Film maker George A Romero had made two stand-alone Zombie flicks – Night of The Living Dead and Dawn of The Dead – both genre setting and crown jewels in the contemporary horror category. Such was the caustic wit and satirical brilliance of Dawn of The Dead that Romero seemingly had the last word in Zombie flicks but by 1985 he finished the trilogy.
Never using recurring characters, the threat remains the same and apparently is much worse since civilisation – or at least North America – is in meltdown. The Zombies are now the majority and the human population is seriously under threat. Dr Sarah Bowman (Lori Cardille) and her team take a helicopter from their underground base in the Everglades to a nearby town to discover no human life but a lot of zombies and quickly depart.
Returning to their base, with previous commander of the operation Major Cooper having died means that the nasty Captain Rhodes (Joseph Pilato) has taken over and all hell breaks loose.
It is filmed both stylishly and sharply but there is a lack of humour – the sardonic witticism of Dawn was what punctuated it – yet one senses that is deliberate because Romero sees this world as hopeless and lacking humanity. Whereas Dawn celebrated all that is human, the protagonists here are whittled down to their most innate instinct – to survive.
Indeed, while the shopping mall of Dawn was the backdrop, a macabre fun palace, here the underground bunker conjures up allusions of apocalypse or an Orwellian room without windows. They are in a metaphoric Hell.
It is difficult not to keep drawing parallels with Dawn. While that film parodied the Zombies with the living mostly in control, in Day the scary aspect of this dystopia is that the humans are horribly divided and, as a consequence, the Zombies – like a cancer – take over.
The guts and gore are plentiful, it’s probably more violent than previous movies although Romero dissects the human villains of the piece. There’s also the monstrous sub-plot of the mad Dr Logan experimenting with the Zombies and human remains to create the unpredictable Bob who eventually runs riot with a gun at the climax. Like consumerism was under consideration by Romero in the previous movie, here vivisection is weighed up as his own Frankenstein’s monster is symbolic of their jeopardy and attempt to control and manipulate the zombies.
Many believe it was the ultimate Video Nasty of the 1980’s in that it was neglected in the cinemas but prospered in the rental video market amongst a younger generation. Either way, while firmly rooted in that decade, the key messages about communication, democracy and ethics remain the same. Romero’s underground hell-hole lacks all of them, but the end makes for a nice one for the good guys as Sarah awakes from a dream to find herself on a desert island with her friends. The ambiguity of the climax sounds a warning shot about what could happen but, fortunately for these protagonists, they are returned from Hell to Heaven in an instant.
From the civil rights movement to racism, from misogyny to anarchy, from capitalism to atomic paranoia, George A Romero’s three ‘dead’ Zombie films set down the marker for a sub-genre in the horror category. Day of the Dead rounds off the trilogy well and, like its predecessor, can be appreciated on several levels with the writer and director keeping several plates spinning including that of Sarah’s struggle with the prominent toxic masculinity in the troop they share the compound with.
Day of the Dead might not be as wry and surreal or absurd than Dawn of the Dead and is undoubtedly darker and less camp but that doesn’t make it any less fascinating or impactful. To the extent there is more here for a wider audience and plenty of food for thought.
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