“This place is a fourteen mile tombstone. With an epitaph
that nobody is going to bother to read.”
In many ways Day Of The Dead remains the odd man out of the
four films that make up the main of Romero’s Dead Teratology. Neither as
successful and iconic as Night Of The Living Dead or Dawn Of The Dead, nor as
passionately defended by its apologists as Land Of Dead. In a lot of ways it’s
understandable. Despite the many treats it has for genre fans, including Tom
Savini’s career best makeup and a sense of ambition that is truly impressive,
Day Of The Dead is an abrasive film, slow paced, claustrophobic, filled with
people who are difficult to like. And while its certainly feels allegorical, it
doesn’t break down as neatly into metaphor as Dawn or Night. Yet it is these
very elements that arguably make Day Of The Dead the ultimate expression of the
Apocalypse through dysfunction that Romero has spent his entire career making
movies about.
Day Of The Dead takes place in a
small military outpost somewhere on the Florida coast. The timeline is much
further along than it was in either of the previous Dead films (Romero’s
original script places it at five years after Night. But the film itself gives
no specific date). At this point society hasn’t just collapsed, it has
imploded. The survivors the film follows, a mix of soldiers and scientists,
divide their time between fruitless experiments and tentative searches for
other living people. Though based on the glimpses of the outside world we get,
a brief detour in a clearly abandoned city, it’s all too clear that these might
truly be the last people on Earth. As their numbers dwindle infighting
increases. The survivors burrow further and further into their respective
factions as the threat of all out war between the last of the living becomes
more and more likely.
When dealing with Day Of The Dead
it is important to keep in mind that it is, to some extent, a compromised film.
The film we have is the result of a rushed rewrite that Romero was forced to
perform when the bulk of his financing abruptly fell through. Romero’s original
script for Day Of The Dead was much more ambitious. Much closer in terms of
scale, narrative and theme to Romero’s later Land Of The Dead. It followed a
crew of scavengers who stumble across a fortified tropical island that has
grown a triangular society similar to the one in Land. Divided between it’s
decadent upper class “country club” boosters, their military enforcers, and the
lower dregs of society who are literally used as food, fuel for scientists
experiments to condition the zombies and are themselves distracted with heaping
qualities of drugs, sex and violence.
It’s an interesting, ambitious
film. In terms of scope it’s massive, as large a leap in scale from Dawn Of The
Dead as Dawn is from Night. In some ways it’s even more ambitious than Land
ended up being. Clearly the collapse of the project hurt Romero. He’s been
working in images, concepts and even entire scenes from the film in all three
of the zombie films he’s made since.
It’s interesting to watch Day Of The Dead in wake of reading
the script as Romero did work in images, set pieces and even entire characters
into the new framework but all are presented in completely different context.
What he delivered in its stead is this claustrophobic exceedingly nasty little
movie, as much about mental apocalypse as physical. The meltdowns inside the
characters own minds as well as the world at large.Where the original is epic, Day is
almost intimate (Probably the only zombie film you could stage as a one act play), where Romero’s original script is unusually optimistic, a definite end
point for his trilogy, the Day we ended up with is a bitter film, while
Romero’s script has a much clearer brand of class commentary, the Day we end up
with is a film uneasy about attempting to give any answers.
If its all the same to you, I would rather give the
sociological subtext of the film a fairly wide berth. Partially because Night,
Dawn and Land and even the woeful Diary Of The Dead have already been so
thoroughly dissected in that regard that it seems a shame to turn to scalpel on
the only Romero film that has some level of mystique left, and reduce it to
something akin to the pulsing forebrain that Dr. Frankenstein turns Major
Anderson into. All its inner workings laid bare for the world to see. Suffice
it to say that Romero is a social horror filmmaker if there ever was one. No
that doesn’t go far enough, he is perhaps the social horror filmmaker of the
last half century. Not just in his zombie films either. The Crazies is a fine
piece of military paranoia, Martin an underclass Vampire film, his underrated
Season Of The Witch as much a horror film of Women’s Lib as The Stepford Wives
or Repulsion. Day is no exception; I will merely point to the sheer
satisfaction, if not relief, that Romero exhibits when this last vestige of
cold war power comes to its bloody end. It’s the same sort of relief that one
feels when an abscessed tooth is pulled; the spectacle of a bad thing coming to
a bad end.
From the Kubrickian opening shot Day reveals its intentions
to be an archer more difficult movie than either of its predecessors. The film
segways from the dream sequence, to a lone scene set in the outside world, a
deserted city that has been claimed by the walking dead and is one of the most
impressive sequences in a zombie film, showcasing Savini’s makeup, which as I
mentioned before is career best. Finding no survivors, the group retreats back
to the underground military base where they are stationed and descend below,
where they will remain for the entire rest of the film.
A word on the environment as it is
one of the most indelible I’ve ever seen in a horror film, right up with
Stanley Kubrick’s Overlook and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s Sawyer house. A gift for establishing a sense of
place has always been one of Romero’s skills. But the military base in Day is
neither the intimate farmhouse of Night, nor almost homey environment that the
survivors in Dawn make the mall. The cavernous space in Day is vast and
utilitarian. An echoing, impersonal, white plaster and linoleum chamber of
horrors. An environment that
manages to simultaneously look like a place that could legitimately survive the
apocalypse and a place that would make those who survived there wonder why they
bothered. When we have a brief interlude in the trailer where the two
helicopter pilots who become our heroes in the back half of the film live, the
viewer almost has to breath a sigh of relief. It’s the only environment we’ve
seen in the film where it looks like people could stand to exxist.
Psychologically imploding under the tension and the very
idea of being the last people on Earth, the ever decreasing population of
scientists and soldiers at the center of Day Of The Dead make the infamously
dysfunctional batch in Night Of The Living Dead look like The A-Team. The one
party lead by the psychotic Captain Rhodes, the other by Doctor “Frankenstein”
Logan who has clearly gone around the bend. All of Romero’s Dead films are
about people’s intrinsic inability to cooperate. Though Zombies are a
formidable threat they are a manageable one. The characters in his films would
all have been able to survive “if-“. It’s that “if” that is the key word. If
they would stop jockeying for position on who was in control of the house. If
they didn’t devolve into scavengers, or go into the ghetto guns blazing. If the
entitlement of the haves wasn’t such potent fuel for the resentment of the have
nots. If they weren’t so caught up making a document that no one would see. If
long standing family feuds didn’t get in the way of cooperation.
In each of Romero’s films there is
a pattern. An initial outbreak of chaos, followed by a briefly achieved stasis
(The Farm House, The Mall, The Base, Fiddler’s Green, The RV) which turns out
to be unsustainable simply because his characters cannot work together. They
react to each other with suspicion, fear, and act on their worst impulses. The
thing that makes Romero’s best films so frightening is the knowledge that the
living dead are merely exacerbating things; the core of what he’s showing us is
our day to day life.
In Day we are given the ultimate
stasis and the ultimate collapse. The difference this time out is that Romero
clearly sees collapse as the preferable option. The two camps represented by
Frankenstein and Rhodes are equally rotten. Rhodes is a fascist bully, but he’s
right that Frankenstein’s experiments are a waste. Not only is Frankenstein’s
method’s morally reprehensible, what is even worse is that his plan is wildly
impractical.
Sure after months of work in isolation Frankenstein can
produce a Bub, the docile trained zombie who is easily the most popular and iconic
aspect of Day Of The Dead. But Frankenstein himself delivered a rather striking
speech about the numbers of the dead. What does he plan to do? Isolate and
condition them one by one? The closest the film offers to something even
approaching a moral choice is the idea of turning your back on the whole mess
during John’s, the helicopter pilot, speech in the trailer
Day Of The Dead may have ended up smaller in scope than
Romero originally intended but it is ultimately no smaller in ambition. In it
Romero does what he had been threatening to do for two films and takes us to
the ultimate end of our world. And the most subversive thing about it is when
he arrives there; he breathes a deep sigh that sounds very much like one of relief.
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