Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [62]
When it was picked up at the Cannes Film Festival in 1976, it made only a small impact, especially compared with a new film by the hot young director of the moment. “John Carpenter at Cannes wiped us off the face of the earth with Precinct 13,” Romero said. “Right from the scene when the little girl gets blown away, I was blown away.” Nothing gets people’s attention like killing an innocent blond girl. To get an R rating from Heffner, John Carpenter submitted Assault on Precinct 13 to the board without the scene of the girl getting killed, and then put it back in when he released it to theaters—common practice in low-budget film. “I actually started to panic,” Romero said. “I realized that the stakes were getting higher and higher. Smaller distribution companies were disappearing. Screens were monopolized by big product.”
Martin opened to mostly glowing reviews and disappointing ticket sales. Romero needed to adjust. He did so with the help of Italian director Dario Argento, who by the 1977 release of Suspiria, the elaborately designed giallo about killings at a dance studio, had supplanted Mario Bava as the king of Italian horror. He got his start working on Once Upon a Time in the West for Sergio Leone and began his career with a relatively conventional detective story, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. It betrayed the hallmarks of Bava’s giallos albeit with perhaps less of a wry humor. “Bava has a much more ironic style,” Argento says.
Argento developed his own distinct cinematic voice in movies like Deep Red and Suspiria, which departed from the more standard whodunit plots into dense, textured, often incoherent stories built on dream logic. The new movies were bloodier and also moved the giallo into more supernatural territory, but their most distinctive contribution was their bold and ravishing use of primary colors. Faces would split in half, one side deep red and the other bright green. The palette was lush and dramatic. The more literal-minded American movies had nothing like it.
Argento had been an early fan of Night of the Living Dead, and held screenings for his friends in Europe and championed it to anyone who would listen. For him, it was a movie about revolution, a radical political statement. He reached out to Romero through an Italian distributor, and the two men met in New York and talked about making a zombie movie together. Argento told him he could help find financing for a sequel to Night and would fly him out to Rome, give him an apartment where he could work.
They made an odd couple. Romero was gentle and all-American, almost disappointingly wholesome, while Argento looked the part of a horror director, with hooded eyes and a skeletal frame. Romero wrote Dawn of the Dead in five weeks. The movie is clearly a Romero picture, but while Argento was only credited as a “script consultant,” that doesn’t reflect his contributions. Their deal was that he had final cut of the version released in Italy—where it opened in September 1978—while Romero had the cut for the American film that came out half a year later. The movie doubled its investment in over five weeks. So when the producers ran into trouble with the MPAA, which gave the movie an X rating, they did not cut down the gore but were confident enough in its commercial potential to release the movie unrated.
Romero embraced the political reputation of Night of the Living Dead. It was hard enough to have a hit movie, so why complain? If people thought he was making a statement, he would give them that. The zombies this time prowl a shopping mall and are comments on the rampant consumerism