Word: dawn
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...throw up just before a test, then spend four days in the bathroom with diarrhea waiting for your score," said a Columbia senior. Others wake up before dawn in cold sweats or were seized with hallucinations. One member of Harvard's class of 1978 tossed on his bed all night before a math final, imagining himself as King Richard in Ivanhoe, doomed to a perpetual spear-throwing contest in which he always had to outdistance his opponents or suffer death...
...tone of Dawn is wildly different from Romero's earlier film, which was stark, claustrophobic, strewn with unintentional laughs, and genuinely funny. The gore and quick cutting help provide the scares, but the heavy use of shopping mall Muzak and color (the original was in black and white) buffer the horror and amplify the irony. It's also shockingly well-directed, blazingly edited (also by Romero), well-written (by Romero), and even well-acted (not by Romero)! The music editing, color, and jerky movements of the living dead combine to create a weird cinematic tour de force...
...first film, you may remember, the newly dead began coming back to life and feeding on the living. (Nobody knows why, although one of Dawn's characters offers this explanation: "My grandfather used to tell us, 'When there's no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the earth'"). If a zombie doesn't completely consume someone, that person also comes back to life and eats flesh. You can permanently kill them by shooting them or bashing them in the head, but since they multiply rather fast, well--one way or another, they're gonna find you, they...
...much criticized use of gore in Dawn of the Dead actually points up a primary virtue of horror films. Everytime somebody blasts off the side of a zombie's head, audiences cheer. Why shouldn't they? What else can you do to flesh-eating zombies? Monster movies reduce every conflict to black vs. white, good vs. evil--that's the point. But they're fantasies--they invoke the supernatural; they don't pretend that that's how it is in real life, the way John Wayne or Clint Eastwood movies do. You can't rehabilitate the alien or the zombies...
...cheering this before? Weren't we getting the same kick out of vicariously mauling zombies? Are we any better than this low-life scum? Hmmm..." That's called, "the shock of recognition" and I'm amazed to be writing about it in connection with a film called Dawn of the Dead. It's easily one of the year's best movies horror or otherwise...