Up until Dawn’s release, it was rare for a horror film to insert such pointed satire while fully delivering on the bloody expectations of its genre. Hippies turned into selfish and hedonistic yuppies, and the progressive and revolutionary-minded Romero turned his wrath toward this hypocrisy by angrily skewering it in 1978’s Dawn of the Dead.

The civil rights part was mostly accidental, after the colorblind Romero and his crew simply thought African-American Duane Jones was the best actor for the leading role, and didn’t change a word of the script to refer to his race.īy the time the late ’70s rolled around, Americans had thrown themselves at the feet of blind consumerism as a last ditch attempt to ignore their recent painful past. The Vietnam allegory was half intentional, half a result of the low budget, as evidenced by the raw docudrama aesthetic. Yes, Night brought us the genesis of the modern zombie and was justly praised for using a horror setting, a genre previously seen as nothing but shock value entertainment, to explore then-current themes like the war in Vietnam and civil rights, but both praiseworthy aspects were as much collateral effect as principal target.

Romero’s Dawn of the Dead was as important to propelling forward the zombie sub-genre, and horror cinema as a whole, as Night of the Living Dead.

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