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This book provides a critical examination of George A. Romero’s zombie classic, Dawn of the Dead (1978): the sequel to his genre–defining Night of the Living Dead (1968) and the precursor to Day of the Dead (1985). (This original trilogy would later be followed by another three zombie films, Land of the Dead, 2005; Diary of the Dead, 2007; and Survival of the Dead, 2009.) Despite the director’s embrace of the genre’s gory tropes – exploding heads, flesh eating children, decapitations by helicopter, etc. – this book argues Dawn is substantively more sophisticated and critically nuanced than its cult–status might first suggest. In developing this argument, I consider the film through two key ideas: empathy and decay. Empathy is examined through the figure of the undead, and decay through the architectures of urban deprivation and consumer satisfaction.

A short introduction discusses the film within the political and cinematic contexts of the 1970s. It examines the direction, cinematography, scenography, and complicated production history of Dawn, including the remarkable dedication shown by the cast and crew during a shoot that spanned over two years. Crucially, the introduction frames my use of architectural histories to articulate the larger cultural histories in which Romero’s film participates.

The first chapter, ‘Why Do They Come Here?’, examines the zombie as a figure of pathos. The zombie is the human that is inhuman, the dead that is undead, the other that is ultimately us. While I agree with Slavoj Žižek’s that the ‘return of the undead’ is a ‘fundamental fantasy of contemporary mass culture’, this chapter examines the contextual histories of the zombie, before considering how the living and undead are both subject to what Michel Foucault termed ‘biopolitics’: his conception of how the physical body is conditioned and regulated by larger managerial forces. Denuded of consciousness, the zombie might appear resistant to biopolitical control, however these figures can also be considered as the ultimate result of these regulations. The notion of empathy is also developed through the ideas of substitution and dehumanization in film. Substitution is explored in films such as Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), remade by Philip Kaufman as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), and Bryan Forbes’s The Stepford Wives (1975), in which the human original is replaced by the other–than–human copy. Notions of dehumanization are discussed in reference to the aesthetics of horror. Here, the zombies’ appearance was influenced by Tom Savini’s combat experience in the Vietnam War; a conflict run through the scientific abstractions of data management, metrics, and body counts.

The second chapter, ‘Architectures of the Undead’, examines the uneasy accommodation of the living and the undead. The opening of the film shows police teams clearing an apartment complex, with these scenes clearly referencing the urban slums, inner-city degradation, and public fears of encroaching criminality that marked the era. After the protagonists flee the decaying city of Philadelphia, the remainder of Dawn takes place within the confines of a suburban shopping mall; a vast paradisical interior that offers the fantasy of sating all desires. Dawn was filmed over the course of two years in Monroeville Mall, Pennsylvania. As a form of occupation, the coexistence of the undead and survivors within this interior suggests it is not only the zombies who are undead, but also the architecture and economic systems that produced these accommodations. Filmed as a blatant critique of 1970s consumerism, Dawn of the Dead relies on an architecture that was already outdated (as a form of consumption), providing a remanent of the pleasures and entrapments of these modes of living, while also suggesting the compromises of the after–apocalyptic.