Dawn of the Dead had an alternate ending that’s… | Little White Lies

Dawn of the Dead had an alter­nate end­ing that’s even bleak­er than the original

01 Sep 2018

Words by Justine Smith

A group of people making exaggerated facial expressions and hand gestures, with intense, almost alarming, expressions on their faces.
A group of people making exaggerated facial expressions and hand gestures, with intense, almost alarming, expressions on their faces.
George A Romero orig­i­nal­ly had a dif­fer­ent fate in store for the pro­tag­o­nists of his zom­bie classic.

In 1968, George A Romero ush­ered in a new kind of zom­bie with Night of the Liv­ing Dead. On an iso­lat­ed farm in rur­al Penn­syl­va­nia, char­ac­ters have found refuge in a barn but can­not agree on the way to sur­vive against the hun­gry undead. Ben, a black man, is the most capa­ble – but racial ten­sions ice his lead­er­ship. As he sur­vives to the end, the arriv­ing police-force mis­take him for a ghoul, shoot­ing him in the head. In images evok­ing lynch­ings, his body is dragged onto a fire as the cred­its roll.

A decade lat­er, Romero released Dawn of the Dead, which turns 40 this year. With the images of zom­bies sway­ing com­i­cal­ly to muzak, the film is often referred to as an alle­go­ry about con­sumer cul­ture, but its ear­ly sequences, as a police force open indis­crim­i­nate fire on res­i­dents of a hous­ing project, digs even deep­er. Con­sumerism is not just a numb­ing force but a tool in com­pla­cen­cy. It is not con­sump­tion, per say, that has crowd­ed the bow­els of hell but the bro­ken sys­tems that per­pet­u­ate vio­lence and apathy.

The film instant­ly achieved icon­ic sta­tus with­in the hor­ror genre, but you may not be aware that Romero wrote an alter­nate end­ing. Where the final cut has Peter and Francine fly­ing away on a heli­copter towards an uncer­tain future, in the work­ing script their fate was sig­nif­i­cant­ly bleak­er. Okay, so the ver­sion that made it to screen is hard­ly the feel-good end­ing of the year, but there is an inkling of hope that the pair might find a new refuge. They’ve sur­vived the first chap­ter of the apoc­a­lypse – maybe they’ll sur­vive another.

In the work­ing script, things pan out in famil­iar fash­ion as Francine, Stephen and Peter make their way to the roof. Stephen becomes a zom­bie and Peter shoots him in the head. Then comes the moment where things diverge. As Francine and Peter are sep­a­rat­ed, she makes her way to the roof and he locks him­self in a room, and from the out­side, we hear a gun­shot – the zom­bies crash in, we under­stand that Peter has killed him­self. On the roof, Francine has start­ed up the heli­copter. Zom­bies break their way through the sky­light and advance, in the work­ing script, it says:

Fran steps out onto the run­ning board; the crea­tures very close now. She crouch­es, watch­ing for a moment, then looks up at the spin­ning blades. She stands straight up, dri­ving her head into the spin­ning blades. A head­less form falls to the roof. The Zom­bies advance.’

The film’s cred­its scrawl up, the helicopter’s engine sput­ters and dies. Even if they were to escape, they would have nev­er made it more than a few feet before dying in a fiery blaze.

Spe­cial effects design­er and make­up artist Tom Savi­ni has argued that Romero shot the so-called sui­cide end­ing.” The direc­tor large­ly denied it, although in the 1985 doc­u­men­tary Doc­u­ment of the Dead he does admit that ver­sion of the end­ing was par­tial­ly shot. In any case, many have spec­u­lat­ed that even if it were to have exist­ed at some point, the footage is like­ly lost by now.

The change in end­ing stemmed from some­thing that hap­pened on set. Over the course of the pro­duc­tion, it became appar­ent that the film had a brighter com­ic book feel than Night of the Liv­ing Dead. Accord­ing to Savi­ni, after they had begun shoot­ing the film’s bleak end­ing Romero held a meet­ing to inform the crew that they we were going to have an up’ end­ing”. Romero had also grown attached to the char­ac­ters – he didn’t want to see them die.

It’s fun to spec­u­late on what would have hap­pened if all the char­ac­ters died before their escape. Was it, as Romero felt, that the end­ing would have been tonal­ly out of touch with the rest of the film? In many ways, Romero found a com­fort­able mid­dle ground between hope­less­ness and opti­mism in his changed end­ing, which still hint­ed at prob­a­ble anni­hi­la­tion. Would the end­ing be bet­ter if all hope was erased?

On a com­mer­cial lev­el, it’s clear that a mass audi­ence would be unlike­ly to embrace that kind of down­er end­ing. An inkling of hope is always bet­ter than none at all, peo­ple are ret­i­cent to accept that human­i­ty might lose. It doesn’t real­ly mat­ter that the entire­ty of the fran­chise sug­gests that human­i­ty will nev­er pre­vail, we want to believe we have pow­er over death. The small vic­to­ries of indi­vid­u­als over the slow, ever encroach­ing mon­sters are enough to make us for­get that we are not escap­ing fate, mere­ly delay­ing it.

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