Dawn of the Dead

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INTRODUCTION

BY SIMON PEGG

I became aware of George A. Romero’s seminal zombie classic,
Dawn of the Dead
, long before I saw it on the small screen. It became the stuff of legend during my childhood, after it was banned in the early ’80s in a moral panic that followed the arrival of VHS. Video snuck up on the British Government like a couple of zombie children in an abandoned gas station and frightened the life out of it. To the panicky moral guardians of the UK’s impressionable youth, it threatened a sudden unchecked influx of filth and degradation and needed to be figuratively shot in the head before it could do any lasting damage. Truth is, few people truly understood the implications of this new medium, aside from those canny chaps in the pornography industry, who saw its potential from the start. Apathy from studio executives, who grossly underestimated the huge financial potential home video presented, meant that newer films were held back from video distribution, leaving the door wide open for an extensive array of archival cinema to become available to the public for home viewing. With no statutory laws in place to regulate classification, a flood of gory low budget horror flicks found their way onto the video rental shop shelves, unfettered by the censorship laws that previously consigned them to theatrical obscurity.

The ensuing panic was feverish. Terrified that the populace would be subjected to an avalanche of filth, a blanket ban was enforced on what became known as “Video Nasties.” As a result of this witch hunt, a number of smart, innovative, well-written and soon-to-be-classic horror films got caught in the crossfire. One of them was
Dawn of the Dead
.

Of course,
Dawn of the Dead
didn’t disappear completely; copies already in circulation were pirated and distributed among gore-hounds, beneath school desks and pub tables. I never came into possession of one of these elusive delights myself, but I knew people that did. I heard snippets of dialogue and detail from various sources and always lapped up the accounts with relish: the helicopter decapitation, the screwdriver in the ear, the machete in the head, the brilliant use of jaunty counter-scoring as the credits roll and the audience try to digest the grim climax. Even as a child I was thrilled by these ideas and by their apparent masterful execution; the idea that one of these so-called “Video Nasties” could be good and not simply exploitation. This film—this fabled cinematic spectacle—was without doubt the best film I had never seen.

I pored over a number of stills from the movie, featured in my
Encyclopaedia of Horror
, and marveled at the synopsis describing a suburban American shopping mall becoming “awash with blood.” I couldn’t grasp why the book praised the film so highly and yet I was somehow not allowed to watch it. The arrival of video had seemingly surmounted the problem of sneaking into cinemas to see films deemed unsuitable for my age. You only needed an older brother or a kindly/irresponsible video shop clerk to gain access to forbidden fruit. I watched John Landis’s
An American Werewolf in London
and John Carpenter’s
The Thing
way before I officially should have and yet Romero’s vaunted masterpiece eluded me. My growing love of horror only made my desire to view this grail-like offering more fervent. It was a full fourteen years after its theatrical release before I finally witnessed the film that would change my life.

When I finally saw the film as a university student in 1992, I was almost glad to have not had the experience as an impressionable young child. Not because it would have upset or disturbed me, but because I don’t think I would have been able to appreciate what a truly superb piece of cinema it is. The version I saw still suffered at the hands of artless censors, who had cut out some of the more outrageous moments of gore with all the artistic precision of zombie teeth, totally missing the humor in Romero’s crayon-red Grand Guignol. For my part, I was profoundly impressed by the film on the deepest level, in ways I find hard to describe, even now.

Firstly it is a testament to Romero’s skill and vision as a filmmaker that
Dawn of the Dead
is rarely considered a sequel to his landmark 1968 zombie film
Night of the Living Dead
; rather it is seen as a separate chapter in the same story. It acknowledges its forbear, not least in subject matter, but can exist as a self-contained story, gaining dramatic weight and effect from the lack of setup and back-story. The story commences several weeks, or even months, after the events of the first film and in a completely different location. There are nods to its predecessor for those faithful enough to pay attention. As Peter, Roger, Fran and Stephen make their escape from Pittsburgh, toward their retail paradise, they fly over an area of agricultural land and a farmhouse that could well be the location of the first film. The narrative pauses for a brief intermission as we witness events on the ground. The sequence feels almost like a news report as we witness a posse of good old boys relishing the apocalypse as an opportunity for beer and target practice. The same sense of grim enjoyment that suffused the close of Romero’s first zombie film pervades here, part callback, part social commentary. The moment lingers in the memory and demonstrates a sensitivity key to Romero’s success.

This second instalment of his opus is deliciously dark and ironic, embracing the absurdity of a species on the brink of extinction, unable to relinquish the small comforts that once distracted from life’s hardships—the irony being that in this world, life has become the greatest hardship of all. Even the zombies themselves cannot let go of the behavior that shaped them in life. They spend the movie staggering aimlessly about the mall, only stopping to inflict violence on unsuspecting humans if distracted from their bizarre automated window-shopping.

Herein lies one of the key fascinations of
Dawn of the Dead
and another of Romero’s masterstrokes. In most horror movies the threat to the human protagonists is a malevolent force, motivated by spite or evil or an egotistical desire to commit acts of moral transgression. Romero’s zombies are victims themselves, tragic figures who have prematurely succumbed to that destiny that awaits us all: death. They cannot be blamed for their actions, nor can they be held accountable; it is simply not their fault. We can no more blame them for the atrocities they commit than we can a cat for catching a mouse. They have no compass, moral or otherwise; they are the walking manifestation of inevitability and, as such, no more wicked than death itself. We yearn to catch and punish the murderer that steals our loved ones away but bear no grudge against death, not really. We dream of eradicating cancer but our anger toward it is misdirected—it can’t help it, it’s cancer.

I found the original novelization of
Dawn of the Dead
online, in a small second hand bookstore in the US. I felt keen to experience the story in a different way, to let it play out in my head rather than before my eyes—after all, there is no greater projector than the imagination. A book is arguably a more challenging medium than film. Cinema is wonderful, inspiring and essential, but does more work for us, so perhaps we work a little less. It is delivered to us more comprehensively in sights, sounds and prescriptions, whereas a book is all about personal perception: we build worlds inspired by words and those realizations are only limited by the boundaries of our imagination. Unbound by conventional running times, books can linger on ideas and expand them into joyful digressions or character-swelling diversions to bolster the emotional content of the story. This is what I hoped the novelization of
Dawn of the Dead
would provide for me and I was not disappointed.

As a companion to the film, this book is a wonderful opportunity to get lost in a familiar story. As a piece of literature, it is a chance to play out a chilling and thoughtful story in your own head, to create or add your own visuals to Romero’s dark ideas, to put yourself behind that fake wall at the top north corner of the Monroeville Mall and know in your heart that the comfort and security you build there, like life itself, is fleeting. Death will find you no matter where you hide. This is a story to savor and enjoy, to inspire debate, speculation and reflection. What would you do, were you faced with an army of the walking dead and a fully stocked, empty shopping mall? The possibilities are endless and terrifying.

Happy shopping.

Simon Pegg

1

Sleep did not come easily to Francine Parker. It was a struggle every night to block out the events of the day and the memories of the past that kept up their pounding conflict within her head. Now, as she slept, the expression of anguish on her face belied any sweet dreams.

At twenty-three, she was slender, and very attractive. After her divorce, she had traded in her glasses for contacts, her brown hair for silver blonde, and her extra twenty-five pounds of pasta, chocolate cake and domesticity for a knockout figure.

It was a comic dream she was having now, really. If she were awake, she would have laughed at its inherent symbolism—she was tied to the kitchen sink, her arms elbow deep in soap suds, and her ex-husband Charlie was kissing her neck.

Finally, the buzzing sounds of voices, electronic hums and general bustle of a frantic television studio in the throes of a national disaster impinged upon the ludicrous plight of the housewife, and Francine started to wake up. In her confusion, she couldn’t place where she was—and then she remembered: she was Ms. Francine Parker, assistant station manager, WGON-TV. She was no longer Mrs. Charles Parker, III, housewife at nineteen, bored at twenty-one. In the two years since her divorce, she had really made strides, but now was not the time for self-congratulation, not with a national emergency on their hands.

Suddenly, Fran lurched forward into strong waiting arms. Her long hair hung in greasy strands about her sweaty face. Her jeans and blouse, which she had been wearing for days, were creased and molded to her body and gave off a distinct odor of perspiration. She had been sitting against the wall, covered by an old overcoat.

“You OK?” a voice entered her fog.

Fran stared at the young man, and for a minute she couldn’t place him. She was shaking and speechless.

“The shit’s really hitting the fan,” said the young man, whom she finally recognized as the copy boy, Tony. His dark hair was tousled, and his olive complexion was streaked with grime and perspiration. Yet, he calmly moved on to the other sleeping forms on the floor, shaking them awake just as gently as he had Fran.

The whine of the voices grew louder and took on definition. Fran realized that the sounds were being broadcast, over a monitor. Still unable to shake herself out of the foolish dream, she looked about. At the far end of the room around the monitor there was a commotion. Small electronic shapes, moving with the awkwardness of stick figures, argued emotionally. All around, people were exhausted and disheveled; however, they managed to buzz frantically about.

“What’s making it happen? What the hell difference does it make what’s making it happen,” said Sidney Berman defiantly, his frizzy black-haired head bobbing up and down rhythmically. His face was flushed—this wasn’t the type of problem, such as how to stop losing your hair, that was often discussed on his well-known morning talk show. This was a matter of life and death. Boy, he marveled, almost every set in the nation tuned to this channel. He wondered what his ratings were now.

“Yes, but that’s . . .” Dr. James Foster said calmly, his bespectacled eyes glistening under the hot studio lights. His thinning sandy hair was moist with perspiration.

“That’s a whole other study,” Berman cut in. “They’re trying—”

“But if we knew that, we could . . .” Dr. Foster moved toward the edge of his chair and gestured with the middle finger of his right hand.

Berman immediately reacted to the gesture and then realized that it was unconscious on the good doctor’s part.

“We don’t know that,” Berman countered. “We don’t know that. We’ve gotta operate on what we
do
know.”

Francine’s eyes shifted from the electronic argument to the pandemonium in the room. Copy people ran wildly with teletype sheets; secretaries organized the stacks of bulletins as they arrived into the different reporters’ boxes. Yet besides the seemingly organized reactions there were others: people frantically scrambled all over the room, tripping over cables and generally getting into each other’s way.