Dawn Of The Dead 1979 - Image 3 Analysis

This is the last scene of the movie where we’re left with a blonde final girl and a black male hero, back in the 1970s the majority of American people (especially in the South, where Dawn of the Dead (DOTD) was likely to be shown in drive-ins) was still racist, only a minority of people was coming to terms with black people.

Romero, through bad experiences himself as a half-Cuban man, loathed racism. He found racism horrible and distasteful, which is why his films look at race a lot; he was trying to express how atrocious it was.

In terms of DOTD, he challenged conventions through having a black male hero, Peter, rather than the white Stephen or Roger. Subsequently, at the time of the film release, it caused a lot of uproar; a lot of people didn’t like the fact that the male hero in the film was black but this is what Romero wanted because his films reflect his auteur influence; his own personal creative vision. This is written about by Andrew Sarris’ in his essay “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962” where he argued that by identifying the best directors and decoding their cinematic style would be the best way to analyse films. This works very well in regards to Romero’s films. In addition to this, a blonde haired woman who has sex in a horror movie is usually the female victim. However, Romero has characterised her to be the final girl, again testing horror's conventions.

This scene is also interesting because we have a hint of an interracial relationship. The open ended narrative finishes with Fran and Peter being the only survivors. Subsequently, this further links to the uproar because there was a mass of racism back in the 1970s and interracial relationships were frowned upon so this would have been extremely shocking to see in a film. This reflects Janet Staiger’s Audience Theory (outlined in her 1990 book “Understanding Films”), were she believes that to understand a film, you must understand the context of when the film was made, and this Dawn of the Dead caused stronger reactions  due to the racist era in which it was created.