Reply #17: In each of the living dead films, the zombies are the

[Downtown Hound]

representation of a new society devouring the old. A lot of talk has been made about the fact that NOTLD has a black man as the hero, but Romero himself has often said the he was simply the best actor they could find. But the zombies themselves are representative of the chaos of the 60's, a time when the streets were crawling with riots, Vietnam was in full swing, and new drugs made everyone afraid. You can feel the presence of the Vietnam War in this movie if you look closely enough.

Dawn of the Dead was made in 1979, a time when America's economy was in the tank. And it takes place in a shopping mall, portraying the zombies as the ultimate consumer: mindless, aimless, just wandering around for the next thing to snack on. Malls were still a relatively new thing back then. In the scene where they first approach the mall in a helicopter, it is described as, "one of those big, indoor malls." Would anybody describe a mall like that these days? The zombies are the new materialistic culture in America rising up and taking over. The heroes that seize control of it and lock the zombies out while they wallow in misery at the prison they created are the upper class. They have access to everything, but it's empty and hollow. The zombies are the poor and the homeless, and their whole existence centers around getting back inside the mall to consume more.

And in Day of the Dead, which isn't as good as the fist two but not bad nevertheless, the surviving humans are holed up in an abandoned nuclear missile silo. It was made in 1985, so I think it's a pretty safe bet that Romero was making a statement on the cold war. You have the evil military guys that are representative of the military industrial complex, the scientists who are either well-meaning but ultimately clueless about what to do or downright psychotic, evil genius types. And then you have the helicopter pilot (once again a black man) and his assistant who are basically like, "Fuck this. Let's go find an island, fuck until we repopulate the species, and get drunk and lie on the beach." They are the people that were tired of the cold war and the threat of nuclear annihilation, of which there were many in the 80's.