Actor David Emge, well known to horror fans for playing the role of helicopter pilot Stephen in the 1978 zombie classic Dawn of the Dead, died on Jan. 20 at the age of 77. Emge’s other film credits included the 1976 comedy The Booby Hatch and 1990’s Basket Case 2.
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After serving in the Vietnam War, Emge started his acting career at the Pittsburgh Playhouse and then moved to New York. He was working as a chef when Dawn of the Dead director George Romero cast him as Stephen in his horror film and consumer-satire, a sequel to the filmmaker’s 1968 release Night of the Living Dead.
In Dawn of the Dead, Emge’s character flies himself and three other apocalypse survivors, played by Gaylen Ross, Ken Foree, and Scott Reiniger, to the seeming safety of a mall where they attempt to carry on with their lives as zombies gather outside.
“I loved that movie,” Emge said in a 1979 interview with The Burlington Free Press. “It was filmed outside of Pittsburgh in a nine-week shooting schedule with two weeks off for Christmas. A cold spooky show…Half of it was shot inside the shopping mall. We worked from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. and had free run of the place.”
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By the end of Romero’s movie, Stephen has become one of the undead. For this part of his performance, Emge developed a distinctive lurching walk which would help define the concept of the modern cinematic zombie.
“Being the zombie was something that I could just like, grab onto,” Emge recalled in a documentary about the film. “I sat there for weeks and weeks watching all of these people coming up with ‘their’ zombie. And I’m thinking, what am I gonna do? I had to come up with something that was distinctive enough, so I thought, okay, now, so what happens to this guy? He gets bit in the neck, he’s bit in the leg, he’s shot in the arm, so basically the zombie image came out of the wounds that he received.”
In the years after the film’s successful release, Emge’s blood-drenched, sad-faced zombie would become something of a icon for horror aficionados. The undead Stephen also helped inspire the 2004 horror-comedy Shaun of the Dead whose star and co-writer Simon Pegg saw an image of Emge’s zombie at an impressionably young age in a book called The Encyclopedia of Horror.
“I would stare at the image of David Emge’s zombified flyboy character,” Pegg recalled in his 2011 memoir Nerd Do Well. “The film became something of an obsession for me.”
Filmmaker Ted Geoghegan, whose credits include the horror films We Are Still Here and last year’s Brooklyn 45, is among those who have paid tribute to the late Emge and his work in Dawn of the Dead.
“Dawn of the Dead is one of the best social and commercial commentaries ever set to film,” Geoghegan wrote on X, “and David’s nerve-addled ‘Flyboy’ ties the movie together with heart and humanity.”
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