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Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Day of the Dead
(dir.: George A. Romero)
There are few directors that make horror fun, gory, and exciting in the same breath as George A. Romero. The "Dead" Trilogy are films for true horror fans, as they create an atmosphere not so much of suspense, but of both flight and fight. It is the genre of survival horror, where one must do simply to survive not the night or the day, but for the rest of their lives. It is an apocalypse, but not of war, pestilence, or famine, but of death, and the dead rising from their graves and devouring the flesh of the living. Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Day of the Dead all have their imitators, but never anyone that could duplicate the level of gore, blood, and human irrationality.
The apocalypse begins with Night of the Living Dead. Night is about a satellite that returns from Venus with a strange radiation. This radiation has made the recently dead rise from their grave and seek to eat the flesh of warm-bloodied humans. They swarm in on human dwellings and begin to kill any and all that do not fight or flee from them. In a small farmhouse, a group of people, scared and tired, seek to escape this horde of undead, but begin to lose their sense of order and clarity as well.
The farmhouse in Night is a great vehicle for what is one of the earliest notions of centralized action. In comparison, this type of action has done wonders for movies like Die Hard and Hardware. It also builds a pressure-cooker type of atmosphere, in which all within this little farmhouse want to survive, but have little tools to do so. Food is limited, there is only one gun, and the truck has little gas. Their puny fortifications are inadequate, and their tempers make it so that they’d probably kill each other before the zombies do.
Dawn lacks some of the pressure cooker aspects that Night of the Living Dead has, but it does include the heavy centralized-area action that is seen in all three films. Dawn is about human survival and the dread of it. The world is becoming over-run with the walking dead, and everyone living is fleeing to somewhere where they believe is safe. Four friends seek the comforts of a shopping mall, in which they clear out, and make it home. There is a need for the shopping mall for both the living and the dead. The dead are somehow attracted to the mall (a great satirical device), and seek its familiar sights and sounds (although they don’t really register them beyond an animalistic sense). For the living, the mall is not only a means of fortification and supplies, but a measure of civilization as well. Yet each of the four is constantly bombarded with a feeling of dread and anxiety, despite the relaxing environment that they have created. There are not only the zombies outside, but the threat of bandits as well.
Day of the Dead is the ultimate pressure cooker. A research team and their U.S. Army protectors seek a method, formula, or any means to stop the zombies. The world has been completely devastated by the zombies, and this team is sheltered away in an old WWII underground military base. The soldiers are becoming stir crazy, and incredibly hostile. Their Captain is 100% officially psychotic, as is the head scientist. Three unlikely friends do all they can from not getting killed, by both the zombies and their own kind. What sets this movie apart from its two predecessors is that the effects of the gore are astoundingly gruesome, and the tempers truly to flare into madness.
These films are of an apocolypse, but not one that humanity will survive, but an inevitable, damning death and undeath. There are no "gother" notions that undeath is sexy or desirable. There is only the dread that either one will be shreaded apart for food, or die, and walk the earth eternally hungry. Whatever civilization that does exist is disintegrating, much to the fears within any myth created. The Bible speaks of Sodom, about the flood, and of John's book of Revelations and its Four Horsemen of Apocolypse. These are but a few examples of a sort of need to purge the civilizations of man. Yet, Romero follows none of the cycles of rebirth that these stories promise, despite comments given by characters in both Day and Dawn. There is only the dread of everyday life, under the onslaught of flesh-eating zombies, and the promise that one may just be among them the day one dies.
This trilogy is not for the weak-hearted or gentle of stomach. It is not for the merry or the eternal optimist. It is dread and gore, pushed past an extreme.
