“TV says you gotta shoot ’em in the head.”
Welcome to our new October feature, 31 Days of Fright, wherein I will attempt to watch a horror movie every day for the month of October and then write about it. This is a completely original idea that has never been done by any other website or podcast. (Also, the name should be considered tentative; I asked my buddies for suggestions on what to name this feature, and they came back with 31 Days of Fright, Cocktober, and Spooky Cinema Nonstop 666 Fest, so for now we’re sticking with 31 Days of Fright). We kick things off with Zack Snyder’s 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead.
Very few directors have seen their careers take off while the opinion of them plummets. Zack Snyder might be the best, if not only, example. As films like Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice produce increasingly low returns, Snyder is somehow able to keep indulging his baser artistic tendencies (for comparison, when M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening and Lady in the Water flopped, he was sent to director jail and used as a hired gun on The Last Airbender and After Earth). Which is why Dawn of the Dead, Snyder’s first film, can feel paradoxically like a breath of fresh air. Put at the helm of a remake, that most toxically regarded of Hollywood ideas, Snyder had to do little more than point the camera and say “Action.” So it’s remarkable that the beginning of Dawn feels so self-assured.
There is precious little setup to the film, other than the introduction of our heroine, Anna (Sarah Polley), and the establishment of her profession, which is a nurse, because in action or horror films, women can only be nurses or teachers. But we start in the middle of the outbreak, which Snyder informs of us through uncharacteristic subtlety, with doctors and nurses referencing bite victims in the ICU. Then things go to hell really quickly – impressively so. Anna’s neighbor’s daughter gets turned (which we don’t see), then turns her husband. Anna escapes, but just barely, and her escape from suburbia is such an instantly iconic sequence that it was parodied years later in the classic South Park episode “Night of the Living Homeless.”
You all know the basics of George A. Romeros’ Dawn of the Dead: survivors hole up in a shopping mall, zombies try relentlessly to get in, ham-fisted commentary on consumerism ensues. Snyder eschews a lot of that, either intentionally or because of budget constraints, and much of his version of Dawn plays out through interpersonal drama, like a season-long arc on The Walking Dead condensed into 110 minutes.
Unfortunately, the cast is overstuffed, and at times underqualified, and a lot of the subplots play out as vignettes. Andre (Mekhi Phifer) and Luda (Inna Korobkina), for instance, are basically in their own film, a lot of which might have actually been interesting to see, but Snyder is more concerned with racing to the finish line with them, and we all know what that means: zombie baby. Certain characters just never click, but are there just as archetypes: there’s the hot girl (Kim Poirier as Monica), the trucker (Boyd Banks as Tucker), the father who gets tragically bitten (Matt Frewer’s Frank, who does a lot with very little). The only one of these eventual dead bodies who really registers is R.D. Reid as Glen, a man coming to terms with his sexuality in the midst of the apocalypse, another story too interesting for Snyder to spend much time with.
Thankfully, the main cast is up to the task of carrying the film. Polley is terrific as Anna; she spends more time behind the camera these days, as the director of films like Away From Her and Take This Waltz, but Polley is engaging, tough, and easy to root for. She’s a surprising choice for a genre film, and she does good work here. Jake Weber, as Michael, doesn’t fare as well. He has a decent amount of screen presence, but he’s undone by how uninterested the script seems in him. Ving Rhames, as Kenneth, doesn’t get much heavy lifting to do, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, because Rhames has never been the most expressive actor on the planet (which actually helped in movies like Pulp Fiction and Dark Blue). That said, Kenneth’s friendship with Andy (Bruce Bohne), a gun shop owner camped out on his roof across the street from the mall, is one of Dawn‘s most innovative, and well-executed, ideas.
There are two genuinely great performances here, though. The first is Michael Kelly (who finally found a role suited to his particular brand of menace on House of Cards) as security guard C.J., who rocks a sweet handlebar mustache and a misplaced sense of authority. (At one point he admonishes the group for stealing.) The other is a pre-Modern Family Ty Burrell, as Steve, the group’s resident douchebag. (For a long time I only knew Burrell as “the douche from Dawn of the Dead.”) The funny thing, rewatching Dawn in my late twenties makes me sympathize with and understand Steve more, which is…off-putting. But Burrell twists his natural charm, downplays his innate goofiness, and delivers a funny, scabrous portrayal of selfishness existing even at the end of days.
You can start to see bits and pieces of current-day Snyder emerging here. You get a hint of his eclectic, idiosyncratic musical taste through the use of Johnny Cash’s “The Man Comes Around” during the opening credits, and later with the use of Richard Cheese’s lounge lizard cover of Disturbed’s “Down With the Sickness.” (This practice would arguably reach its nadir with the “Hallelujah” scene in Watchmen.) And you see his hard-on for slow motion emerging – seriously, how many times do we need to see a smoking shell casing tumble to the ground? A million? Let’s go with a million.
Dawn of the Dead is the rare film that could have benefited from being a six-hour miniseries (the other is World War Z, which should have hewed closer to its source material’s structure, and also been a ten-hour series on HBO). Too much happens off screen, much of it very important. Occasionally this can work, like in the film’s tensest sequence, when the group tries to get supplies to Andy, only to watch and hear him turn into a zombie in real time. Other things we really needed to see, like C.J. transforming from cantankerous alpha male into self-sacrificing team player.
Overall, Dawn of the Dead stands up twelve years later as one of the better remakes ushered into theaters. You can see Snyder trying to hone his aesthetic, and he’s comfortable telling a story of a few people against impossible odds (which he would do again a few years later with 300, probably his best overall film). Looking at Snyder’s career, Dawn is best viewed almost anthropologically, free as it is from the hacky bells and whistles, and overreliance on dour bombast, that has become one of his trademarks. Dawn of the Dead is solid genre entertainment, and it succeeds because it rarely tries to be anything else.
Here’s the schedule for the rest of the month. Depending on availability, these are all subject to change.
10/1: Dawn of the Dead (2004)
10/2: The Exorcist
10/3: Pontypool
10/4: Hocus Pocus
10/5: The Orphanage
10/6: Rosemary’s Baby
10/7: Alien
10/8: Scream series
10/9: Scream series
10/10: Cujo
10/11: The Cabin in the Woods
10/12: Pulse
10/13: The Babadook
10/14: Friday the 13th
10/15: The Last House on the Left (both versions)
10/16: The Thing (both versions)
10/17: Little Shop of Horrors
10/18: Hush
10/19: Silent Hill
10/20: The Shining
10/21: Funny Games (2007)
10/22: Evil Dead series
10/23: Evil Dead series
10/24: The Mist
10/25: The Ninth Gate
10/26: The Fly
10/27: A Nightmare on Elm Street
10/28: The Nightmare Before Christmas
10/29: 28 Days Later/28 Weeks Later
10/30: It
10/31: Halloween (either version)
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