George Romero’s best zombie movie, Day of the Dead, hits even harder today
No director has done more to define a genre than George A. Romero with zombie flicks. Without the groundbreaking, lo-fi chills of Night of the Living Dead or the high-octane, satirical thrills of Dawn of the Dead, zombie fans wouldn’t have the likes of The Walking Dead,Army of the Dead, or the seemingly endless horde of zombie thrillers to choose from. But in 1985, Romero’s true opus was rejected by critics and audiences alike. That movie was Day of the Dead, a grim post-apocalyptic parable whose politically charged subject matter and focus on ensemble drama may have alienated the escapist-seeking audiences of the ’80s, but makes it a perfect zombie tale in the age of elevated horror.
Day of the Dead centers on a team of military and scientific personnel sheltering in an underground bunker to survive the zombie outbreak. As the scientific team experiments on undead subjects to finalize a cure, tensions rise between them and the hostile soldiers led by the power-mad Captain Rhodes, reaching critical mass when the survivors learn the secret behind the lead scientist’s experiments. But those tensions reside primarily within the human factions, rather than the human-versus-zombie conflicts viewers had come to expect from the genre. Sure, Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead excelled because of their depictions of human struggles as much as for their jaw-dropping gore, but Day of the Dead takes it to the next level, playing out as a taut political thriller within the apocalyptic backdrop.
While many moviegoers at the time weren’t impressed with the film’s emphasis on human drama rather than zombie carnage (critic Janet Maslin noted that “a lot of [the film] is devoted to windy argument”), Day of the Dead is
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