The Story of an Unauthorized Sequel to ‘Dawn of the Dead’

The spectre of George A Romero’s Night of the Living Dead hangs over modern horror so much that it is sometimes easy to forget just how ahead of its time it was. Night of the Living Dead was released in 1968, the biggest movies of that year were 2001: A Space Odyssey, Funny Girl and Oliver!… Great movies all, but so much more of their time than Romero’s still chilling zombie classic – hell, genre horror movies had just begun their crawl out of the grindhouse and into the mainstream with the same year’s Rosemary’s Baby, and the two pictures are still arguably the blueprint for what we’d today call “elevated horror”.

Yet the industry in which Romero made his masterpiece was an extremely different one from the one it is today. Hell, that was still the case ten years later when he made the film’s sequel, Dawn of the Dead. The industry had more in common with the wild west than the movie industry we know and love today (as much as we know we shouldn’t). This was especially the case when you moved out of Hollywood and into the fledgling international movie scenes of the 1960s and 1970s.

Today, copyrights to movies are guarded with a severity that Fort Knox might consider “a little drastic”. Not so much when Dawn of the Dead was released. In fact, the best examples of this come from the film’s Italian release. Where it was completely re-edited by giallo sensei Dario Argento, completely re-scored by Italian prog supremos Goblin, and given a new title, the ever-so-slightly dreary Zombi. While Argento could only change so much, the two pictures are so far apart that it is justified to consider them two different movies.

For one thing, Argento’s Zombi is a much, much more serious film than Dawn of the Dead.

How did they make two different movies out of Dawn of the Dead?

This might sound ludicrous, but Romero’s Dawn… Is absolutely not the punishingly depressing slog that Night… Is – in fact, the 1978 picture actually has quite a lot of satirical (I’m so sorry) bite to it, the script is witty and quotable, and the music goes a long way to keep the tone surprisingly light… chintzy muzak bops play over scenes of a desolated mall, empty save for shambling corpses looking for the next meal. It’s not exactly Airplane!, but there’s an ebb and flow to the tone of it all.

Not so much with Argento’s Zombi. The dubbed dialogue has none of the witticisms or jokes, and Goblin’s score is deeply unsettling. With many of the exposition scenes cut in Argento’s version, you’re left with a film that actually has a lot more in common with the bleak terror of Night of the Living Dead than Romeo’s own sequel to it. So much so that when Argento’s cut of the film was released, it garnered its own fanbase separate from Dawn of the Dead, which is theoretically the same film.

Which is where that old chestnut copyright law comes back into play. At the time, Italian copyright law stated that any film could be marketed as a sequel to any other film, whether it was officially or not. Thus, a sequel to Zombi (otherwise known as Dawn of the Dead) was put into production by Italian movie producer Fabrizio De Angelis. Thankfully, Romero was delighted at the prospect of a whole new breed of zombie movies coming out of Italy, and Zombi became a whole new separate franchise of its own.

After all, as any of these movies will tell you, it’s tough to keep a good zombie down.