and finally the zombies zombify Stephen, because—once again—toxic white masculinity has gotten the best of him, and he’s gone rogue on Peter’s plan. There’s blood and chaos everywhere, but, alas, Stephen has residual, instinctual memories of where the others are hiding, and leads the zombies to the attic home. Peter sends Fran to the chopper alone; he stays to commit suicide, but changes his mind in the last seconds, and defeats dozens of zombies on his way to join Fran in the chopper. The final lines of the film are these:

Peter: How much fuel do we have?
Fran: Not much.

Peter: All right.

They fly off into the sunrise, a pregnant white woman and a Black man, perhaps unlikely allies in other films or realities in the 1970s, but perfectly paired here, each determined to survive, and utterly over it with the self-deluded cowboyism of both Roger and Stephen.

As an avowed enemy of self-deluded cowboyism, I bid them good journey and happy hunting.

Stay tuned next week to see where Romero’s surprisingly political zombocalypse will end.