This scene from Dawn
of the Dead (DOTD 1979) sees a SWAT team clearing out an infected apartment
complex of African-Americans, who are also heavily discriminated against by
Wooley, a SWAT officer. The heavy racism was a link to the historical context of the time where racism was more prevalent and
Romero sought to challenge this by representing
how horrible racism is, with Wooley shooting uninfected African-Americans
sadistically.
The special effects at the time where conducted by Tom
Savini, a well-known special effect artist who used his experiences in the
Vietnam War to inspire his effects and represent
how horrible body horror is to the
audience. Romero and Savini were also not held back by the Hays Code that had
limited Psycho in the 1960’s. Looking
at the institutional context of the
time we can see it’s because target
audience members were becoming harder to scare, due to real life
experiences, and this resulted in horror films being able to use more body horror to shock the audience. The
effect in this scene is an exploding head and represents how far the film industry could progress in little over
a decade.
The lighting in
this scene is motivated by the lamp
on the right hand side of the frame
and gives the apartment connotations
of being bright and homely. It’s only one of three props in the mise-en-scene it also makes the
apartment connote being basic and
simple. The fact that the residents have a small amount of possessions represents they are not affected by
consumerism as much, with the lack of items also connoting their tenement housing.
The scene features collision
cutting with some slower cuts in the corridors between the quicker cuts of
rooms filled with zombies. However as more zombies appear and overrun the SWAT
team, the cutting gets becomes a quick
paced montage to build connotations
of tension, panic and adrenaline.
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