The Geek Address

For horror fans, remaking the George Romero classic Dawn of the Dead is like rewriting the bible. You don’t even attempt it. When it was announced that newcomer Zack Snyder was going to direct the remake, a million horror fanatics cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. Unlike the recent slew of Hollywood remakes, however, Dawn of the Dead isn’t that bad.

So what makes Dawn of the Dead a decent film? Snyder manages to distance himself from the original script, dumping the characters but retaining the basic storyline: a handful of survivors seek refuge in an abandoned mall besieged by flesh-eating zombies. Snyder establishes a reasonably endearing bunch of characters before allowing the zombies to tear them apart but let’s face it - this is a zombie film, people! We’re not here for complex characterisation and a startling commentary on the human condition. When you buy a ticket to Dawn of the Dead, you’re expecting to see legions of zombies gorging themselves on human flesh. And when it comes to zombies, Snyder delivers. These aren’t the lame zombies that you remember from Night of the LIving Dead. They’re horribly decaying, putrescent corpses that pursue the characters without mercy. The make-up effects in Dawn of the Dead are incredible, demonstrating how far we’ve come since the original.  

There are a number of memorable scenes in Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead. In his definitive history of horror, Stephen King discusses the art of the gross-out: “Even the very worst horror movies sometimes achieve a moment or two of success on this level…the gross-out is art, and it is important that we have an understanding of this. Blood can fly everywhere and the audience will remain largely unimpressed. If, on the other hand, the audience has come to like and understanding - or even just to appreciate - the characters they are watching as real people, if some artistic link has been formed there, blood can fly everywhere and the audience cannot remain unimpressed.” Dawn of the Dead is quite successful when it comes to grossing out its audience. Midway through the film a character called Lude gives birth to a zombie child. This scene was profoundly disturbing because the filmmaker had established a connection between the audience and the character. One of the innovative things about this scene is that it confronts taboos - something that horror films must do if they’re going to, well, horrify. In Danse Macabre, King touches on the idea of taboos. As I was watching this particular scene, I thought, “Oh no…no, they can’t do that! They can’t shoot the zombie child.” For a moment, I shied away from the screen. It takes a lot to make a jaded horror fans like myself flinch.

A lot of people have criticized the remake for its lack of social commentary. Historically, social commentary is what sets zombie movies apart from other splatter films: Night of the Living Dead confronted issues of racism; Dawn of the Dead was a tongue-in-cheek commentary on consumerism; 28 Days Later confronts issues of road rage; and Resident Evil educated us about the danger of bringing computer games to the big screen.  As I was reading some reviews of Dawn of the Dead, I stumbled across the following: “However, despite its flaws the movie actually does convey a message to the audience. We are able to catch the jokes about obesity skyrocketing in America when the 350-pound woman becomes a zombie. It gives an eerily accurate depiction of how our society can be instantly turned upside down by a catastrophic event. In many ways it is a film of the post-9/11 America in that it demonstrates our fears of a biological or chemical terrorist attack. It gives us a world where our characters awake one morning to find that the world they knew no longer exists. Dependence on technology is replaced by dependence on other people, not for services and products but for life itself. These are people not looking five years down the road but only toward tomorrow.” The remake doesn’t touch on issues of consumerism because it doesn’t have to. Unlike the relative stability of the 1970s, we live in a society where terrorism is a reality, where our world can be turned upside down overnight. Horror films have always explored our unconscious fears and anxieties. The commentary on consumerism is absent because social and political conditions have created a situation akin to that in the movie (not that I’m suggesting we’re going to be overrun by zombie terrorists).

Dawn of the Dead is an enjoyable film that keeps getting better every time I watch it.