George A. Romero
Zombi

PROLOGUE.

Catania, September 2046. A soft and warm wind blows through the streets, among distracted passersby. Another day comes to an end in the déjà-vu tranquility of the Becchini household. Like every evening, mom Paola prepares dinner with delectable lasagna with mushrooms and cheese, legumes with pesto, and strawberry salad for the husband returning stressed and exhausted from the office. And for little Giulia, who watches the evening news with wide eyes and the innocence of her 7 years: "..The great waste emergency that overwhelms the central-south of the peninsula these days severely tests the stability and cohesion of the government. Prime Minister Barbara B. has announced maximum alert, from the cathedral of Arcore where her father's embalmed body rests. The Interior is ready to use armed forces and special teams to neutralize the powerful criminal organizations, which now control incinerators and waste disposal everywhere." Even Catania seems submerged by the rotten stench of sovereign garbage. "Giulia, come on, turn it off, dear, it's almost ready on the table.." Paola remarked. "Is daddy coming back?!" the excited girl asked, and in that brief moment, a thud was heard behind the villa's door. Paola ran with a few pounds of fear to the entrance, opened it, and..

TO DEATH WITH CONSUMERISM! (OR WE SHALL BE DEAD).

A virus more potent than Viagra has awakened the slumber of the dead. They now spend their free time feeding on the living who sleep, eat, and produce. And thus, more dead than the Dead. Planet Earth is hostage to the new\old dominant race (but Andreotti was already around for decades..), in Philadelphia, on a TV program, politicians and personalities hysterically discuss what to do while S.W.A.T. teams break into a building of the deceased. Peter and Roger, two of the special forces, reporter Francy and her pilot boyfriend Steve flee in a helicopter: short on fuel, they are forced to land on the roof of a large shopping center. But the grumbling dead don’t seem gullible, they know the four are inside the gigantic premise and attempt entry (perhaps they find some sales too). Barricaded and alienated from the rest surrounding them, will our heroes manage to save their skins by shooting at the crumbling heads of hungry zombies? It will be carnage (and in the 'cut' optimistic finale, Romero envisioned the suicide of the two survivors, tired of fleeing from 'Willy The Coyote’..). ‘Dawn of the Dead’, aka ‘L'alba dei morti’.

The second chapter of the horror\political epic by the great George A. Romero, known to us with the iconic 'Zombi'. After the "night" infested by the dead in the watershed masterpiece of '68, "the dawn" and the celestial men's gore fury. A social awakening from lethargy, restless and ambiguous, that politics and mass consumption fertilized among the narcotized people in armchairs, in front of the tv and Nixon who proclaimed himself honest. Romero finished filming in about four months, between the end of '77 and the start of 1978 (the year the film was released), for a cost below two million dollars, choosing Monroeville Mall as the story’s location, available during closing hours between 10:00 PM and 8:00 AM, in Pennsylvania. In the opening titles and posters of the movie, the contribution of friend and Italian colleague Dario Argento is clear, who hosted Romero in his Roman home (where the screenplay was completed) and obtained the exclusive distribution rights of 'Zombi' in Europe and Japan as co-producer. Additionally, Argento decided to entrust the soundtrack to his loyal Goblins, who did an excellent job (though, incredibly, their music was not present in the US version); and re-edited the film for some markets, cutting around twenty minutes from the original cut: he made the narrative more concise and dynamic. Unnecessary characters and sequences that slowed down the story were removed. Make-up artist and splatter-effects wizard Tom Savini appears in several roles, including the memorable leader of the biker gang who ends up cannibalized, and Romero himself plays a cameo as the TV studio director. 'Zombi' was a great success, grossing as much as forty million dollars at the time.

The political/social corpus, in George Romero's work, is evident in the brilliant intuition of the shopping mall: a backdrop, and 'theatrical backdrop', throughout the story. It’s not by chance that, returned to a passive limbo and standardized by common induced thought, the so-called 'living dead' find in the large supermarket space their congenial and comforting habitat. 'As if, reclaiming the body and familiar gestures, the desperate search for a grotesque and solidaristic replica of the time when they were 'alive' (in the society of well-being) was just a gentle hypnosis, a nail fixed in the consciences, absorbed by the economic dictates of the West. The memory of earthly life, the ancient 'habit' established in atrophied neurons, closes any evolutionary and progressive process. The director asks, asks us (and shows insistently), the decayed state of Ethics and social values dominated by the naive arrogance of the consumer; by the thousand brands and rituals of advertising that enslaves and makes everyone dependent, regulated by da-da-da jingles and erotic images. We are dead, looking for refuge in the back of a hypermarket, and we don’t know it. A drop of blood also falls from my guilty hand..

THE FUNERAL EPILOGUE.

..And stains the ‘Welcome!’ mat of the Becchini family, before the Apocalypse. A huge scream filled the house walls with terror and disgust. A putrid, foul-smelling being, with a vaguely national-popular appearance, grabbed the poor woman by the neck: her veins seemed to explode for how swollen they were, the eyes of the dying Paola out of their sockets. The grumbling 'thing', and angrier than a vintage Giorgio Bracardi, squeezed hard until he made her tongue shoot up to the ceiling soaked in blood. Then with a quick and lethal bite to the head, he smashed Paola’s skull, feeding on her still moist brains. At that moment, behind the resurrected Pippo Baudo, a tall and mystical man entered, zigzagging without an arm through the hallway singing ‘..You always take the bait, the barricades in the square you make on behalf of the bourgeoisie creating false myths of progress. Who do you think we are, for the hair we wear, we are fireflies that stand in the dark..’ -He surprised the trembling Giulia closed in a locker. 'Up patriots to arms, contemporary music brings me down..', he kicked it open, and amid the girl’s agonizing screams, he grabbed her fragile little arms. He violently stretched them, tearing them from the small body and spurts of crimson blood. The television broadcasted indifferent to everything, and the TG1 director Pierluigi Diaco struggled to advertise his own talk ‘Face to face’. Once the massacre was over, the two undead left in the direction of the cemetery, where other similar ones were waiting ravenously. During the funeral of what was left of his family, the horror of that scene was a heavy mask for Salvo Becchini. Meanwhile, the waste was increasingly toxic, and indeed smelled of moldy carcasses. They had awakened even the Dead, everywhere.

And the Dead prevails, in Catanzaro and Bari, determined with his sad and resolute ‘funeral’ face to take back what once was his, including our women. The State is in check, decides on the ultimate reactionary help from Jenna Bush, president of the USA. The decisive weapon will be released from hibernation: Chuck Norris. The resilient Texas ranger will first be catapulted onto Sicily (to the notes of ‘Altered state’ by Sepultura), and his benign rotating kick will break kneecaps and shoulder blades of each zombie, exterminating them mercilessly. Because there is no chin behind Chuck’s solid beard, just another fist. Side effects: risk of multiple fractures for the civilian population as well. Norris loves training with young people and children, unfortunately; in this, he is very democratic. Once the human race is extinct, rats will be the new dominant species. And Chuck Norris their leader.