Has it really been 30 years since George A. Romero, Pittsburgh’s slyly subversive godfather of the politically and socially subtextural horror film, taught legions of unsuspecting filmgoers to love the maul but loathe the mall via his taboo-devouring masterpiece Dawn of the Dead? Amazingly, yeah, it has, and to celebrate the occasion the Alamo Drafthouse’s Rolling Roadshow, in conjunction with Horrorhound Weekend and enough shriek-show luminaries to gag Tom Savini, are staging a once-in-a-deathtime screening of Dawn… at the original shooting ‘n’ maiming location, the legendary Monroeville Mall, on Saturday, June 21. For fans of the film — and apart from Chron film editor Kimberley Jones and my mom, who isn’t? — this is likely to be Heaven (or is that Hell?) on earth. Whichever. All we can say is we’re ticked off they didn’t do this way back when we actually lived in the area. Of course, we were, like, ten years old, but still.
We vividly recall seeing the above 1978 television spot broadcast on New York’s WPIX-TV. In fact, that final shot of the zombie hoards busting through the elevator doors to take a bite out of Flyboy severely fucked with out pre-teen psyche and kept us out of the ‘vators and sticking to the (relatively) undead-free safety of escalators at least until puberty finally hit. It didn’t help matters, either, that our wacky Jewish grandfather worked in a mall with a clock-tower almost exactly like the one seen in Dawn… and would terrify us by removing his dentures and snapping them at our horrified face. Lotsa yuks, Papa. Thanks for the memories.
It wasn’t until we moved to the Texas panhandle in 1980 that we finally got to see Romero’s gutsy, anti-consumerist freakout in all its uncut, midnight movie glory. The local Mann Cinemas fourplex regularly screened Dawn… to a uniformly drunk, stoned, and astonishingly vocal weekend audience comprised mostly of vaguely racist rednecks — who would hoot ‘n’ holler every time the film’s African-American SWAT hero, played by David Emge, appeared onscreen — and our gang of misfit proto-geeks, and we must have seen it at least 15 times before moving on to Heavy Metal and Das Boot. Go figure. Bottom line: George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead warped us to the core way back when, and last weekend’s DVD double-bill of that and the director’s recent, equally disturbing Diary of the Dead proved to us, yet again, that Romero (and that godforsaken mall) is an American institution. Here’s blood in your eye!
This article appears in May 30 • 2008.