George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead premiered to instant controversy in 1968. It’s safe to assume that this was due to Romero’s unflinching eye for gore effects, but the world was already five years removed from Herschell Gordon Lewis’s envelope-pushing drive-in viscera fest Blood Feast (1963). The true dissension in the public—at least a portion of the public—toward Romero’s film was because of its politics. Night of the Living Dead, the debut feature for Bronx-born Romero was shot in-and-around the blue collar environs of Pittsburgh, where Romero attended film school. The film’s local premiere shocked viewers who were expecting to see a fun horror movie shot by a hometown crew. Romero not only doubled down on the type of gruesome violence that Lewis had pioneered, but added a healthy dose of nihilism and a pervasive layer of left-leaning politics that earned his film as many fans as it did detractors. He continued this with 1978’s Dawn of the Dead, which, like Night of the Living Dead before it, had a Black lead in Ken Foree. In 1985, he closed the original trilogy with the least-discussed and revered of Romero’s initial Dead series: Day of the Dead (1985).
There’s really no connective tissue between the films narratively. They all focus on zombies and a group of humans attempting to stay alive, largely in one space for the duration of the film. Night of the Living Dead spends most of its runtime in a rural farmhouse; Dawn of the Dead, famously, in a shopping mall; and Day of the Dead traps its characters in an underground military bunker in Florida. All of them have a sense of claustrophobia, even Dawn of the Dead, despite the mall being larger than the geographic limitations of the settings featured in the other two films. In contrast to their titles, all three films feel inherently nocturnal. Day of the Dead, regardless of its title, could take place at any time. The windowless, soulless, environment of the underground bunker is the most sterile of the series, feeling suitably post-apocalyptic.
The plot of Day of the Dead is remarkably simple. In it, much of the United States has become overrun with the undead, forcing a group of scientists and military personnel to hunker down in an underground bunker in Florida. The scientists pass time performing medical tests on the undead, going so far as to teach them to talk, until the military discover that some of their test subjects are their own dead soldiers. This, naturally, causes a rift between the two parties and they eventually have to fight for themselves when the undead above gain entry to the bunker below. As with the two films before it, Romero doesn’t shy from presenting his politics. It’s easy to glean that Romero, and subsequently the film, is on the side of science and humanizing the undead. The military are portrayed as stubborn, volatile, and against progress.
Day of the Dead was not well received in 1985 and it’s not hard to see why. Romero forgoes the crowd-pleasing action of the second film and much of its satire for something much more dour. If anything, the film is more thematically similar to Night of the Living Dead, coasting on nihilism punctuated by consistently impressive, albeit nauseating gore effects executed by Tom Savini. It feels like a post-apocalyptic chamber drama masquerading as a horror movie. The film’s climax is expectedly chaotic and provides fans of the genre with what they came for, but Romero takes his time getting there, patiently filling much of the film’s 100-minute runtime with prolonged scenes of dialogue. This is hardly to the film’s detriment, and it’s a testament to Romero as both a writer and director that the film works as well as it does while avoiding the pitfalls of fan service and genre conventions. Day of the Dead is a zombie movie where the zombies themselves feel inconsequential. In Romero’s world, it was always the humans that were the problem.
Day of the Dead screens tonight, September 13, at Nitehawk Williamsburg on 35mm as part of the series “Midnite Movies.”
