31 Days, 31 Screams: Day 17 (Dawn Of The Dead)

Brains.

So! All these shambling things running around, trying to kill us. All of our passive enjoyment of watching people get got by the monsters is on full display. We like it when the red water comes out. Eventually we'll confront the slasher and this display of culture, but for now let's go in a different direction, something a bit out of left field. It's time to talk about zombie fiction! I'm not the biggest fan of it, and yet there is a market for it. That is not to say that there aren't pieces of zombie fiction I like or love, but they have to be doing something beyond the base requirements. We'll get to those, but first we have to get at a base. To that end, today I watched George Romero's zombie classic, Dawn Of The Dead! I admit I probably could have dug up the original Night Of The Living Dead on Youtube, since it's public domain and all... but I've had Dawn Of The Dead on my hard drive for three years now and I wanted to get it out of the way. Well, it's out of the way now. So, what have we got here?

Well, a world that's already fucked, for one. The zombies are already here, and they've basically fucked everything up and the country's in a state of martial law. Everyone's yelling at each other in a TV station, there's awful people with guns taking pleasure in being able to finally just shoot other people in the head without repercussion, and oh yeah. Corpses are getting the fuck up and biting people and ripping at their flesh and making the red water come out. In the midst of this we have four people who decide that this shit is fucked and that they're out, escaping in a helicopter for new lands. More spooky zombies come at them in places and get all fucked up but eventually they find an abandoned mall and decide to hunker down in it. This is where we stay for the rest of the movie. Now, to its credit, the abandoned mall is a pretty great setting. I liked seeing all the stores and stuff the place had to offer, and if you had to bunker down someplace during a zombie outbreak, a mall would seem pretty ideal... once you cleaned out all the zombies anyway. Which they actually do! Sure, one of them gets bitten during the process of blocking the zombies from the main entrance, but c'est la vie. He still gets to help out and have fun in the arcade before he turns, so good on him. Over time, the three survivors turn the mall into their own little safe space, even as the world around them is probably utterly fucked. They can manage to hold out there! Then a bunch of bikers break in, loot the place, and ruin everything. Another one dies, and two of them escape in their chopper, roll credits. So that's the movie!

I dunno. It was... well, a zombie movie! I think I've been spoiled by the more clever zombie movies that have come out to be really down with this baseline no-frills approach, but that can't be because even the baseline no-frills slasher movies still crackle with tension and whatnot to keep my attention. Here we have a 140-minute movie where some people run up and down a mall shooting extras in grey facepaint in the head, and sometimes having a spot of trouble with them. The red water is neat, I suppose, because it's a very vibrant red that makes it stand out. Who did that? Tom Savini? Oh, he did the brutal shit in Friday the 13th as well? I wonder if we'll see him and George Romero again. Ah well. This movie was slow for me. The worst kind of slow where I was actively watching the clock, pausing it to check Twitter every half hour or so. I was not engaged at all, not really, because it's a zombie movie. We're all fucked anyway. There's more symbolism to unpack about consumerism and literal zombies wanting nothing more than to get into the mall for reasons unknown to their zombie brains. Also one of the characters says the word "zombie" at some point. I thought that was against the rules. Oh, and that bizarre fucking bit where the bikers start throwing pies into the zombie's faces and spraying them with seltzer! What the FUCK? I don't have anything else. It's a horror classic which inspired many a zombie film, but the underlying message of WHO ARE THE REAL ZOMBIES HERE, SPOILERS IT'S HUMANITY has been hammered to death in most pieces of zombie media so I'm cold on this. Don't worry, we'll get to the ones that I DO like... but for now. Ehh.