DAWN OF THE DEAD DIRECTED BY GEORGE A. ROMERO ANCHOR BAY ENTERTAINMENT IN ...

DEAD DIRECTED BY GEORGE A. ROMERO ANCHOR BAY ENTERTAINMENT

IN THE wake of the remake currently in theaters of George A. Romero's 1978 comic-horror classic, the time is ripe for a fuller reconsideration of the original Dawn of the Dead. His films have garnished increasing respect in recent years, but Romero is still ghettoized as a genre filmmaker, a purveyor of lowest-common-denominator pulp that, while greatly enjoyable, can never be taken seriously. This is obviously silly. As Matt Zoller Seitz recently pointed out in his Press review of Dawn's remake, genre pictures often have the freedom and flexibility to go where more "serious" work cannot.

Dawn of the Dead, itself a loose revisiting of the plot of Romero's 1968 Night of the Living Dead, centers on four individuals who flee the chaos of Philadelphia, under full-scale zombie attack, for the suburban comforts and safety of a mall. Holing up in their shopping center, the group carve-out a comfortable existence, killing all of the (surprisingly passive) zombies and achieving a utopia of materialist excess. Their comfortable existence is invaded by the arrival of a marauding gang of bikers, who proceed to destroy their false paradise.

Dawn documents a society in terminal crisis. There will be no renewal here. This point is made obvious by the film's ending, but is also evident in the collapse of every previously stable building block of American society over the course of the narrative, from consumer culture to the family. As Robert Wood astutely notes, the zombies' powerful urge to consume the flesh of human beings is merely the rampant urge to consume of the "normal" individuals taken to its logical conclusion. The survivors try to recreate a lost order in their new environment-designing an apartment that looks like a comfortable middle-class residence, engaging in joyously free-of-charge shopping sprees, eating candlelit dinners-in an attempt to ignore the ugly reality of the brain-hungry zombies shuffling outside their doors.

Dawn of the Dead gives its spectators the subversive (even now, post-9/11) thrill of witnessing a society razed. There is horror in this-like the response to a police officer's query of why the residents of a Philadelphia apartment block allowed the zombies to stay in their building, a decision that cost them their lives: "Because they still believe there's respect in dying"-but there is also the possibility of a better, or at least, different, future. There is no brighter day at the conclusion of Dawn of the Dead, just the dawning awareness that the American way of life has been fully, permanently exhausted.