Hell On Earth: 1978’s Zombie Apocalypse ‘Dawn Of The Dead’ Reviewed

My dear readers, this can be disturbing material. It is, after all, the description of a non-comedic unsettling zombie movie. If you dislike such things, please do not read further.

Dawn of the Dead, 1978, Directed by George Romero. The full version is on YouTube. What stuck with me since the first time I saw this movie was its theme of Hell On Earth. It was more apt than you might have realized. Happy All Hallowed Saints Day Eve.

In media res. A TV station in chaos. We see a doctor pleading with a skeptical news anchor to believe him that the dead are rising. “The situation must be controlled before it’s too late,” the doctor says.

You have to put yourself in 1978. Zombie movies were unfamiliar. They were genuinely frightening. They are now an excuse for jokes, nothing more than goofy video games or an excuse to show off creative gruesomeness. Not this movie, not then. It is almost impossible to recapture now the definite sense the events were happening, could happen.

The only thing the government could think of was to move people into central areas, bunched up together. Locked down. Martial law has been declared in Philadelphia and other major cities.

The doctor says they are “unable to check the spread because of the emotional attitudes of the citizenry toward these issues of morality.” Men would not do what needed to be done to check the spread.

Yet it was dawning—forgive the pun—on some men they had to take things into their own hands. The TV station’s traffic copter pilot Stephen tells his girlfriend, producer Francine, they are bugging out. “We’ve got to survive,” he tells her. “Somebody’s got to survive.” The rule of law, the old strictures on behavior, were vanishing.

Romero first shows us the excess of the freedom of action, a cop running amok for the sake of running amok. Given the year, this was painted in the service of a politically correct trope (“racism bad”). Even so, we have the idea. Violence for the sake of violence leads only to needless death and chaos. Violence in service of life is good and necessary, and that if it is avoided, even worse follows. The rogue cop is gunned down by one his brother cops, Peter, who turns out to be one of our heroes.

The police are clearing out a building in which residents refused the vacate orders. It is here we see the first real horror. Not the shots fired between citizens and police, which are standard in any shoot-em-up. But one of the most viscerally unnerving scenes in the movie. A cop lines up a zombie, but it’s the undead husband of a woman who cannot understand what is happening. She runs to embrace her undead mate, blocking the cop. She tries to reason with the walking corpse. It takes a bite out of her. Then another. I write it coolly, but you have to imagine audiences unused to such spectacles. The filming makes it easy to imagine you are the one with chunks of flesh ripped away.

This is one of prime reasons zombie movies are perennial. The fear of being eaten alive. This fear is deep, in our very bones. It is hard to imagine a worse death. In zombie movies, we feel the bloodmemory of our ancestors. No place is safe. Constant vigilance is required lest one end up a meal.

Peter meets another cop, Roger, who turns out to be friends of Stephen the helicopter pilot. They discuss running. It’s here one of the movie’s curiosities is shown. A one-legged priest is ministering last rites to the dead in the building’s basement. He explains the resistance of the building’s residents. They are poor, he says, and do not give up their possessions easily, but their dead they do not give up at all.

The priest considers the two cops and says, “You are stronger than us. But soon, I think, they [they zombies] be stronger than you. We must stop the killing,” he adds, as he lopes off, “Or lose the war.” He means, of course, killing of the living by the living. Sin, to put in a word Romero never would have used, allowed to prosper for too long, is conjuring demons.

The priest, we can only infer, has been protected by his faith. We guess this because Peter and Roger discover the room of the undead in which the priest, untouched, had been ministering. It is our second exposure to Hell. Think of a pre-woke British nature documentary of a pride of lions feasting on the entrails of a recent kill. The cops dispatch the feeding zombies.

Roger wonders why the residents kept the bodies. Peter says, “Because they still believe there’s respect in dying.”

Roger and Peter find their way to the helicopter landing pad, where Stephen and Francine are waiting. It’s always difficult to insert comic relief into a horror movie, but Romero does it well, as we meet another group of cops who are running. Stephen asks one, not too bright but charming and always smiling, where they are going. Smiling says “We got an idea we can make it to the island”. What island? “Any island.”

I don’t how he managed it, because it doesn’t look like rotoscoping, but as the helicopter with our four protagonists is lifting off, you catch a distant high-rise with its lights switching off, floor by floor. The metaphor is not lost.

The helicopter has been flying through the night, and at dawn is over rural Pennsylvania, where we see then focus in on a jolly group of national guard and other men in their fall hunting gear formed into a semi-organized posse. It has always seemed to me this is exactly how a situation like this would play out. There is safety in numbers, in well armed and disciplined numbers, that is. There is still a remnant willing to fight. But even they have been corrupted, charity waning. Shooting zombies is treated as light sport.

The helicopter lands to refuel at an abandoned airstrip. Not unexpectedly, a zombie or two shows up, but they are no real trouble. Yet Romero does not spare us. There are two undead children: even the innocent have been corrupted. There is only one thing to do. Peter has a hard time doing it, and we watching it.

Finally the mall. Much has been written about this damned mall. About how the movie is “only” an allegory about consumer culture, about how unthinking shopping becomes the reason for life. Romero has Stephen say “This was an important place in their lives”. Think about what we are called. Consumers. We exist only to consume, like an irrational animal, a zombie.

Yet as a young man seeing it the first time, I didn’t see any of that. What I did see was what a terrific spot a mall was to ride out an apocalypse. It had everything. Food, tools, shelter, comfort, clothing, water, radios, TV, weapons, electricity. Everything.

Zombies when not in pursuit of food are tame. So it is amusing—well, more of a relief—when Roger turns on the mall’s electricity and the elevator music starts. We see the undead stumbling around, with stunned incomprehension, to beautiful music, the kind that used to air in grocery stores back then.

Amidst the sea of zombies, Roger and Peter begin some light looting, the dangers of which Roger takes just a little too much pleasure in. As they are breaking into a store, a zombie grabs Peter’s gun, which fascinates the zombie more than Peter does as food. Stephen goes to help but it is inept with firearms, and nearly gets himself killed.

As is inevitable, somebody has to make the big decisions, which falls to Peter, as he is the calmest and surest of the three men. There is no sense Francine will ever turn warrior. It’s not that she acts like a “stereotypical” woman, but that she acts as an ordinary woman. Reluctant to use violence, and unskilled when she must. I’d say this is “refreshing”, but back then it was the norm. Or one just changing, because 1978 was also the year Halloween came out, which featured (and done well) the now obligatory standard indestructible female heroine.

Stephen, the least of the three men, listens to the radio about the ineffectual government losing control of the cities, and boasts how great their own small band did at fending off dangers. It is always the weakest who boast loudest. Peter warns that complacency means you’re the main course. We learn that Francine by Stephen is three months pregnant. She overhears the men discussing her, and later warns Stephen that the mall could turn into a prison. Just take what they need and keep going. But where?

As our band decides how to secure the mall, we see via a TV transmission my favorite character, the bearded, one-eyed contrarian, who explains in a calm, deep voice that the zombies are not cannibals, because they are no longer human. “These creatures are nothing but motorized instinct. Their only drive is for food…We must not be lulled by the concept that these are our family members or friends. They must be destroyed on sight.” Where there were once men, there are now only beasts.

The CDC thinks a virus is responsible. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. The contrarian is having none of it. Indeed, the viewer is never given any compelling scientific reason for the plague. We learn the story from Peter soon.

The men decide to close off the mall using trucks to block the doors. Roger hotwires the trucks, Peter runs interference, and Stephen watches from the sky. Roger lets the thrill of adventure grow too large in him; he is incautious. He is bitten. Audiences then did not know that bites would turn fatal. But he survives, for now, and the trio succeeds in blocking entrances.

There are zombies still trapped inside, so our team goes on safari. Roger becomes more wan each day, the bite having its effect; he has to be pushed in a cart. The mall is a cornucopia, with plentiful food and distractions, even what passed for video games back then. The team builds a false wall to disguise the entrance leading to the upper offices, which they have made their home.

It’s here in a moment of calm the key line in the movie is spoken. Peter says his grandfather warned, “Where there’s no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the earth.”

This is it. The zombies are pure appetite, seeking only their own “pleasure”. They are without compassion or the possibility of love, thinking only of self. They have no reason. They exist only to exist, in pain and causing pain. The sound effects capture this perfectly. Zombie voices are human, but guttural, eerie noises, not words.

Roger is dying, and knows it. He pleads with Peter. “I’m going to try not to come back.” He does anyway, with confusion on his face. Peter is forced to shoot him, just as the scientist’s voice on the TV says “We have to be logical, we have to remain rational. We have no choice. It’s that or the end.” Those words, logical and rational, were only then beginning their fracturing, but then they still carried some weight.

Francine is taught to shoot and even to fly the helicopter. Her belly swells. Yet the toll of inactivity and excess comfort begins to tell. The three are alive, and in great plenty, but they have nothing to live for except the sake of living. They do not look inward or higher. They simply stare. The TV has been silent for some time now. Tempers are frayed. They eat.

No goal, no soul. They are not that different than the zombies.

With one exception: they realize their plight. They sober up, realizing must do something, anything. So they make ready and stock the helicopter. Which is noticed by a biker gang, mercenaries who have been living on the road since the beginning. The gang covets the mall.

Stephen wants to protect what he thinks is theirs, and recommends fighting. But there are dozens of bikers. Peter says let them take what they want and then they’ll go. Peter and Stephen rush to close the gates to the individual stores before the gang gets inside, bikes and all, but there’s no time to get all gates down.

The bikers get inm but they’re none too smart, and have somehow found pies which, Three Stooges style, they splatter the zombies’ faces with.

Stephen becomes angry at the looting and shoots at one of the bikers. Who fires back.

This forces Peter into the fight. In the midst of the mayhem, one nitwit biker becomes enamored with one of those blood pressure machines into which you stick your arm. His friends try to pull him away, but he comes back to it. The same time the zombies do. They bite his arm off. In a bit of black humor, the machine registers “0 Over 0.”

The bikers thrill to the looting and wanton destruction, while fending off zombies. Distracted by their crimes, not all make it, including one of the leaders who was enjoying the killing too much. The zombies, quite graphically, feast on the wounded bikers.

Stephen makes an escape into an elevator, but is found by some bikers and is shot. Peter escapes back upstairs. The zombies attack Stephen as he tries to climb out of the elevator. He is bit, but he manages to clear the zombies from the car.

Peter tells Francine he’s not sure whether Stephen is alive or dead. Time passes.

A zombie accidentally hits the button on the elevator, and Stephen comes out, undead. His instinct causes him to go to the false wall. Other zombies join him. The false wall is torn down. The zombies, led by undead Stephen, climb up.

Peter shoots what’s left of Stephen. He tells Francine to escape. “I don’t want to go,” says Stephen, “I really don’t.” Francine makes it to the helicopter, with some zombies following her to the roof. Stephen retreats into a room, ready to kill himself. But the dawn beckons, he changes his mind, and fights his way out. Romero rejected the original, bleaker version which had Peter go through with it. Which is wise not because Romero never painted Peter as other than brave throughout the entire film. It would have been entirely against his character, and ours, since Peter stands in for all male viewers.

Peter has to fight his way to the roof, and as he gets to the helicopter a zombie grabs his gun. It is the same creature who took Peter’s gun earlier. It still has the first gun; it now has two. The zombie considers, drops the old one and keeps the new one, a glimpse of triumph on its face. Peter almost smiles.

The pair take to the skies into the rising sun.

Some of the violence, especially in the final mall scenes, is gratuitous, and clearly there to show off the makeup skills of Tom Savini, who also plays a biker. This is a distraction and goes against the message that violence for violence’s sake is deadly, though the Savini biker character does pay the price. Luckily, the time in which these unnecessary visual flourishes come helps them fade into the background.

The music is spooky and clever, as is setting the movie at the bleakest time of year: late winter with no green, not even any snow. Everything is gray and dreary.

You might say the movie represents the time the Katechon is removed. This is a being or entity which, by the grace of God, now holds back the evils of Hell, and which Romero likely would have heard of in his youth. Romero was raised Catholic, and later said he rejected it because of its vision of Hell. He said he didn’t believe it was a place.

But it was still real to him. Yet it wasn’t in the hereafter. It was here. “And now you know what withholds, that he [Antichrist] may be revealed in his time. For the mystery of iniquity already works; only that he who now holds, do hold, until he be taken out of the way.” When the Katechon is removed The End comes. A literal, not figurative, Hell on earth.

Zombies may not be scriptural, but what better way to visualize the shedding of all love and charity, the loss of all hope, the utter bleak self-centeredness of the forever unrepentant, man reduced to pure animal, feeding only one each other, the resulting gore not unlike a painting by van Eyck or Hieronymus Bosch?

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