Dawn of the Dead

I’ve seen George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) enough times that when I watch it, I pay more attention to things that go on in the background or margins of scenes because I’ve always been fascinated with the world he created in the Dead films. Unlike the many imitators and wannabes, he took the time to develop the protagonists, giving them flaws and vulnerabilities so that we care about what happens to these characters while still delivering the goods in the gore department. The end result is a smart, exciting and horrifying masterpiece that has more on its mind than killing zombies.

Taking place years after the events of Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn begins with Francine Parker (Gaylen Ross) waking up from a nightmare into a living one. She works at a Philadelphia television station embroiled in chaos, trying desperately to stay on the air. In recent viewings I’ve paid closer attention to what is being said in the background as Romero gives us tantalizing hints to this world whose order is rapidly disintegrating thanks to the zombie epidemic.

Two pundits argue about whether people are actually coming back to life and eating the living. As the opening credits continue to appear, Romero shows people behind the scenes continuing to argue among themselves. Right from the get-go Fran has a forceful personality as she’s willing to stand-up to her boss when she goes against his orders and removes non-existent rescue stations from being broadcast. In a nice touch Romero uses one of the T.V. pundits to give us the low-down on the zombie rules in Dawn for those who might not have seen his other films. We learn that the President of the United States has implemented martial law in the country and people are no longer allowed to stay in their homes.

Fran’s boyfriend Stephen Andrews (David Emge), a helicopter pilot, urges her to take off with him. She hesitates, a last vestige of loyalty to her job perhaps, until a co-worker tells her, “We’re off the air by midnight anyway. The emergency networks are taking over. Our responsibility is finished.” The way he says that last line – in a resigned way – has always affected me and strikes a slightly ominous tone. Later on, our heroes find a television and Romero treats us to snippets of news from the outside world. One pundit suggests that the zombie outbreak might be a viral disease. We are never given the full picture, but in a way that is a smart move on his part as he realized that whatever we think up, filling the gaps with our own imagination would be better than anything he could come up with and so, in a way, we become a part of the creative process.

As if to illustrate the martial law orders for people to leave their homes, Romero cuts to a SWAT team carrying out a raid on a tenement building. We meet Roger DeMarco (Scott Reiniger), a smart and able man who tries his best to avoid a racist member (James Baffico) of his team as they enter the building to find a mix of people and the living dead. The racist cop is a continuation of the men that shot Ben at the end of Night of the Living Dead only he takes pleasure in killing African-Americans, living or dead. His actions give us a first real taste of Tom Savini’s groundbreaking make-up effects as he blows off some hapless civilian’s head off with a shotgun blast.

Fortunately, this renegade cop is taken out by one his own, Peter Washington (Ken Foree). Interestingly, the raid on the apartment building devolves into chaos just like at the T.V. station, minus the zombies, of course. I like how the sight of the living dead affects these cops. One man is so traumatized that he takes his own life. Roger is also affected and we see the shock play out on his face. Peter isn’t the cold killing machine he initially appears to be. When he and Roger clear the basement of zombies, a tear runs down his face as he tries to keep his emotions in check, but it must be difficult having to kill his fellow man. For me, the scariest part of Dawn of the Dead is the apartment building bloodbath because the protagonists don't know what atrocities are lurking behind every door and the terror and confusion in such an enclosed space is unsettling.

Peter and Roger team up and the latter knows Stephen so they hook up with Fran and escape in the helicopter. As they make their way across Pennsylvania, Romero cuts to a group of redneck hunters who’ve teamed up with the military and are treating the whole thing like a hunting party complete with beer and music. This echoes a similar scene in Night of the Living Dead only with more a satirical vibe as the country music and the laidback attitude of the hunters creates a bizarrely festive mood, punctuating the pervasive feeling of dread that has permeated Dawn of the Dead up to this point.

Our heroes discover a shopping mall and decide that it is just too good of an opportunity to pass up. As they systematically take control of the place, Dawn of the Dead becomes a fascinating treatise on the pros and cons of materialism as over time our heroes get complacent and over-confident that they’ve rid the place of zombies. As is often the case in Romero’s films, humans are just as big a threat if not more so to the protagonists than the living dead. This comes in the form of a gang of marauding bikers that threaten our heroes’ peaceful existence. It’s good in a way because the bikers wake them up, reigniting their survival instincts and reminding them that no place is safe and that the best strategy is to keep moving.

I’ve always felt that Dawn of the Dead has never gotten enough praise for its excellent screenplay that presents realistic characters thrown into extraordinary circumstances. For example, there’s a good exchange in the helicopter as everyone debates how they’re going to get more fuel and Peter lays it out for them, cutting through the bullshit: “Wake up, sucker. We’re thieves and we’re bad guys, that’s exactly what we are.” He makes a good point – societal order has gone out the window and it is everyone for themselves. There’s another nice bit when our heroes discover the rather large shopping mall and decide to check it out. As they observe the living dead shambling by stores Fran wonders, “What are they doing? Why do they come here?” to which Stephen says, “Some kind of instinct, memory, what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.”

I like that Romero isn’t afraid to have flawed protagonists. It’s more realistic and makes them more relatable. For example, Stephen isn’t as adept at killing zombies as are the well-trained Peter and Roger. His first run-in with the living dead is awkward as he clumsily tries to protect Fran. He’s also a lousy shot, unable to kill a zombie after three shots from his rife and then he almost shoots Peter while trying to nail another one. Roger is a little too cocky and over-confident when it comes to dealing with zombies. Interestingly, it is the characters with the least amount of flaws – Peter and Fran – that survive. Romero doesn’t pass judgment on any of these characters, but instead simply presents them warts and all and leaves it up to the audience to decide.

Romero’s script develops complex relationships among our heroes by introducing Fran’s pregnancy early on. While Roger, Peter and Stephen debate whether Fran should have an abortion or not, she sits in another room visibly upset at decisions being made without her two cents. Gaylen Ross handles this scene brilliantly and you really feel for Fran. I like that she speaks up, isn’t afraid to stand up for herself and lets it be known that she is not going to cater to their needs, that she wants to know what’s going on and be treated as an equal. She also demands to be taught how to fly the helicopter in case something happens to Stephen.

Scott Reiniger does a nice job of playing Roger’s transformation from empathetic cop to someone who takes too many chances and loses his objectivity with fatal results. I like how dealing with and killing zombies changes Roger. He covers up the trauma of it through false bravado. His gradual transformation into a zombie is a chilling one, not just because of Savini’s subtle make-up effects, but also how Reiniger conveys the change via his demeanor and the way he carries himself.

Ken Foree’s Peter is the calming influence on the group and he’s the natural leader if you can say it has one. He’s the first to support Fran’s demand to be treated as an equal, but with one caveat – she can’t go out with them until she learns how to use a gun. He also offers up chilling pearls of wisdom like the iconic line, “When there’s no more room in hell the dead will walk the earth.”

While Night of the Living Dead is rightly regarded as a landmark film, Dawn of the Dead is a more ambitious one. It is also better written with more fully developed protagonists dealing more with just survival, but things like pregnancy and a false sense of security. Like Night, Dawn is very much a film of its time as it offers up harsh critiques on capitalism and materialism, using the zombies as metaphors for mindless consumers. It also deliver the goods for horror fans courtesy of Savini’s impressive make-up effects, culminating in the biker’s siege of the mall, that stands the test of time and still looks better than the CGI effects of its noisier, flashier remake that dumped the socio-political commentary for stylish slam-bam action.

The image of the living dead wandering mindlessly through the mall while goofy-sounding muzak plays over the soundtrack is still one of the most potent images in any film of its kind because it speaks directly to our consumer culture. The living in Dawn of the Dead consume material items while the zombies consume them. Peter and Fran survive because they don’t need all their material items to exist. The mall being overrun by bikers and zombies forces them to leave all those useless creature comforts behind and take only what they need. It is implied that they don’t have much fuel left in the helicopter, which leaves their future uncertain, but they’re alive and for right now that’s enough.

Creepshow

Anticipation was high among horror fans when it was announced that three giants of the genre were going to collaborate together on a film. Author Stephen King, director George Romero and makeup effects wizard Tom Savini decided to pay tribute to the classic EC horror comic books from the 1950s with an anthology film called Creepshow (1982). Coming off the personally fulfilling, but commercial failure of Knightriders (1981), I’m sure Romero was eager to move on to something else and hooking up with King made sense. The two men had originally met over the possibility of collaborating on an adaptation of the author’s novel Salem’s Lot, but when the film rights were sold off to television, Romero moved on.

Making a horror anthology was a bit of a risky gamble at the time. They were all the rage in the 1970s with Hammer and Amicus cranking out films like The House That Dripped Blood (1971), Tales from the Crypt (1972), and From Beyond the Grave (1973), but by the end of the decade they had fallen out of favor. King and Romero wanted to bring these kinds of films back while also celebrating the horror comic books, like House of Mystery and The Vault of Horror that they grew up enjoying as kids. The project was given a decent budget and populated with a mix of up-and-coming movie stars and veteran character actors. While receiving only mixed reviews, it was a sleeper hit.

Creepshow is bookended by a boy (Joe King) being chastised by 1980s horror movie mainstay Tom Atkins for reading horror comic books. The overbearing patriarch throws his son’s issue of Creepshow in the trash and the rest of the film depicts various stories from its pages.

The first story is “Father’s Day” that sees a family of wealthy snobs waiting for their Aunt Bedelia Grantham (Viveca Lindfors), the rich matriarch who is rumored to have murdered her father, Nathan (Jon Lormer) on, what else, Father’s Day. Nathan was a real piece of work, angrily demanding his cake over and over until, out of frustration, Bedelia brains him with an ashtray. It’s Father’s Day again and Nathan (John Amplas) rises from the grave demanding his cake once more. The undead patriarch, of course, evokes Romero’s zombie films, but Tom Savini’s makeup isn’t a rehash of Dawn of the Dead (1979). The look of undead Nathan is in keeping with the exaggerated style of the old EC comic books.

Romero hits us right up front with all kinds of attention-grabbing style: skewed camera angles, garish Giallo lighting (saturating shots in red or blue lighting) and employing split-screen action like the panels in a comic book. He even evokes Night of the Living Dead (1968) ever so slightly when we see Bedelia visit her father’s grave; the cemetery initially bathed in warm, late afternoon light, soon becomes ominously atmospheric.

There is a nice mix of comedy and dread with the former coming from a fantastic moment where we get to see “serious actor” Ed Harris grooving out to some cheesy music with his wife (Elizabeth Regan). I can’t get enough of seeing him dancing so awesomely badly to a cheesy ‘80s song. With the exception of Harris, the rest of the Grantham clan are a bunch of vain, selfish, obnoxious bluebloods that deserve what’s coming to them, which makes their comeuppance at the hands of Nathan all the more satisfying.

“The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill” is easily the weakest story in Creepshow as Stephen King, in an act of unfortunate hubris, casts himself as the eponymous Jordy, a stereotypical dumb yokel who foolishly touches a fallen meteorite and begins sprouting a strange, green moss-like substance that mutates into wild vegetation all over his body. Before you can say Swamp Thing, Jordy and his place are overwhelmed with lush green vegetation. Where the other segments achieve the right mix of horror and humor, this one goes too far over to the comedy side and comes across as too cartoonish.

King’s “acting” is straight out of an Ed Wood movie – strictly amateur hour and not in a it’s-so-bad-it’s-good kind of way. This segment is essentially a one-man show and King just isn’t talented enough to pull it off. Romero does the best he can to keep things interesting visually (Jordy’s place is a marvel of set design), and Savini’s make-up job on King makes you wish that he had done the effects work on Wes Craven’s Swamp Thing (1982).

Fortunately, Creepshow bounces back with “Something to Tide You Over” as funnymen Ted Danson and Leslie Nielsen are cast against type as two men at odds with each other. Harry (Danson) has been sleeping with Richard’s (Nielsen) wife Becky (Gaylen Ross). Richard confronts Harry and takes him out to his privately owned beach and proceeds to bury him up to his head, waiting for the tide to come in, much like he did to his wife. It’s a pretty unorthodox kind of revenge as is the plot twist where we see what happens to Harry and Becky after Richard leaves them to die.

Again, Romero comes up with some fantastic imagery, chief among them the shot of an irate Harry submerged in water, which evokes the watery demise of Shelley Winters’ character in The Night of the Hunter (1955). Once Richard returns home, Romero ratchets up the tension as we soon realize that Harry and Becky are back for some vengeance of their own. Savini’s makeup effects on the waterlogged couple are quite extraordinary and their distorted, watery voices are unsettling. It’s great to see Leslie Nielsen shed all of his comedic shtick to play a fairly sadistic son-of-a-bitch and he seems to relish the change of pace. Few remember that he started off his career playing dramatic roles because he’s so closely identified to his iconic character in the Naked Gun movies.

For me, the best story in Creepshow is “The Crate,” which focuses on Henry Northup (Hal Holbrook), a reserved college professor, and his friend and colleague Dexter Stanley (Fritz Weaver). Henry is married to Wilma “Billie” Northup (Adrienne Barbeau), a boozy, overbearing shrew of a wife, who shows up to a faculty party drunk and belligerent. Dexter is called away when a janitor (Don Keefer) shows him a crate from an Arctic expedition dating back to 1834. It was stored away under a staircase in the bowels of a building.

Naturally, Dexter and the janitor decide to open the crate and they unleash a ferocious creature that kills the hapless custodian in gruesome fashion (although, restrained for Savini). Pretty soon, Henry and Billie run afoul of the nasty beast as Savini gets a chance to flex his impressive makeup muscles. I can still recall seeing pictures of the crate monster in Fangoria around the time Creepshow came out and being scared by it. At a young, impressionable age, it took me awhile to see the film all the way through, but at least I read the comic book adaptation.

What really sells the horror in this segment is the absolutely sweaty, wild-eyed terrified reactions of Dexter to the two deaths he witnesses. Fritz Weaver does a great job as Dexter, never amping up his character’s anxiety too much and knowing just when to reel things in. Holbrook is also very good at showing Henry’s transformation from mild-mannered professor to calculating husband who plots the demise of his domineering wife. Adrienne Barbeau is a hoot as Henry’s obnoxious wife and looks like she’s having a blast bouncing off of Holbrook’s doormat of a husband. It’s a juicy role that lets the veteran actress vamp it up as only she can.

Finally, the story “They’re Creeping Up On You!” features E.G. Marshall as Upson Pratt (perfect name for his character), an anal-retentive neat freak businessman who lives in a sterile apartment. He’s obsessed with eradicating his place of bugs. It’s an amusing spin on the equally reclusive and germ-obsessed Howard Hughes fused with Ebenezer Scrooge. All Pratt cares about is money and clearing up his “bug problem,” but soon enough the omnipresent cockroaches have their day in a rather fitting finale to this film.

Marshall is excellent as the curmudgeonly germaphobe sealed up in how sterile fortress. He’s a prisoner of his own obsessions. This segment shows what a truly skilled actor can do when he has to carry a segment on his own, unlike King in his story. For anyone creeped out by bugs this segment is particularly disconcerting.

George Romero first met Stephen King when he was approached by Warner Bros. to direct an adaptation of Salem’s Lot, a novel about a small town in Maine that is terrorized by vampires. The two men met in Maine for several days and even though the project fell through, they kept in touch. King and Romero wanted to work together on an adaptation of the author’s epic novel The Stand, but realized that it would require major Hollywood studio funding to get made. In order to retain full artistic control, they decided to make another inexpensive film first that would make enough money to give Romero more clout with the studios.

In the summer of 1979, Romero and his business partner and producer Richard Rubinstein met with King in Maine to come up with ideas for an original film because it would be cheaper to make. One idea was a series of horror “blackouts,” short sketches leading to a major scare. Romero wanted to create five stories in five completely different styles: one in black and white, one in color, one in 3D, and so on. However, they decided that this approach was too experimental.

It was King that came up with the comic book idea and the “Creepshow” title. He wrote and completed the 142-page screenplay in October 1979. The first story, “Father’s Day,” was described as a “deliberate EC pastiche,” according to King. “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill” was an adaptation of “Weeds,” a short story King published in the May 1976 issue of Cavalier. In fact, “Weeds” was originally written as the first chapter of a novel, but as the story started to spread beyond Verrill’s world, King could not find any more to say. For the film, he decided to change the tragic tone to a more comedic one.

“Something to Tide You Over” was inspired by King’s memories of being buried up to his neck in sand as a child and also from a film about Bluebeard the pirate being left to die below the high tide line. “The Crate” was adapted from a short story published in the July 1979 issue of Gallery magazine. The story was inspired by a real crate found under the stairs in the chemistry building at the University of Maine. What stuck in King’s mind was that the crate had been under the stairs for a hundred years and he imagined “something really sinister in there.” The creature in the crate was inspired by the Looney Tunes cartoon character, the Tasmanian Devil. For the last story, King originally had a mixture of spiders, cockroaches, beetles, and bugs that did not even exist. However, budgetary constraints forced him to use cockroaches exclusively.

Initially, King was not interested in a framing story to link the five stories because he felt that ones in past horror film anthologies were “silly and contrived.” Romero suggested a comic book as the framing device and King agreed. The Spectre, featured in the prologue and linking segments, was a reworking of the “Old Witch”, “The Cryptkeeper” and other narrators from the EC comic books. Romero used King’s first draft, making some changes with the author’s approval and input during principal photography, which often involved rewriting dialogue.

With King’s script, a rough budget and poster art created by EC comic book veteran artist Jack Kamen, the filmmakers shopped the project around Hollywood. Money wasn’t an issue with studio executives, but rather the content. They wanted creative input, which King and Romero balked at. So, they went back to United Film Distributing, a subsidiary of the United Artists Theater Circuit, who had backed Knightriders. They ended up financing Creepshow’s $8 million budget.

Pre-production began in early 1981 and Romero called on frequent collaborators, like makeup effects artist Tom Savini and cinematographer Michael Gornick. The production set up offices in Penn Hall Academy, an abandoned Pittsburgh grammar school, transforming their gymnasium into a soundstage. Principal photography began in late July 1981. In order to give each segment its own distinct look, King and Romero decided to employ the vibrant color scheme from the EC comic books through heightened, saturated lighting and utilizing stylized backgrounds. With the significant budget, Romero had the freedom to shoot on location as well as on a soundstage. Filming lasted 17 weeks, ending in late November.

Post-production was quite extensive with four different editors working on the five stories, a large amount of optical work, and composing the film’s score. Originally, Romero planned to use music from the Capitol Library (which he also used in Night of the Living Dead). He felt that the music would work well with the film, but assistant director John Harrison noticed the varying degrees of quality in material from the various decades and ended up creating much of the music in the film on a synthesizer. Rick Catizone created the animated sequences that acted as segues between segments in the style of Kamen’s comic book pages drawn for the film.

Creepshow debuted at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival and was a rousing success with a distribution deal made with Warner Bros. – the first time a studio would distribute a Romero film. The film received mixed reviews from mainstream critics. Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and wrote, “What they’ve done here is to recapture not only the look and the storylines of old horror comics, but also the peculiar feeling of poetic justice that permeated their pages.” In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, “The best things about Creepshow are its carefully simulated comic-book tackiness and the gusto with which some good actors assume silly positions. Horror film purists may object to the levity even though failed, as a lot of it is.” The Washington Post’s Rita Kempley wrote, “What one confronts in Creepshow is five consistently stale, derivative horror vignettes of various lengths and defects.” Newsweek magazine’s David Ansen wrote, “Creepshow is a faux naïf horror film: too arch to be truly scary, too elemental to succeed as satire.” Finally, in his review for the Globe and Mail, Jay Scott wrote, “The Romero-King collaboration has softened both the horror and the cynicism, but not by enough to betray the sources – Creepshow is almost as funny and as horrible as the filmmakers would clearly love it to be.”

If Romero was criticized for his rather non-descript directorial style prior to Creepshow, with this film the director showed that he could turn on the style with the best of them, cutting loose and having fun with the material. He pays homage to the classic EC comic books from the ‘50s by presenting a series of short stories populated by reprehensible protagonists that get their well-deserved retribution through supernatural means. Most horror anthologies are notoriously uneven in terms of quality and Creepshow is no different. Fortunately, there’s only one segment that isn’t very good and that was down to casting, while the rest of them are populated with familiar faces that seem to be having fun inhabiting their colorful characters, which translates into fun for the audience watching them.

Creepshow helped kick off a new wave of horror anthology films that included the likes of Nightmares (1983), Cat’s Eye (1985), Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (1990), and, more recently, Trick ‘r Treat (2007), which, with its mix of horror and comedy and use of garish, vibrant lighting, seems particularly indebted to Creepshow. While it certainly doesn’t contain the scathing social commentary of other Romero films, it is a fun, entertaining romp – a cleansing of the cinematic palette if you will, before he moved on to tackle the third installment of his Dead trilogy with Day of the Dead (1985).

SOURCES

Gagne, Paul R. “Creepshow: Masters of the Macabre.” Cinefantastique. September-October 1982.

Further reading: Check out Sean Gill's excellent take on Creepshow over at his blog.