In Night of the Living Dead, the dead return to life and the living are forced to retreat, barricading themselves inside the nearest source of shelter to wait for help as crowds of insatiably hungry zombies slowly attempt to force their way in. A once lovingly-maintained home, decorated and lived-in, is stripped for anything that can be used for defence, its history lost in the struggle to survive. In Dawn of the Dead, a band of survivors find an abandoned shopping mall and exploit its bountiful resources to endure the outbreak: food, weapons, clothes, space, fuel. Neither money nor the rule of law have value in post-zombie America, and chaos reigns: the dead gather outside, the living fight for what remains of society.
In Day of the Dead, Romero expands the space further but the situation has only gotten worse. Zombies now outnumber survivors by 400,000 to 1, and it’s no longer feasible for those who remain to lock themselves in secluded houses or shopping malls. A dozen survivors, some scientists, some soldiers, are stationed within a fourteen-mile underground military bunker in Florida and instructed to find a cure. On rare forays outside, a small subgroup fly a small helicopter up and down the coast fruitlessly searching for survivors, but find nothing but death, while, back at the compound, hordes of zombies, drawn to the fresh graves of dead survivors, hammer on the gates and security fences that keep them at a safe (enough) distance. Within the dimly-lit, all concrete and sheet-metal bunker is a large enclosure built to hold the dozens of zombies captured outside for use as research specimens. When a new test subject is required, soldiers lure the creatures towards a system of low-tech wooden gates and rope pulleys at the front of the paddock, where they’re separated off, restrained, and taken individually into filthy white-walled laboratories for experimentation.
The bunker is a surprisingly vast space, the sheer volume and security of which would once have seemed the perfect place to escape from the chaos, and is certainly one of the safest places in America, but it’s also cavernous and barren, dwarfing its residents and trapping them underground while they wait for a miracle. “This is a great, big, fourteen-mile tombstone with an epitaph on it that nobody’s gonna bother to read”, the team’s helicopter pilot says of the bunker, his voice echoing into the high-ceiling as zombies moan quietly in the near-distance. If anything could have been done to stop the outbreak this is where it would have happened, but the research is going nowhere.
Romero starts the film just as the ideological differences among the compound’s residents start to manifest in a dangerous way. Deaths at the hands of the zombies held inside are not uncommon, and six people, one doctor and five soldiers, have been killed so far. A transition of power has recently taken place among the soldiers following the death of the former commanding officer, and his replacement, furious at the research team’s lack of progress, demands something to show for their experiments. If they don’t deliver soon, he threatens to kill them, destroy all traces of the project and escape in the helicopter with the remaining members of his unit. The scientists, who need subjects for their experiments, view the practice of keeping zombies in a controllable space inside as a dangerous necessity for their work, while the soldiers, presented with no indication of the value of the research they’ve been assigned to facilitate, feel they’re risking their lives for nothing. The pressure increases.
The new major, usually draped in strips of machine gun bullets, is increasingly unhinged, as are his men, and they assert their dominance over the researchers by threatening them with near-constant verbal and physical violence, while the eccentric lead scientist, Dr. Logan, never out of his blood-soaked surgical scrubs, is similarly maniacal. In much the same way as the soldiers, he takes great pleasure in exterminating an unruly test subject with a power drill, and he has gone to great lengths to remove the skull of a zombie and leave the exposed brain, still attached to its spinal column, on a table, with dozens of wires connecting it to a battery. He’s long since abandoned his search for a cure to the outbreak and, in his desperation for answers, has taken short-cuts. He announces a breakthrough, a superficially successful attempt to domesticate a zombie and curb its hunger for human flesh, that at first seems promising, but the creature’s apparent civility has been rewarded with the freshly mutilated corpses of recently dead soldiers; several moral and ethical boundaries crossed in pursuit of a dead end.
There’s nothing left of humanity but failed experiments and horrifying violence, and it’s the realisation of this apocalyptic situation that separates Day of the Dead from its predecessors. In Night, the threat is brand new and its scale is unknown, causing panic and rash decision making, while in Dawn, hope persists in spite of the well-documented nationwide devastation. It takes the violent invasion of a marauding biker gang, intent on looting anything in the mall that once had value, to destroy the survivor’s fortress. In Day, one of the first images Romero presents is a huge pile of money blowing across the steps of a bank as hundreds of zombies swarm the streets. Money is history. Hope for reclaiming civilisation as it once was is now just paper in the breeze.
So what does this leave for the survivors? No progress in the research, no hope for a future. No point in staying, but nowhere to go. They just go through the motions of performing duties that no longer have value until, finally, the facade of hope crashes down. The shaky status quo, built with good intentions but left to rot on stagnant orders, false-promises and bought time, collapses in an instant when the true horror of Dr Logan’s experiment is discovered, exposing the anger and fear buried within the hyper-macho soldiers as they violently take ownership of the situation by attacking the researchers and planning their own escape. The failure here is a human one. The soldiers’ fears are forced onto the researchers who, without the conditions to work effectively, the learnings to calm the soldiers’ nerves, or the manpower to take what they need by violence of their own, are forced to cut corners in an attempt to protect themselves and preserve their own lives, even if only for a short amount of time. The zombies, either controlled inside or locked outside, are less of a danger than desperate men with heavy weapons. It’s fitting that Miguel, a soldier whose psychological fragility is mocked and ridiculed by his fellow officers, but whose refusal to accept that he’s struggling to cope pulls him further from the people trying to help him, is the precipitating factor to the final collapse of order in the bunker. Othered by both tribes, he chooses death over life and brings the zombies inside. Once compassion and civility has been lost, there’s nothing to separate the living and the living dead. In Day of the Dead, Romero shows an America beyond salvation. The only thing left to do is bury it underground and start again somewhere else.