Dawn of the Dead (Zombie Flicks)

I must first state that it is in my humble opinion that all movies are simply dreams on film. Movies, by nature, work like dreams; when you can have a jump cut in Citizen Kane that spans a few decades, well, you know you're not dealing with reality.

So, if all movies are dreams, then horror movies are nightmares. To quote George Romero: "You use horror to show the world being turned upside down." Based on that theory, it is my opinion that the horror genre is easily the most brutally misused of all movie genres. A good horror film can force you to face your repressed fears and desires head-on, and that is a very valuable experience. I don't feel that monsters NEED to correlate with any major historical event, but it does help. The original Night of the Living Dead, for example, plays off the chaos and paranoia of its time period (racism, gangs, rebellion, Vietnam).

popularized it, maybe, but certainly did not invent it. that technique was used to great effect in ingmar bergman's brilliant horror film, "The Magician".

also, interestingly, most "visionary" type filmmakers don't use dreams as an influence at all. i remember someone asking terry gilliam in an interview if his dreams inspired his films, and he said no, that he rarely dreams at all & when he does, they're very linear, realistic dreams.

i would say "fantasies" over "dreams", although i'm not even sure if that is accurate. "desires" may be better, because that can apply to the emotional, intellectual, spiritual, artistic, physical, visceral, etc.

Can we trace the origins of that? What's the earliest use of that tactic that you can think of?

I'm thinking Nosferatu, but he didn't exactly pop out the corner -- more like came out of the shadows.

As for the political bent of horror films -- I think they are more effective when that's part of it. The real source of terror in 28 Days Later was shifted from the zombies to the horny soldiers in the castle. Brilliant.

It might seem poetic to think in this Cocteau mode of the "dream film", but it's not very representative to what film is all about. Film is a visceral experience, realized through sensory response to external stimuli. This is about as far from the dream experience as one can get.

I like the concept, but it's just a bit too romanticist and not very practical when you think about the technical, psychological and physical aspects of the movie watching experience.

Now, I might be able to buy a comparison to a DAYDREAM, however....

My comparison of movies to dreams is not based on storytelling. Yes, most movies are linear and, in terms of sequence, logical. But I'm talking about the way movies work, specifically when it comes to editing. The fact that you can jump 17th century China to New York City in the year 2050 in a split-second is entirely unrealistic and is very much the way dreams work. That's why our dreams seem to cover so much time, when in reality they only lasted a few minutes.

Again, how does this relate to the cinema? Although film gets a reputatation as a "passive" art form, the reality could not be further from the truth. The way the brain interprets a dream vs. the way a person experiences a film is about as different from one another as they could possibly be, for the reasons I listed in my previous post.

We definitely need a seperate post for this, and it would be great to hear other folks weigh in on this.

DAwn of the Dead (1978) really is the perfect allegory now for COVID-19

in NOTLD, the undead come out of nowhere, and overwhelms the country as they are poorly understood. fairly quickly, scientists learn how to fight them, and initially it helps, but by Dawn of the Dead, skeptics like the talk show host at the beginning express disbelief that 'zombies' are real and that the dead are returning to life. rebels defy scientists instructions and do not destroy the dead, instead letting them live untreated at the bottom of their building, which continues the spread of the undead. scientists even lament that they could have stopped it 'at the beginning!' but people are reluctant to dispose of the dead in the way they've specified.