George Romero's Dawn of the Dead

George Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead” came out in 1978. The movie follows four people who fly to a mall and reside within it during a zombie outbreak. While the people are at the mall they take whatever they want or need from the stores and seem to have unlimited resources. The people face some challenges such as getting around the mall with all the undead and a group of bikers that come and ransack the mall. By the end of the movie they are down to only two people and it ends on a slightly higher note than that of “Night of the Living Dead” with them escaping in the helicopter.
This film relates a lot to what we have been talking about in class lately. The story shows the conspicuous consumption with both the zombies and normal people. The normal people are continuously getting whatever they want or need. The bikers show this extremely well by just showing up and grabbing whatever they want. The zombies are also consistently trying to get the four people and when the bikers show up the zombies make sure to capitalize on their appearance. Matthew Walker showed a lot of good points in his article “When There’s No More Room in Hell, The Dead will Shop the Earth” which we talked about earlier. He discussed how the people used the mall not only to get good but also as a sanctuary. The line from the movie which was said by Fly Boy when asked why the zombies are showing up at the mall, “Some kind of instinct. Memory, of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.” shows a good example of how the people turn into automatons and the zombies just pick up where they left off.
The zombies in the film are also a lot like the zombies in Romero’s other films in which they are pretty much slow moving automatons. Tom Savini did the make up for this film in addition to doing stunts and starring as the second in command biker. He helped give the zombies and gore their now well known looks.