Return of the Dawn of the Dead
When I was 16 one of my all-time top-five best-ever movies was Dawn of the Dead. It resonated with me for two reasons: 1) it was set in a mall, and much of my teenage life was also set in a mall; and 2) it starts in media res and skips the backstory which I've always thought helped it achieved a higher level of creepiness.
The new Dawn of the Dead will be released next month and, well, I guess I'm somewhat excited. I now know (through the five paragraphs below) that the part of my brain I thought I lost in high school has actually been lying dormant, filled with facts and opinions about zombie films, waiting to rise again.
A zombie movie is essentially a kind of low-brow morality play. Whether it's race relations (Night of the Living Dead), consumer culture (Dawn of the Dead) or man's attempt to control nature (one of the half-sown seeds of 28 Days Later), Romero-school zombie flicks are social commentary.
(And, in fact, the social commentary is what distinguishes Romero's films and their descendants from, say, the Italian gross-out zombie films or Peter Jackson's spoof Braindead/Dead Alive .)
The living dead sub-genre isn't exactly rich with thematic possibilities, so it will be interesting to see what statements, if any, the new DotD filmmakers make. Based on the trailer, it seems like they're playing with some of the zombie movie conventions.
One staple of the genre is the infection of a secondary character whose humanity slowly fades while the remaining characters watch in anguish. 28 Days Later cleverly recasts this cliché--because of the 10 second delay before the newly infected become raging blood-puking monsters, the death is compressed into a single violent scene.
The new Dawn of the Dead goes in a slightly different direction (or so it seems from the trailer) by making the infected character pregnant. I think the movie is navigating in shallow waters here, but it might be an effective twist. After all, what rouses our sympathies more than babies and pregnant women (and puppies)? What better way to draw out the characters' humanity than by giving birth against a backdrop of unrelenting, flesh-rending inhumanity?
Also, there are at least two leading black actors--Mekhi Phifer and Ving Rhames--in DotD. In a zombie movie the black characters survive the longest (cf., the righteous Peter from Dawn of the Dead, the glowering Ben from Night of the Living Dead, the steely Naomi from 28 Days Later) but can two of them escape the mall? I don't think so. My prediction: one's zombie meat, and it isn't Marsellus.
