Changes in Genre Conventions in Dawn of the Dead

For anyone who has watched a decent number of zombie movies, “Dawn of the Dead” covers some pretty familiar terrain. It follows a group of characters—a couple and two police officers—who are forced to work together to survive the zombie apocalypse. Once these characters get together, they need to find a place to wait out the apocalypse, and to find supplies. Although on the surface this film appears to be a pretty standard zombie movie— and while watching it, it was fairly easy to predict what was going to happen—I think the film diverges from the typical zombie formula in a couple of important ways. I think the film’s tweaks in the normal zombie movie formula in order to critique its materialistic protagonists.

 The first major departure was the amount of money and supplies the protagonists to work with. Usually in zombie films, the characters are caught off guard and have to resort to using whatever they can find to survive. In Walking Dead for example, the protagonist has to resort to using a horse for transportation. In Night of the Living Dead, the protagonists start in a car only to have it overrun by zombies. In this film, the characters start the movie already having their own private helicopter, a form of transportation which conveniently prevents any contact with zombies (besides that one fuel stop, of course). It is abnormal for a zombie film to give its characters such an easy way out of contact with their zombie antagonists, and to remove the immediate tension of looking for a way to escape the zombies.

Despite their advantage in transportation, the protagonists do eventually need to look for supplies. In most zombie films, the process of attaining supplies involves complications and danger. Often, the place with supplies is the hardest place to get to, and is swarming with zombies. In Dawn of the Dead, the characters land on the roof of a mall and almost immediately stumble into a loaded supply room. Boxes of imperishable food literally line the walls of this room, and the characters’ entry to it was unopposed.  This is almost an unbelievably lucky occurrence in a zombie movie. Really, the movie could have ended here. The characters made it to a safe place; they could have hidden out in their conveniently stocked and isolated supply room until was safe to go outside again. But the characters do not see it that way. Instead of staying in the supply room, the characters decide that the superior supplies within the rest of the mall are too good to pass up. Therefore, they deliberately put their lives in danger to get supplies that they do not NEED but WANT.  At this point, it seems that survival is not the goal of the characters. But if survival isn’t their goal, then what is it? It would seem that what they are really after is comfort.

The characters again show their concern with comfort when the group of bikers invades the mall. Although the biker characters are presented unfavorably, I didn’t think it was necessary for the protagonists to confront them. The way I saw it, if they had hidden up by the roof the bikers would have looted the place and left without bothering them. However, the characters (at least the character Stephen) had become so possessive of the mall that they were willing to engage in warfare to keep their abundance of supplies for themselves. Sure, the bikers seemed like really unpleasant people—but it doesn’t reflect well on the protagonists that they have enough supplies for way more than four people, and that they are willing to kill other human beings to maintain ownership of way more supplies than they could ever use.

Overall, I think the film gave the characters these advantages in supplies to critique them. They started with an advantage that most people don’t get in the zombie apocalypse (a helicopter) and when they left, they immediately found a place with virtually unlimited supplies (the mall). Even though they had more things than they needed, they were unwilling to share. Ultimately, they found it necessary to kill people to protect their monopoly on the mall. In the end it was their greed, not the zombies that cause the deaths of two characters. The first man dies after they have unnecessarily gone into the mall for fancier supplies, and the second man dies after he decides that he can’t allow the bikers to share in the mall’s ample resources.