George A. Romero’s Day of the Dead arrived in 1985 as the third film in the series that began with Night of the Living Dead, and it is the bleakest of the three. The world has already lost. The apocalypse has ravaged the entire world, and what remains is a handful of scientists and soldiers sealed in an underground missile bunker in the Florida Everglades, arguing about what to do next while the dead press against the walls.
Romero called it a “tragedy about how a lack of human communication causes chaos and collapse even in this small little pie slice of society.” That is exactly what the film is.
The Bunker Under the Everglades
The premise is simple and grim. Seven years after the events of Dawn of the Dead, the apocalypse has ravaged the entire world. Societal structures have mostly vanished. Survivors are vastly outnumbered.
Inside the bunker, the scientists are trying to find a solution to the zombie pandemic, and the soldiers have been assigned to protect them. That arrangement is the whole engine of the film.
Dr. Sarah Bowman, played by Lori Cardille, is the scientist at the center of it. She flies out to Fort Myers with Private Miguel Salazar, radio operator Bill McDermott and helicopter pilot John to look for more survivors. They find only a large horde of the undead and come back. Major Cooper, the military detachment’s officer-in-charge, has died in their absence.
Captain Rhodes and the Man Playing Him
Captain Henry Rhodes, played by Joseph Pilato, is the film’s antagonist. He is an increasingly mentally unhinged soldier who appoints himself leader of the military group after Cooper’s death. Pilato plays him as a man running out of patience and then out of sanity.
The casting was quick. Pilato said Romero “pretty much just gave it to me. I don’t know if he auditioned other people, but it was very quick. I came in and it was like, ‘You got it!'”
Pilato had worked with Romero twice before, on Dawn of the Dead and Knightriders. He told an interviewer that one reason he got the role was the budget being scaled down from 7 to 3.5 million.
That scale-down shapes the film. Day of the Dead is a chamber piece. Most of it happens in corridors, labs and a corral full of captive undead. The claustrophobia is not a limitation the film overcomes. It is the point.
Logan, Bub and the Corral
Dr. Matthew Logan, played by Richard Liberty, is the lead scientist. The soldiers call him “Frankenstein” because of his grisly surgical dissections of the zombies. Logan believes the undead can be made docile and domesticated through training and conditioning. He keeps a collection of captive undead as test subjects in a large underground corral.
Sarah opposes this. She wants to search for a possible cure for the virus instead. The disagreement is not academic. It is a fight over what the remaining humans are even for.
Logan’s prize subject is Bub, a friendly captured zombie taught to engage passively in human behavior. Sherman Howard plays him, credited as “Howard Sherman.” Bub is the film’s strangest and most memorable creation. He is not a monster in the usual sense. He is a test case, and the film treats him with more curiosity than fear.
Richard Liberty got the part through a phone call from Christine Forrest, Romero’s then-wife and the film’s casting director. Liberty said she offered him the role and told him Romero specifically wrote it for him. Liberty had worked with Romero before, on The Crazies in 1973.
Sarah Keeps a Secret
Sarah discovers that Logan has been experimenting on the corpses of dead soldiers, including Major Cooper. Fearful that the other soldiers will turn on the scientists, she reluctantly keeps this a secret.
That secret is the film’s real pressure valve. The zombies outside are a fixed threat. The humans inside are the variable. Miguel’s mental state worsens, and when Sarah tries to help him he lashes out until she stops. The soldiers range from decent and workmanlike to mean-spirited and confrontational. Rhodes sits at the far end of that range.
Romero wrote and directed. Richard P. Rubinstein produced. The film runs 101 minutes. It is tagged as horror, drama and mystery, and the tagline promises “The darkest day of horror the world has ever known!” That tagline oversells it. The darkness in Day of the Dead is not spectacle. It is bureaucratic, petty and human.
Rewrites, a Smaller Budget and a Three-Film Deal
Work on Day of the Dead began shortly after Dawn of the Dead came out in 1978, then stopped while Romero made other projects. The film was developed as part of a three-film deal with United Film Distribution Company, the distributor of Dawn of the Dead. Romero chose to make the two other projects in the deal first, Knightriders in 1981 and Creepshow in 1982.
Romero had final cut privilege, but the screenplay was rewritten multiple times. United Film Distribution Company worried that his original vision, which he described as “the Gone with the Wind of zombie films,” was too ambitious and would need to be shot with an R rating in mind to stay commercially viable. Romero chose to make the film on a lower budget instead.
That is the trade the audience inherits. The grand version of Day of the Dead does not exist. What exists is tighter, cheaper and, by most measures, better for it. A bigger canvas would have spread the same argument thinner.
Pilato, Liberty and the Supporting Company
The supporting company does the work the bunker requires. Jarlath Conroy plays Bill McDermott, the group’s alcoholic radio operator. Terry Alexander plays John, the helicopter pilot. Anthony Dileo Jr. plays Private Miguel Salazar, Sarah’s suicidal lover and one of Rhodes’ men, credited as “Antoné Dileo Jr.”
Gary Howard Klar is Private Walter Steel and Ralph Marrero is Private Robert Rickles, both Rhodes’ men. John Amplas plays Dr. Ted Fisher, the technician. Phillip G. Kellams is Private Miller and Taso N. Stavrakis is Private Juan Torrez. Greg Nicotero appears as Private Johnson. Romero himself cameos as a zombie with a scarf, uncredited.
Members of the rock band NRBQ appear in zombie makeup.
Key Facts
- Title: Day of the Dead
- Year: 1985
- Director and writer: George A. Romero
- Producer: Richard P. Rubinstein
- Runtime: 101 minutes
- Genres: Horror, Drama, Mystery
- Original budget target: $7 million, scaled down to $3.5 million
- Published critical score: 7.1/10 (IMDb)
Running Order
| Chapter | What happens |
|---|---|
| Fort Myers run | Sarah, Miguel, McDermott and John search for survivors, find a horde |
| Cooper’s death | The officer-in-charge is dead; Rhodes takes charge |
| Logan’s corral | Captive undead used as test subjects; Bub is the standout |
| Sarah’s discovery | Logan has experimented on dead soldiers, including Cooper |
| Miguel’s decline | Sarah’s attempts to help him end when he lashes out |
What the Film Gets Right
The zombies are not the scariest thing here. Rhodes is. Pilato plays a man who has decided that authority is the same thing as being right, and the film never lets him off that hook. The soldiers under him are not all villains. Some are just tired and following orders. That is worse.
Bub is the other half of the argument. Logan’s conditioning research suggests the undead might be reachable. Sarah’s cure research suggests they might be fixable. Neither gets a clean answer. The film is not interested in which scientist is correct. It is interested in what happens when two people who disagree are locked in a room with a dying world outside.
The budget cut shows in the effects and the scale, but it also forced Romero into a tighter structure. Day of the Dead has less room to wander than Dawn of the Dead. It behaves more like a stage play with a body count. The corral, the lab, the corridors and the radio room are the whole world.
Where It Sits in the Series
As the third film in the Night of the Living Dead series, Day of the Dead is the one that stops pretending the outbreak can be managed. Night of the Living Dead was about strangers failing to survive one night. Dawn of the Dead was about consumerism and the mall as a fortress. Day of the Dead is about the institutions that were supposed to save everyone, and it argues they were never going to.
Romero’s own description is the most useful thing anyone has said about it. A lack of human communication causes chaos and collapse even in a small pie slice of society. The film is a demonstration of that sentence for 101 minutes.
This paper’s own view is that Day of the Dead is the most honest entry in the series, though not necessarily the strongest. It refuses the escape hatch that a bigger budget and a bigger vision would have offered, and it puts the failure where it belongs, in the people who were supposed to be fixing things. The zombies are weather. Rhodes and Logan are the climate.
The 7.1/10 IMDb score is a fair reflection of the film’s uneven middle stretch, where the military banter starts to wear before the story turns. But Bub remains one of the great strange creations in horror, and Pilato’s performance is the reason to watch. The dead were never the problem.
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