Dawn of the Dead's "First Draft Treatment"

The "First Draft Treatment" of Dawn of the Dead.

The earliest material for Dawn of the Dead seems to come from 1974, possibly late 1973. We have a letter dated April 1974 that refers to a meeting between American International Pictures and Romero about a sequel to Night of the Living Dead (already called Dawn of the Dead at that point) and, for reasons that will be explored at a later post, the unfinished draft dubbed a "First Draft Treatment" seems to be the version of the story Romero had proposed to AIP. 

There are two protagonists, Steve (or Stephen, as Romero alternates between the two sometimes within the same paragraph*) and Francie, and the majority of the narrative is built around a supply run through the mall that Steve embarks on by himself. Francie is relegated to the sidelines, worrying about Steve as he repeatedly growls at her to "Stay by the walkie-talkie and DON'T CALL!" The film is set in a mall, but instead of the mall being a haven that the humans clear of the undead, the pair remains in hidden rooms and crawlspaces, venturing out of their secure confines into a mall patrolled by semi-intelligent zombies, including ARMED zombie guards, only when necessary.

These zombies are not the same "ghouls" that we saw in Night. They show signs of intelligence that grow more pronounced the longer they last. They perform tasks, they wear uniforms, they seem intelligent – and, according to Steve, “they’re getting smarter and smarter every day.” They carry guns, though rigor mortis means that they have difficulties controlling the finer aspects of motor control, which aids Steve in his run through the mall: “their arm and hand motion is too spasdic [sic] to achieve accurate aim. The pistols fire, but the bullets fly in random directions, ricocheting off railings and crashing through the windows of the shops.” In many ways, they're closer to the mind-controlled zombies of Haitian voodoun - or, at least, the American pop-cultural versions seen in films like White Zombie and I Walked with a Zombie - than they are to the creatures we'd see in the eventual film. 

And they are far more active than they were in Night, Steve’s encounters with the zombies are fight scenes, with both hand-to-hand combat and gunfights. Steve spies a “glow eminating [sic] from the butcher shop,” which leads to the most brutal, goriest scene in the treatment. It’s a fight scene between Steve and zombies wielding meat cleavers. Or, at least, they seem to be zombies. There’s a curious slippage in Romero’s language between “zombies” and “men” – a far more decisive and impactful terminological blurring than his alternating between “Steve” and “Stephen”:

In the cold room, the sight is bizarre. Two men, in white, butcher’s frocks, are at work with cleavers. Atop huge wooden blocks, they are chopping pieces of some large, raw meat into sections. In a wave, Stephen realizes that the meat sides are actually human remains.

The early versions of Day introduces a similar idea, and places it squarely within the human-controlled realm: keeping zombies docile enough to train requires a steady supply of human flesh. But here, the butchers move in unison, they don’t speak, and Steve’s only response is to fight back – there’s no attempt at communication, even to register Steve’s disgust. The reveal only comes when Steve hits one with a rifle shot in the chest but “he staggers slightly, then, raising the cleaver, continues to advance.” But what does it mean if it has become so difficult to tell zombie from human? 

And yet the zombies show no agency, and no emotion. Romero repeatedly characterizes their faces as “expressionless” or “emotionless.” The confusion between zombies and mannequins is repeated throughout Steve’s supply run: “The death-like heads of store mannequins look on silently. Each time a mannequin looms in the foreground, it appears suddenly, the impression being that it might be another zombie.” But as the treatment progresses, we start to see signs not just of intelligence but glimmers of lingering memories and humanity in the zombies. From a distance, it’s increasingly difficult to distinguish the undead walking the mall from a pre-apocalypse crowd of living, breathing shoppers. They seem to be learning things, even independent of any kind of control or instruction.

The contrast between the zombies and humans becomes especially clear at the end of the fight in “Ye Village Butcher Shop,” a stomach-turning spectacle to rival anything concocted by Herschell Gordon Lewis for the goriest thing ever put on film. In a room filled with human body parts that are increasingly scattered across the room during the fight, Steve struggles to stay upright while weaving through a standing pool of blood and other fluids: “Stephen stiffens to attention, but his feet slip on the bloody floor. He loses his balance, and, trying to regain footing, his feet slide more violently on the gruesome remains and sawdust. He falls and steadies himself on his free hand so that he does not sprawl in the blood.” Decades before Peter Jackson and Sam Raimi, Romero imagined what would become one of the truly great gory slapstick gags of the era. Steve, of course, can hardly contain his disgust, but the butchers remain stoic, determined, and, perhaps surprisingly, surefooted. At the end of the fight, Steve will discover that there is a structure and purpose to the zombie community at the mall, with more stockpiles of food on the way in trucks (yes, these zombies can drive). The mall is turning into the same sort of shopping center for zombies in search of food as it had been for humans wanting new jeans. Zombies in police uniforms arrive to reassert order after Steve’s supply run has turned the mall into chaos, shooting other zombies who wander out of place. As the commotion continues, two new characters arrive:

A civilian-dressed figure steps out of the rear door closest to the mall and stands aside as another personage climbs out of the car. The second man is tall and dramatic in appearance. He is dressed in a black suit and his attire is neatly conservative. As he stands to view the scene, we see his face closely. He was at one time handsome, but where his flesh has the same pallor as all the other creatures, and where his left eye should be, there is only a deep cheek. The other man who emerged from the car, and the uniformed Police who pass, treat the personage with deference. The mysterious figure expressionlessly takes in the sights around him, then moves off. […] As the black figure moves towards the trucks, a crazed zombie all but collides into him. The black figure stares into the eyes of the zombie, and the zombie obediently falls into an attentive posture and stands very still. The personage moves on.

Again, there is a terminological shell game going on here: are these “figures” or “personages” zombies or human? Romero will refer to the figure in black as a “man” but we’ve seen that he will sometimes use that to describe the undead. Regardless of his official status, part of his mystery is that he is a figure with characteristics of both human and zombie, but also something different, as Steve discovers in their first encounter. The one-eyed man “transmits a thought” and sends a clump of zombies after Steve as he climbs above them in the ductwork. Through an opening, Steve looks down and meets the stranger’s gaze: “For a brief instant, the two stare at each other. Then, the one-eyed man faces the group of clutching zombies and, on his telepathic command, they calm themselves and slowly move away. Their moves are deliberate, organized. Stephen realizes that the one-eyed man has some telepathic command over the creatures. He looks back at the authority figure to find the man’s good eye staring back again.”

In their second encounter, Steve attempts to fire on the stranger unseen from afar but the stranger keeps throwing his hands up and flinching, before retreating into his car. His jaw hanging open in disbelief, Steve realizes that the stranger can read his mind too. The treatment ends before we get a glimpse at the inner workings of this zombie society beyond this figure straight out of White Zombie controlling an army of zombies, before we see everything that the guards are protecting.

The injection of a supernatural telepath into a straightforward zombie movie is a wild idea, one that would significantly alter the tone and scope of the story. In retrospect it seems like a curiosity, a distraction and a dead end that Romero apparently never resolved within the script, and which he therefore excised from later drafts. But it's FASCINATING to conjecture where he would have taken this story, and what it would have looked like. But it also shows how much Romero wanted to do something completely different with his second Dead film. He wanted to push his "zombie" film into the territory of action films, of fantasy, to not limit himself by the expectations placed on him by the genre. 

 

*: At one point in the script, Romero mistakenly refers to Steve as "David," which he had crossed out and corrected by hand. Those sorts of slip-ups happen for any writer, of course, but "David" is the name of the hero in his previous film, The Crazies, and this feels like a potentially revealing mistake. It suggests a similarity between the two, that perhaps the confusion came because Romero was thinking about them as analogous characters. It's pure speculation, of course, but this Steve is indeed far closer as a character to The Crazies' David than he is to the eventual "Flyboy" of the finished film. 

 

 

-Adam Charles Hart