Obligatory Halloween Post Has Risen From The Grave

Beast Witches to Boo on Halloween!

So, here we are yet again, scare addicts! It's that time of year when I talk about a movie that took a sizable chunk outta my sanity as an impressionable yoot!

In past chapters I've talked about some of the scariest fright flicks ever made, including An American Werewolf in London, The Exorcist, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Alien, The Return of the Living Dead, The Evil Dead and The Shining.

I'm not sure how old I was when I first saw this year's entry, but I learned of its existence when my parents inexplicably let my buy The Encyclopedia of Horror edited by Richard Davis back in 1981.

At the tender age of 11, I certainly wasn't prepared for the gruesome image I saw on page 139:

A distinct look of revulsion played over my face as I read that the still was from a movie that "showed in macabre detail what happened when zombies overran New York."

I can already hear the hard-core horror hounds out there screaming "What?!? New York?!? It happens in Pennsylvania, you dumb-ass!"

But back then I didn't know any better. I took the writer at face value as he went on to add: "Most of the action takes place in a large supermarket (?) which becomes awash with blood."

I was officially intrigued. As I read through the book I encountered more details on page 149:

"Mr. Romero now has color, and blood is gorier in color. Mr. Romero has never been one to eschew physical grue. Characters have the tops of their heads blown off in graphic closeup. Bolstered by larger budgets, Mr. Romero doesn't always resist the temptation to indulge himself, and is danger of overstatement as far as his moral message is concerned."   

The intensity of the movie was further bolstered by the following lurid image on page 153:

The pic was captioned thusly:

"In the 1970's, horror movies, with their surfeit of blood and special effects, were becoming almost too gruesome and frightening for the average horror fan." 

Yeah, no shit, Rich.

Prior to reading this book and seeing these images, the most graphic violence I'd seen in a film was likely Raiders of the Lost Ark. It would still be a year or so before I'd see "Mr. Romero's" notorious first feature film, a nasty little piece of celluloid which I've already talked about here and here.

In fact, the experience of seeing that particular magnum opus traumatized me so badly that I swore off Romero movies for at least two or three decades. I honestly didn't want to subject my embryonic  wits to any more of this madman's nightmare fuel. But every subsequent horror book I collected talked about this nasty sequel in hushed tones, as if daring me to watch it.

Here's what Tom Hutchinson had to say about it in Horrors: A History of Horror Movies two years later:

"Most of the later part of the action takes place in a huge shopping mall to which the zombies come. 'They gravitate to places that have meant a lot to them when they were living,' says one of the characters in the most overt statement yet about such a consuming and consumed society, although the sight of redneck farmers out on a zombie-shoot is a fairly obvious comment on our sporting lives."

And whereas its predecessor was in black-and-white, this sequel was in color, which meant "the gore was more realistically effective in the way it looked on screen. So heads explode in wincing close-up, because that is still the only way to eradicate the zombie plague, as once again a small group of people flees the rotting wrath to come. The plague analogy is very relevant for, besides being cannibalistic, the zombies pass on their contagion to whomever they bite, so that a man on the run dies of the bite and is then revived as one of the living dead." 

By this time I'd seen Romero's debut film and knew I wasn't even vaguely ready to watch it's gorier color sequel. Especially based on what I read and saw in Nigel Andrew's book Horror Movies.  

This book featured another stomach-turning still from the movie:

Now, it's one thing to screw up the courage to watch a movie that's scary but its a completely different bag o' rats to stare down the barrel of what my increasingly-frantic horror library was calling one of the goriest films ever made.

But eventually my horror movie apprenticeship hardened my stomach to the point where I thought I could tackle this one. So I took a trip down to my local video store, rented the town's single threadbare copy and followed my usual masochistic ritual. I turned off all the lights and crawled up on the couch. Given the film's reputation for vomitorial visceralism, I eschewed the snacks that I normally set aside for movie time. 

Despite my precautions, I had no idea at the time that nothing can prepare you for your first viewing of...

Dawn of the Dead (1978)

***WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD*** 

If you've never seen this classic horror movie, then what the hell are you doing?!? Go watch it first and then come back to read what this inconsequential jack-ass has to say about it!

After pressing "PLAY", I watched with dread as the movie began with a television station in turmoil. Nothing directly ties Dawn to its predecessor, but I like to think that this flick continues the story started in Night of the Living Dead...and the zombie plague has gotten a helluva lot worse.  

People are shouting, papers are flying in the air and two "experts" are hotly debating the current situation, leading to one of the film's many memorable quotes:

"Every dead body that is not exterminated becomes one of them. It gets up and kills! The people it kills get up and kill!" 

For some reason the yahoos gathered in the studio started heaping scorn upon the guy for saying this. Were they oblivious to what was going on all around them? Hadn't they seen the first film? In some weird way, this presages the current Trump-era tend of dismissing clear and present dangers like climate change as "fake news." 

So Romero, sneaky bastard that he is, wasted no time sneaking in some sly social commentary. Beyond this scene parroting the growing trend towards "circus" television, I watched as Givens, the unscrupulous station manager, forced his employees to keep broadcasting a list of non-existent rescue stations. One of our protagonists, Fran, played by the delightful Gaylen Ross, kicked back against this, which led to the following exchange:

Givens:    Garret, who told you to kill those supers?

Fran:        Nobody. I killed 'em. They're out of date. 

Givens:    I want those supers on the air all the time! 

Fran:        Are you willing to murder people by sending them out to stations that have closed down?

Givens:    Without those rescue stations on screen every minute people won't watch us. They'll tune out!

This introduced a pretty constant theme in the movie: seeking diversion and comfort from a world spinning down through through materialism and short-term gain. Realizing that all semblance of remaining order is lost, Fran agreed to escape in the station's news helicopter with her partner Stephen, a.k.a. Flyboy, played by David Emge. 

We then smash-cut to a S.W.A.T. team that's poised to raid a dilapidated tenement building. At least I assumed they were S.W.A.T.; most of them looked like hippies dressed up in Halloween costumes and awkwardly toting plastic M-16's. Clearly the movie didn't have the budget nor the inclination to hire real S.W.A.T. guys or train the extras in weapon handing and police tactics. As I would quickly learn, these petty observations would soon be rendered inconsequential. 

At the time I had no sweet clue what was supposed to be happening in this scene. And that's what I love about independent movies from this era. Unlike modern studio films, you're not spoon fed information and you've gotta puzzle things out for yourself.

Distracted by trauma during the introduction, I'd missed out on the reference to martial law. Apparently, things have gotten so bad that citizens were no longer able to occupy private residences and the bodies of the recently deceased had to be turned over to authorities for proper disposal. Well, the folks in this particular building weren't too keen on the idea of the cops bombing in and taking over their turf. An armed conflict ensued, giving Romero and horror movie makeup maestro Tom Savini an excuse to set off more explosive blood squibs than what was used to kill Sonny Corleone in The Godfather.

As someone who was still squeamish about seeing on-screen blood and graphic violence, this scene quickly caused my stomach to curdle. And when one the S.W.A.T. guys, appropriately named Wooley, suddenly veered deep into the weeds, things got much, much worse. 

I remember thinking to myself: 'Yeah, I know society is falling apart here, but how did this sloppy, psychotic fuck pass his last psych exam? Or his fitness exam, for that matter? Sorry, but as soon as this loon racked his shotgun and started raving about how Martinez needed to show his "greasy Puerto Rican  ass" so he could "blow it off", I was hoping the field commander would show up, take Mr. Electricity off to the side and ask him to "ex-nay the whole Uuertopay Icanray thing". Oh, and maybe encourage him to switch to decaf.

But nope, I sat there, jaw agape, as this lunatic went into rampage mode throughout the building. At one point Officer Batshit kicked down a random door, fired his shotgun, and blew the head off the poor fucker who just so happened to be standing there. 

This prompted me to punch the "STOP" button on the VCR remote control, for the first of many, many times during the movie.

"Wha-wha-what the fuck was the point of that?!" I muttered to myself, reflexively putting the back of my hand up to my mouth. Clearly the years hadn't caused Romero to go soft. If they're starting with a full-on head explosion, what they hell were they gonna do next?

Tentatively I pushed the "PLAY" button again and recoiled away from the television screen. 

My answer came pretty quick. I watched as a bunch of zombies got released from one of the quarantined rooms as they tried to put Old Yeller down. One of ghouls grabbed his unwitting girlfriend (?) and chomped down on her neck and then her arm. Again, Tom Savini's gut-wrenching makeup effects prompted another pause.

'I'm not gonna make it,'  I thought to myself, trying to stem the rising tide of bile. As my horror books had blithely observed, the gore in Night of the Living Dead was repellent enough, but this time out things were in color. Lurid, realistic, stomach-churning color.  

When I resumed the movie, my nausea got a brief reprieve but my nerves didn't. I was introduced to two of the S.W.A.T. team members, namely Peter (Ken Foree) and Roger (Scott Reiniger), who have an encounter with a one-legged priest who's unpretentious delivery gives added resonance to the following chilling line:

"When the dead walk, señores,we must stop the killing or we lose the war."

Much to my complete and utter lack of delight, I got to see what this creepy and cryptic reference meant in the very next scene. As it turned out, the people in the tenement building have been stashing their dead and dying loved ones in the basement, who are then zombie-ing out and eating each other. *HUUURRRKK* Romero and Savini, the sick little monkeys that the are, document all of this in a series of devilishly-sadistic closeups.

I swore under my breath as I mistakenly hit "PAUSE" instead of the "STOP" button, inadvertently lingering on the sight of a gross, putrefying zombie gleefully munching away on a leg bone. Averting my gaze, I started mashing random buttons until the screen mercifully went black. 

"Jesus Christ!" I yelled out loud, likely causing my parents in the next room to stir. "What the fuck is wrong with these people?" 

Now, it wasn't as if I was watching this movie at an impressionable age and I couldn't tell the difference between reality and fantasy. It was just so vile, repulsive, realistic and nightmarish that it was starting to make me feel sick. After resuming the film, I managed to get to the end of the scene, feeling a palpable sense of relief every time Roger and Peter delivered another merciful head-shot to each of the rotting, cannibalistic aberrations.  

Something else worth noting at this point is the film's production design, or lack thereof. Dawn of the Dead wasn't shot on some hermetically-sealed, pre-constructed back-lot set that was made to look grungy. Nope, Romero went out, found the gnarliest, most dilapidated, run down, filthy apartment building he could find and then just started crankin' the camera. Between the vile setting and Michael Gornick's sickly-looking cinematography, Dawn of the Dead actually looks like it smells bad. In fact, to paraphrase my recent review of Terrifier, this movie looks like it was shot in "Smell-O-Vision" and the knob got permanently stuck on the "Devil's Anus" setting. 

As it turns out, Roger and Stephen are bros, so both he and Peter go along in the chopper flight. As the foursome get a bird's eye view of the countryside, we witness the full scale of the zombie apocalypse as packs of armed rednecks and military types are shown roaming the countryside, gunning down any wandering ghouls they encounter. 

Many times I've bitched about movies being tonally inconsistent, and this one is no exception. In fact, a case could be made that Dawn is tonally schizophrenic. After all, movie drunkenly careens from one of the most intense moments of visceral horror to a scene where roving bands of heavily-armed yahoos are wandering around, sport-shooting ghouls and enjoying an outdoor boil-up, all to the tune of "'Cause I'm A Man" by The Pretty Things.  

But somehow it worked for me. Maybe its because Romero had given me just enough down time in the helicopter to get to know our main characters. Perhaps it was because a moment of levity was just what I needed after all of that extreme brutality. Maybe it was the oddly-reassuring connective tissue (pun not intended) that this sequence provided to Night of the Living Dead. Whatever the reason, it didn't feel completely out of place to me. 

Eventually our heroes were forced to land and refuel. It was at that point when I really noticed the film's oddball musical choices. Speaking of schizophrenic, Dawn of the Dead's soundtrack is just as patchwork as its tone, featuring genuinely-creepy tracks by legendary Italian prog-rock band Goblin sandwiched between incongruous clips of generic stock music. The music is super-weird in the airport sequence; kinda like a bandsaw being oscillated back and forth at high speed. It really adds to the feeling of creeping doom. 

As our heroes explored the abandoned airport, a deader popped out of nowhere and tackled Flyboy. At the time I chuckled to myself, thinking 'Wow, dude might be an ace pilot, but he's pretty useless when it comes to hand-to hand combat. What the dell was that whole cross-body-block thing? Honestly, that shit's funnier than the redneck cook-out scene.'

Moments of black comedy dispensed with, it was clearly time for Romero to get down to the task of scaring the shit out of me again. I watched as a cadaver started to creep up on an oblivious Roger as he re-fueled the chopper. Now, in a crappy horror movie, this would result in some big showdown between the two, but not here. Here it's all about the gag. Driven by pure instinct, the zombie climbed atop a pile of crates interposed between him and Roger, inadvertently stuck his Frankensteinian melon up into the helicopter's rotor blades and promptly got more than a little taken off the top. 

Moments like this started to take the sting out of the graphic violence for me, to the point where the movie started to transition from balls-out horror to something kinda comic book-y. Having said that, not two minutes later, in one of the movie's more subversively-tasteless scenes, I watched in abject terror as Peter was forced to gun down two prepubescent ghouls who bushwhacked him in the airport office.

My nerves scarcely had a moment to recover before one of the most iconic zombies in cinema history made his debut. I squirmed in my seat as this bald rotter with the hideously decayed face and chest started silently closing in on a distracted Peter. Given his black and red plaid shirt, I idly wondered if this guy had inadvertently wandered down south from Mississauga.

As Flyboy aimed his rifle at the encroaching ghoul, I knew that he'd never owned a Daisy air rifle as a kid since he'd clearly never been exposed to even the most basic gun safety rules. His shot missed the zombie and nearly hit Peter, requiring a timely intervention from crack shot Roger.

Now refueled, our heroes quickly got airborne again. Eventually they flew over a massive parking lot and an equally-sprawling two-level complex. This led to one of the most gloriously-dated exchanges in film history:

Stephen: What the hell is it?
Roger: It looks like a shopping center, one of those big, indoor malls

Even in the mid-Eighties this was a really antiquated reference. By then, consumerism was at its zenith and shopping malls were everywhere. After touching down, our heroes looked down into the parking lot where scores of zombies were aimlessly milling around. This led to the following dialogue between Stephen and Fran, which continued to hammer home the film's theme:

Fran: What are they doing? Why do they come here?
Stephen: Some kind of instinct. Memory of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.

Fun fact: after you watch Dawn of the Dead you'll never look at shoppers in a mall around the Christmas season the same way again.

As the characters first ventured inside, I was really impressed by how well the movie used the mall as a location. Sometimes it felt as if Romero was shooting the flick in real time as the actors explored their surroundings. At one point the lights, animated displays and the incongruous muzak got turned on, leading to yet another funny tonal shift. I even found myself chuckling as Romero juxtaposed more over-the-top gore with scenes of zombies bumping into one another on the escalators and tumbling over the railing and into the fountain. 

At this point I really took notice of the low-fi makeup job on most of the zombies. In Night of the Living Dead, the make-up artists had it relatively easy. Since it was in black and white, all they needed to do is slap white makeup, facial appliances and chocolate sauce on a bunch of extras and *poof*, instant zombies. But in Dawn, Savini had a much bigger challenge.

Between shooting in color, the on-set lighting, the film stock used, and the sheer number of zombies that were needed, Savini's plan to shellac the background performers in a flat grey hue kinda backfired since it ended up photographing blueish-green. But considering the film's budget and time constraints, I find it easy to suspend disbelief and just go with it.

I also noticed that the blood in the film didn't really look like blood at all. I didn't know it at the time, but the egg tempera candy apple red gore used on-set was actually mass-produced by the 3M corporation. When the dailies started to come in, Tom told George that he hated the color of the blood, but George thought it was reminiscent of the EC Comics of his childhood and they decided to just roll with it.

After Peter and Roger took off to look for supplies, I felt a rush of anger as Stephen charged after them, effectively leaving Fran to her own devices. With everyone running riot around the mall, a Hari Krishna zombie slipped into the stairwell, leading to a legitimately creepy scene where he menaces Fran. Mercifully she managed to hold the l'il undead bastard at bay long enough for the guys to get back and help her.

Wow, and you though Hari Krishna's were pushy in real life!

This brings me to actress Gaylen Ross and the character of Fran. Compared to the shell-shocked  Barbra in Night of the Living Dead, Fran is practically Ellen freakin' Ripley. Sadly, she's also kinda useless at the start of the film, leaving Stephen to fend for himself during the airport attack and then retreating from the Hari Krishna zombie quicker than if it was alive. But the good news is, Fran does have an arc. She starts out about as valuable as a screen door on a submarine but by the end of it, she can handle herself quite well.

Nowadays you'd probably get criticized for showing a female character experience any sort of courage or competency struggle *cough, cough* Rey in Star Wars *cough, cough* but, in my humble opinion, that isn't realistic either. Hey, I'm big enough to admit that, if I was faced with what Fran had to deal with in Dawn of the Dead, I'd probably be the first one to go "full Barbra" on my fellow survivors. 

It's then revealed that Fran isn't at the top of her game because she's got a bun in the oven, prompting this bizarre exchange between Peter and Stephen:

Peter: Do you want to get rid of it?
Stephen: What?!?
Peter: Do you want to abort it? It's not too late...and I know how.

When I heard this I thought to myself: 'How the hell does Peter know how to abort a baby?!? Is he just gonna boot her in the stomach?!?' As a good Catlick boy, hearing this casually-thrown-out line was more shocking than some of the gore effects. This leads me to another point: sometimes George Romero's dialogue is pretty tin-eared.

Anyhoo, back to what was happening on screen. I was really enjoying how every part of the plan to seal off and then secure the mall was being documented in loving detail. It was almost as if Romero and company were providing a real zombie apocalypse visual survival guide. But every time Peter and Roger haphazardly tore-ass through the parking lot with another set of trucks, I couldn't help but wince. To this day, I'm stunned that no one was killed while making the film.

After fooling the zombies time and time again, ol' Rog starts to get pretty cocky, bordering on Wooley-levels of unhinged. This leads to one of my all-time favorite lines in cinema history:

I felt myself growing increasingly nervous as Roger's overconfidence started to get the best of him. He let his guard down at one point and got chomped on both the arm and the leg. Now, you gotta understand the context here. This was very likely only the second or third movie I'd ever seen that  featured zombies. The concept of a dead body being reanimated, walking around and spreading its infection by biting other people was nebulous, mysterious and decidedly vile.

Notwithstanding the compelling visual evidence that at least a baker's dozen aspiring stuntmen were maimed or killed during this scene, the chaos was palpable. A lot of the gore is incidental; such as the throwaway moment where a zombie gets run over, stands back up, ripping his own arm off in the process, and then continued to attack the truck. Again, going back to the golden zombie rule: these things weren't dropped until the creature's nexus of animation, the brain, was destroyed. Needless to say, the implications for this rule is a gore hound's wet dream.

With all of the entrances sealed off, our heroes set their sights on exterminating all of the zombies inside the mall. This was kicked off with a wonderful scene where they raid a gun shop, montage-style. Say what you want about Romero practically bolting the camera down as well as his workmanlike dialogue coverage, he's undeniably a crackerjack editor and this sequence is pure gold. Keep in mind: this pre-dates Ash getting prepped in The Evil Dead by three years. Oh, and you gotta dig that weird-ass tribal music playing in the background!

Eventually Peter, Roger, Stephen and Fran managed to put all of the zombies down and life slowly started to return to some semblance of normalcy. For one brief shining moment we got a chance to breathe a sigh of relief. But even then, the ever-present sound of the zombies pawing away at the mall's entrance doors was a constant reminder that a tsunami of death and chaos was lurking just outside, seeking to find and exploit a single crack in their defenses.

This led to the movie's most iconic scene where our Fantastic Four are standing together up on the top floor of the mall, looking down and listening to the slathering horde pounding and clawing away outside. Even though Romero's dialogue can falter at times, it's bone-chillingly effective in this sequence:

Fran: They're still here.
Stephen: They're after us. They know we're still in here.
Peter: They're after the place. They don't know why; they just remember. Remember that they want to be in here.
Francine Parker: What the hell are they?
Peter: They're us, that's all, when there's no more room in hell.
Stephen: What?
Peter: Something my granddad used to tell us. You know Macumba? Voodoo? My granddad was a priest in Trinidad. He used to tell us, "When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the Earth."

Like all the best campfire tales, Ken Foree's accomplished delivery sent chills down my spine and prompted me to seek comfort in a...well, a comforter that was lying on the couch. I bundled myself up, steeled my nerves and kept watching.

This dire speech was immediately re-enforced by poor Roger finally succumbing to his zombie bites. Between Scott Reiniger's stirring performance and the eerie musical cues, it was really, really hard to watch. Especially as Roger's corpse started to stir under the sheet and sit up, eventually revealing yet another classic Tom Savini makeup job.

Side note: every once and awhile the character's turn on their television, and we see a dude I originally dubbed "crazy eye patch guy" appear in emergency news broadcasts. For the record, the character's name is actually Dr. Millard Rausch and he's played with aplomb by Richard France. Only in a 70's-era low budget indie horror flick would a guy like France be cast as a scientist. Nowadays it would be some prim n' proper Anderson Cooper-looking motherfucker.

But no, here we get Richard France, yet another gloriously-distinctive weirdo that Romero loves to cast in his movies. I immediately fell in love with this guy. Thanks to his deep, baritone voice, matter-of-fact delivery, strange mannerisms and absolute certainty in delivering the script's whack-a-do lines, he effortlessly commanded every single scene that he was featured in. Plus, I admired his penchant for screaming "DUMMIES!!! DUMMIES!!! DUMMIES!!!" over and over again.  

Eventually life became so domesticated inside the mall that, at one point, Peter prepared an elegant anniversary dinner for Stephen and Fran in has to be the most gloriously-dated 70's-era scene in any film. Even though the couple are surrounded by the trappings of normal life all around them, there's something supremely claustrophobic and depressing about the whole thing. If anything, this sequence embodies Fran's prescient prediction from earlier in the film:

"You don't see that it's not a sanctuary, it's a prison!"

As if in response to this, a huge pack of motorcycle-riding lunatics showed up to invade the mall. Again, Dawn shows it's influence by presaging Mad Max by a year and The Road Warrior by four. Prior to the big show down, I watched with growing concern as Peter, Fran and Stephen removed all of their jewelry and fancy clothes and donned their survival gear again. The message wasn't lost on me: if the world is falling apart you can only distract yourself for so long before you're forced to deal with it.

What followed over the next thirty minutes could only be described as an orgy of blood and mayhem. After getting past the barriers, the invaders drove their bikes en masse right through the mall and then started to pillage everything. Witnessing the looters snatch up property that he thought now belonged to them, Stephen snapped and started sniping away at them.

During the ensuing chaos, I was witness to approximately one-hojillion explosive blood squibs, a multitude of hacked-off limbs, decapitations and at least one nauseatingly-realistic disembowelment. Presiding over this insanity was a gleefully-anarchic Tom Savini, providing the gore effects behind the scene and inhabiting the role of lead-biker Blades. Witness the scene where he buries a machete in the head of one of the zombies, resulting in the iconic third still at the beginning of this entry. 

I didn't know it at the time, but, just like every other setting for Dawn of the Dead, the mall was a very real location: namely Munroeville Mall in Munroeville, Pennsylvania. Every night, after the place closed closed down for the day, Romero and his cadre of cinematic horror nerds would bomb in, shoot all night long and then try and clean everything up before the place re-opened in the morning.

Re-watching the film, I'm stunned that they managed to make the place presentable every day, what with cars and motorcycles ripping around, mannequins being run over and gore flying everywhere. I've always wondered if any casual shoppers ever slipped in an errant patch of blood in the sporting goods section of JC Penny or noticed a random ear stuck to the inside of the photo booth.

Whereas the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake featured the fast-moving zombies which were de rigueur at the time, I still maintain that Romero's shambling ghouls are much more interesting. Eschewing the fantasy logic that re-animated dead bodies shouldn't even be physically capable of sprinting around like Usain Bolt, the shufflers really lull you into a false sense of security. They may be clumsy and inherently pathetic, but if you aren't paying attention and they come at you in a clutch you can find yourself proper fucked without much ado.

By the time the pie scene rolled around, I really didn't know what to think. I remember having a really hard time reconciling the violence with the humor. Towards the end, Dawn of the Dead is like a live-action Road Runner cartoon where Wild E. Coyote's resulting wounds are realistically and clinically depicted by a crazy former Vietnam combat photographer cum supremely-talented makeup artist. I didn't know if I should laugh, scream, cry or projectile-vomit onto the television screen.

As the zombies began to overwhelm the bikers, something happened that made absolutely no sense to me. With the ghouls closing in all around, one of the raiders inexplicably strapped himself into a heart monitor machine and gamely followed through with the test, even as the creatures fell upon him like a living luau. I sat there in stunned silence, listening to the monitor's readings screech as they literally tore him limb from limb right before my disbelieving eyes.

This necessitated another pause. As gross as the visuals were, even I knew that Romero was clearly fucking with me at this point. The thing that surprised me the most is that I hadn't stopped the movie in quite awhile. So, either I was becoming numb to the cavalcade of gore or the film's humor had de-fanged any cruelty inherent in the act. 

But even then, Romero still had one final, amazingly-memorable trump card to play. After Flyboy got lethally nibbled he came and back almost immediately as one of the most iconic zombies in cinema history. As if Tom Savini's hero-level makeup job wasn't amazing enough, David Emge completely sells the illusion. When he emerged from that elevator, eyes and mouth agape, covered in hideous wounds, revolver dangling abstractly off one finger, Emge became the prototypical zombie in my mind. To this day I still have no idea how he managed to walk around on his ankle like that.

And with that, the living dead reclaimed the mall. As if to reinforce the whole "zombies gravitate to places that are familiar" angle, Zombie-Stephen instinctively staggered his way back through the mall, tore through the wall and incrementally made his way back to the hero's secret safe-room. Unfortunately his new squad of undead bros came along with him.

This led to an absolutely insane climax. With a tidal wave of ghouls now streaming past their barricade, Peter told Fran to escape in the helicopter while he held off the horde. But, then, right at the last second, instead if Peter shooting himself in the head, he jumped up, battled his way through the slavering undead and fought his way towards the helicopter. The musical accompaniment for this sequence, by the way, sounds like it might have inspired the opening title score for the A-Team.

Years later I found out that Romero's original ending was crazy-bleak. Peter shoots himself in the head and Fran decapitates herself by sticking her l'il blonde noggin' into the helicopter's rotor blades.¡Ay, caramba! I'm super-glad Romero jettisoned this downer ending. Between the pie fight and the death of Stephen, I don't think my poor brain could have coped with yet another whiplash-style tonal shift. 

As the orchestral strings swelled and the helicopter flew away, I breathed a palpable sense of relief and felt kinda proud of myself. I'd managed to make it all the way to the end without tossing my cookies or pausing every five seconds to dry-heave into a beef bucket. If anything, Dawn of the Dead truly reinforced the artistry of horror films for me. Even if they weren't made for a lot of money, they could still be epic, tackle big themes and resonate with you long after the credits rolled.

I'd also finally come to the conclusion that cinema gore was illusory. Convincing and gross, sure, but an illusion nonetheless. From that point forward, whenever I saw a practical effect, my first question was "Wow...how did they do that?" instead of "Oh gawd...can I reach the terlet in time?"

Whenever I re-watch Dawn of the Dead, my respect for the movie continues to grow. To me, it's more than just an iconic horror flick. I see it as a direct response to film critics and the moral majority who continue to complain that movie violence begets real violence.

To me, it's the other way around. Compared to news footage of kids coming home from Vietnam in body bags or students getting shot in cold blood by National Guard at Kent State, movies like Dawn of the Dead were just a reflection of the turbulent times that the creators lived through. In fact, by combining extreme gore with black comedy, Romero was telling us not to get bent out of shape over the fake stuff but to pay attention to the real horrors inherent in our reality. 

So, this Halloween season, avoid Zack Snyder's serviceable but vapid remake and check out the one and only Gone With The Wind of zombie flicks, Dawn of the Dead.

EPIC:  Recent documentary about the making of the film, included in Anchor Bay's marvelous DVD boxed set from 2004. WARNING: SPOILERS AND NOT EVEN VAGUELY SUITABLE FOR WORK!

VINTAGE EPIC:   This once hard-to-find doc from 1985 talks about Romero's early career and features some stellar behind-the-scenes footage from the production of Dawn of the Dead:

IRONIC FAIL: The reason Dawn of the Dead is currently unavailable in hi-def form is because the film's original producer and current rights holder, Richard P. Rubenstein, blew six million dollars inexplicably converting this classic horror movie into 3-D and now he wants a ludicrous amount of money for the rights to try and recoup his losses. Read the infuriating details right here.