Who's that a quotation from? From George A. Romero, who wrote and directed "Dawn of the Dead" as a sequel to his "Night of the Living Dead," which came out in 1968 and still plays the midnight circuit as a cult classic.
If you have seen "Night," you will recall it as a terrifying horror film punctuated by such shocking images as zombies tearing human flesh from limbs. "Dawn" includes many more scenes like that, more graphic, more shocking, and in color. I am being rather blunt about this because there are many people who will not want to see this film. You know who you are. Why are you still reading?
Well ... maybe because there's a little of the ghoulish voyeur in all of us. We like to be frightened. We like a good creepy thrill. It's just, we say, that we don't want a movie to go too far. What's too far? "The Exorcist"? "The Omen"? George Romero deliberately intends to go too far in "Dawn of the Dead." He's dealing very consciously with the ways in which images can affect us, and if we sit through the film (many people cannot) we make some curious discoveries.
One is that the fates of the zombies, who are destroyed wholesale in all sorts of terrible ways, don't affect us so much after awhile. They aren't being killed, after all: They're already dead. They're even a little comic, lurching about a shopping center and trying to plod up the down escalator. Romero teases us with these passages of humor. We relax, we laugh, we see the satire in it all, and then -- pow! Another disembowelment, just when we were off guard.
His story opens in a chaotic television studio, where idiotic broadcasters are desperately transmitting inaccurate information (one hopes the Emergency Broadcast System will do a whole lot better). National Guard troops storm public housing, where zombies have been reported. There are 10 minutes of unrelieved violence, and then the story settles down into the saga of four survivors who hijack a helicopter, land on the roof of a suburban shopping center, and barricade themselves inside against the zombies.
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