(Credit: YouTube still)
Having helped pioneer the zombie genre a decade previously with Night of the Living Dead, George A. Romero outdid himself when he returned to the very familiar undead ground for the spiritual sequel Dawn of the Dead in 1978.
In with a strong shout at being named the single greatest zombie flick that’s ever been made, it was a suitably monstrous hit at the box office that openly laughed in the face of the X-rating handed out by the MPAA and the moral panic it incited in various other countries around the world, turning out as one of the most profitable films of all time by earning $66million on a $640,000 budget.
Beyond its engaging characters, spine-tingling terror, and gore-drenched sequences of hungry monsters descending upon a shopping mall for their next tasty morsel of human flesh, Dawn of the Dead offered a biting satirical spin on the concepts of capitalism and consumerism to ensure there was plenty of bite to back up its bark.
After a gruelling fight for survival, the film everybody regards as one of horror’s highest points concludes with Ken Foree’s Peter Washington and Gaylen Ross’ Fran Parker barely escaping by the skin of their teeth, with the remaining survivors battling their way to the roof and escaping in a helicopter. It’s a fist-pumping moment that provides a much-needed relief of the unbearable tension, but it almost didn’t play out that way.
There were no guarantees they got particularly far or survived for very long, considering the chopper was low on fuel and a full-blown zombie apocalypse was happening around them, but there nonetheless remains that shining ray of light for audiences to hope and believe Peter and Fran went on to start a new life somewhere where shuffling hordes weren’t banging on their door.
The original ending was exponentially bleaker, though, and would have ended Dawn of the Dead on the biggest imaginable downer. In the initial draft of the screenplay, Peter and Fran would have resigned themselves to the impossibility of their situation, coming to the realisation that there was no scenario in which they managed to keep their lives intact.
Accepting fate, Peter would have followed through on his internal struggle shown just prior to his ascent to the mall’s roof by shooting himself. Left alone and without a straightforward means of doing the same, Fran would have thrown herself headfirst into the rotating blades of the helicopter to transform herself from prospective zombie food into a splatter of red mist.
That’s about the bleakest thing imaginable and would not just completely alter Dawn of the Dead but ruined it in the eyes of the viewer. It’s one thing to barely survive an onslaught of zombies, but simply giving up and deciding death is the only escape was a real bummer gladly excised from the story by the time cameras started rolling.
