THE END IS NIGH! Part 2: Dawn Of The Dead - 1978 If Night seemed like the ne-plus-ultra when it was released, Dawn Of The Dead went several steps beyond. It is without a doubt one of the greatest horror films ever made. Romero's follow-up, ten years in the making, very effectively extrapolated the zombie-plague to the point where human society was crumbling and zombies were on the verge of taking over. Dawn is grander and more ambitious and also much more violent, thanks in no small amount to the use of colour. Now we could see exploding zombie heads and gut munching in glorious technicolour. Dawn follows the basic story structure of its predecessor. As society crumbles, a small but diverse group of people find a way to escape the madness and take refuge in a secluded place, in this case a huge deserted shopping mall. Feeling like the proverbial kids in the candy store, they start hording the limitless supply of consumer goods, building a luxurious palace for themselves in the mall's attic. Their situation doesn't last long however. Not only do they themselves get bored and frustrated with their useless affluence, but somehow zombies seem to gravitate towards the mall in greater and greater numbers. As the group are forced to fight, another menace turns up to threaten them: a roving gang of bikers have stopped at the shopping mall and are demanding the group share all the goodies inside. Dawn Of The Dead is several films in one. Part horror, part action and part social commentary, it delivers these three elements in equally effective doses. There's a sustained sense of inspiration running through every facet of the film, but it mainly comes down to Romero's script. Stretching the boundaries of the genre almost as far as they will go, he delivers a to-the-point critique of american (or western) society. We're so hooked on consumption that even in times of crisis we won't be able to let go. It has become an integral part of our lifestyle and often is the main purpose of our lives. It is because of this attachment and dependance that consumption could very well be our downfall. Examples of this can be seen daily: the Los Angeles riots (what started as massive politically motivated protest quickly turned into banal looting and senseless violence) and more recently the lootings in Indonesia. We want to own so badly that we can get blinded and take any opportunity to gather more property, whatever the consequences and however useless the gathering. In Dawn we see the main protagonists running crazy through the shopping mall, gathering as much product as possible. They try on fur coats, have candle-lit dinners and play poker with inordinate amounts of cash from the obviously deserted local bank. But for them to be able to do all this, each time they have to fight their way through the hordes of zombies that occupy the mall and risk being hurt, killed, or eaten. It's a risk they're all too willing to take. The bikers do the same thing, destroying the protagonists' safe haven at the same time. But the efforts of both the heroes and the bikers are utterly useless: merchandise has no value without a society to give it its value. Yet everyone runs around like mad trying to horde as many things as possible. In the end fights even break out between the group and the bikers over these useless goods, resulting in casualties on both sides. The odd thing about this whole thing is that it has nothing to do with the zombies. They just stumble along minding their business while all the human characters run around trying to get the best merchandise. In this zombie movie, Romero makes his message abundantly clear without even using zombies. Talk about great writing. Besides delivering the blood and guts, Romero shows how mankind is its own worst enemy. In times of crisis, all we seem to be able to do is fight ourselves instead of uniting to fight the real problem. In the wake of this we also see one of the main ideas behind Romero's trilogy emerging: when one society replaces another, in actual fact nothing changes. White-faced zombies stumbling around a shopping mall aren't that much different from human shoppers and their blank stares. They only just got back from the dead and already the zombies are out shopping. This example also clearly shows the director's approach. Romero is not afraid of using irony and humour, even in an all-out horror movie. In fact the zombies in Dawn are made silly just as often as they are downright menacing, the number of pies they receive in the face (courtesy of the bikers) almost outnumber the bullets they get in the brain, the only difference being that the former method is nowhere near as effective as the latter. But to avoid misunderstanding: for all its pie-throwing and social criticism, Dawn Of The Dead is most definitely a horror film. Just like its predecessor, Dawn Of The Dead set new standards for the portrayal of violence in motion pictures. The seventies had seen a new era of explicitness, thanks largely to Night Of The Living Dead, with films such as The Exorcist and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre scaling new heights. In the wake of Dawn, movies went even further. To illustrate how much of an impact the film's gore effects had, Dawn made an idol of its make-up effects man Tom Savini (who also coordinated stunts and starred in the film as the leader of the bikers - a role he more or less reprised recently in the Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez collaboration From Dusk Till Dawn), who would in following years gain the nickname King Of Splatter for his work on a whole string of eighties' slasher movies. The film spawned a veritable deluge of cheap imitations, most of them made in Italy (see Spaghetti Splatter, parts 1-5) where the emphasis was totally on outrageous gore effects. But mainly it set the standards for the movies that followed. In horror movie terms, the eighties didn't start on New Years Day 1980, but two years prior with the release of Dawn Of The Dead. Click here for part 2: Day Of The Dead