The film opens in a T.V. studio operated by the Emergency Broadcast System. (Yes, there's a reason for those shrill test frequencies that get you out of bed when you fall asleep the night before watching Kojak.) A moderator and a scientific expert are having a violent political disagreement about how to handle the zombies. In the pandemoniun, four people--a technician, his stage manager-girlfriend, and two armed guards--decide to take off (quite literally--they leave in a helicopter) and find a safer area. They eventually land in a large, abandoned shopping mall outside Pittsburgh and decide to stay there. Much of the film's remaining time is spent mowing down these jerky, green zombies, running them over, blasting their heads off, bashing them in, etc. It's fun. It's also gory enough to earn the film an X rating.
THE FILM has things to say about our consumer society. Although there are heavy-handed (though valid) references to the mall as a much-beloved place, which explains the zombies' attraction to it--flickers of pleasurable memories in otherwise dead brains--Romero's satirical jabs are more skillfully displayed by the four heroes' eventual life-style and by our acceptance and enjoyment of it. Once they flush out the zombies and barricade the entrances, they have all the stores to themselves--think of it! They set up house with the finest stereo equipment, unlimited gourmet foods and wine, chic, expensive clothing, sporting goods, etc. By surrounding themselves with material luxuries, they almost succeed in forgetting the hordes of zombies that surround the mall, clamoring at the entrances, waiting...waiting...It's an ingenious metaphor for our society's material-assisted repression of certain realities--poverty, social injustice, or more down to earth, our crippling over-dependence on oil, which we were made aware of in 1973 and managed to repress for six years.
The much criticized use of gore in Dawn of the Dead actually points up a primary virtue of horror films. Everytime somebody blasts off the side of a zombie's head, audiences cheer. Why shouldn't they? What else can you do to flesh-eating zombies? Monster movies reduce every conflict to black vs. white, good vs. evil--that's the point. But they're fantasies--they invoke the supernatural; they don't pretend that that's how it is in real life, the way John Wayne or Clint Eastwood movies do. You can't rehabilitate the alien or the zombies in Dawn-- you've got to blow them away. You don't have to blow away Vietnamese and have your audiences cheering it--unless, as in The Deer Hunter, you depict them as bloodthirsty aliens, which is a lie. (If anything, the Americans should have been depicted as aliens.) Nor do you have to blow away "social deviants" whose problems are considerably more complex than mere "badness". Horror movies are genuinely cathartic--they are not meant to be taken with you when you leave the theater; they don't explicitly or implicitly express right-wing political sympathizers.
KILLING THE MONSTER is also sanctioned by the Church. The triumph of Britain's Hammar horror films is that thay exploit the connection between aggression, sex, and religion. Each blow of that long, hard stake into the writhing female vampire's bosom practically reverberates with church bells. Perhaps unintentionally, these movies make it easy to see how poor, repressed Puritans could have burned men and women at the stake for witchcraft. Chances are, we would have done the same.
Romero's artistic glory is his ability to add a further dimension. He gives us our fun and then holds up the mirror so that we can see the blood dripping from our lips. Towards the end of the film, when a militant hippie motorcycle gang invades the shopping mall disrupting our heroes' idyllic existence and attempting to steal merchandise, we root for the zombies to eat them. When this low-life scum begins to dispatch zombies with startling efficiency and even more startling relish, we think "God damn sadists," and then: "Wait a minute--weren't we cheering this before? Weren't we getting the same kick out of vicariously mauling zombies? Are we any better than this low-life scum? Hmmm..." That's called, "the shock of recognition" and I'm amazed to be writing about it in connection with a film called Dawn of the Dead. It's easily one of the year's best movies horror or otherwise.
THE BIG BUDGET summer shockers--Prophecy, alien, The Omen in its time--are all wrong: humorless, literal-minded disasters. Horror movies thrive on satire, wit, ghoulish irreverence (or else elaborately-stylized reverence, as in the Hammar films, to the point where it's funny). Or else lots of erotic overtones. (Alien had some, but they're mitigated by the film's frigidity. Prophecy is sexless.) The British can usually make funnier and more stylish horror films, because they're so good about being shocked: "A vampire you say? My word..." Here are a few of the most precious moments in horror history: Ernest Thesiger plying Boris Karloff's Frankenstein monster with brandy and cigars; Carrie telekinetically crucifying her Jesus freak mother; Roy Scheider spooning fish entrails into the sea, prissily calling out to Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss "Why don't you guys shovel some of this shit?" and as he hits the last word, noticing this big shark a few feet from his face; Vincent Price, dressed as Richard III, leaning over a butt of marmsy wine in which he has just drowned a lush theater critic, sighing, "I hope he travels well"; Peter Cushing prattling pleasantly about stakes through the heart over snifters of brandy, while upstairs the heroine, her bosom heaving out of her nightgown, opens her window for Christopher Lee, his eyes blazing red, grinning through his fangs as he nuzzles her neck.
Campy, but so classy. Alien and Prophecy have no class. They are aimed at the huge, snorting, blood-soaked pigs we are, and not at the devilishly perverted highbrows we strive to be.