Dawn of the Dead
Zack Snyder

Graham Barnfield

George Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978) made a profound impact on me as a teenager.

An early dose of the frighteners came from seeing it as half of a pirate video double bill with An Officer and a Gentleman (see From One Extreme to Another), through which I also initiated myself into the process of 'courting'. (Who knows what erstwhile date Sharon Barkshire from class 2R made of this gruesome movie? No, we're not still together…). Here was a movie that got under my skin and got me thinking about what to do if Sharon and I were placed in a similar situation to that of the cast, ie surrounded by zombies in a shopping centre.

A real and more pressing threat was the nationwide campaign against such 'video nasties' - led in part by TV show Nationwide - which coincided with the illicit screening. The gross distortion and outright lies used to ban these genre flicks kept Dawn close to my heart. My teenage annoyance at the film's treatment is revived from time to time, not least when terrestrial broadcasters screen heavily cut versions, like when the shot zombie children were excised by the BBC in the aftermath of the Dunblane massacre.

Following the recent remakes of The Ring and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, news of an impending Hollywood 'reimagining' of Dawn of the Dead was bound to trouble my soft spot for the film. The charm of two thirds of Romero's trilogy, commencing with Night of the Living Dead, stems from his creative control. By moving from industrial filmmaking to preparing horror features for the college/grindhouse/super-16mm circuit, the auteur imposed his distinctive vision on a range of increasingly gruesome works. So it seemed unlikely to me that a mainstream studio picture could follow in Romero's tracks.

The good news is that Dawn of the Dead (2004) is a good deal better than it could have been. Ana (Sarah Polley) and Kenneth (Ving Rhames) are likeable leads, even if the rest of the cast seem a bit too perfunctory in their role as zombie food. And the opening 10 minutes, in which we move from Ana ignoring afternoon indicators that something has gone awry to a full-blown public emergency, is a masterclass in effective storytelling. A suburban street in Everett, Wisconsin sees neighbours either shooting or eating each other amid realistic traffic chaos, before the movie lurches straight into Johnny Cash's apocalyptic 'The Man Comes Around' and some cunningly edited archive footage. It's as if the first 27 days of 28 Days Later (2002) had been shot on film and were now being shown. We go from scenes of domestic bliss to Ana's husband Luis (Justin Louis) trying to devour her.

28 Days Later has been a real influence on the remake, to the point where some wags have dubbed it '29 Days Later'. Danny Boyle's success has indicated that once again the commercial climate is amenable to zombies. Boyle accelerated the pace of the cannibalistic undead, showing them running down the street like Olympic athletes, and this special effect is used to great effect here. Boyle replaced the radioactive origins of the living dead with some biological affliction, signified by grim images of jostling cells. And herein lies the weird circularity of the whole set-up: ignoring a plethora of dubious spin-offs, it's clear that the Romero Living Dead trilogy was the basis for 28 Days Later. Now we see a major remake of a Romero genre classic which would be unthinkable without 28 Days Later to pave the way.

Pre-Video Recordings Act such circularity was made explicit was by hack directors like Joe D'Amato, whose Anthropophagus: The Beast (1980) climaxes in the protagonist (played by George Eastman) eating his own entrails. (Eastman and D'Amato's subsequent collaboration, Absurd (1982), begins with a regenerative undead serial killer, again played by Eastman, being disembowelled in an almost symmetrical scene, picking up where he left off before.) Both scenes richly symbolise too many Hollywood horror films: whether Scream-themed pastiches of pastiches or the latest zombie movies, many seem to prefer feasting on the genre's own innards to real innovation.

Comparisons between the original Dawn and its 2004 remake have flowed thick and fast, almost as fast as the latter's ascent to the top of the US box office charts. The critics have generally found in favour of the original. There are plenty of reasons for doing this, such as Romero's character development, showing a gradual breakdown among characters who come to despise the luxury of being locked in a shopping mall (admittedly with the zombies on the outside). Romero's location allowed to ridicule consumerism - a point more daring in the late 1970s than today - and crank up the sheer tension involved in watching his protagonists prepare meticulously to make the mall inhabitable and zombie-proof.

Feature debutant Snyder's crew inherit a mall that seems to have been constructed more for zombie resistance than retail, as if written into the building regulations. Snyder's initial carnage and depopulation at ground zero is meticulously timed, but God knows how much time has passed during the remainder of the new Dawn. When the handful of survivors run out of lemon syrup for cocktails in the mall, the decision to escape is made. Meanwhile gun nut Andy (Bruce Bohne), trapped on another roof and surrounded by the living dead, runs out of food entirely. So clunky is the storytelling at this point that days, weeks or months could have passed before the fateful decision to escape is made. (Incidentally, the escape attempt leads to some riffing on Lucio Fulci's Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979), but to say more would be to give away the ending.)

Despite these comments, fans of the original should recognise that comparisons are daft. Although the title and the shopping mall concept remain the same, this is basically a futuristic war film. The script could be just as easily retooled to show aliens or androids getting blown away. Romero purists like me shouldn't get our shrouds in a twist - after all, most punters propelling the new version to the top of the US box office weren't born when the original first appeared. In fact, apparently the cameos by original cast members Tom Savini, Ken Foree and Scott Reiniger need a note in the closing credits to explain just who they are.

Finally, it is refreshing to see a zombie action flick with none of the raging misanthropy of 28 Days Later; apart from the objectionable yuppie Steve (Ty Burrell), you never get the sense that the zombies' victims were asking for it. Shedding the anti-consumer satire only reinforces this positive trait. More disturbing is the eerie similar between the 'contagion' parts of this movie and the endless daft TV programmes about hypothetical calamities, from the BBC's smallpox docudrama to its current frightfest If.... Now there's a truly undead genre, slowly digesting its own entrails.

Graham Barnfield's website is at www.emalone.net/gb_cv.htm.