The wonder of the horror movie “Dawn of the Dead” seen from the perspective of “editing”

"Dawn of the Dead" synopsis

Suddenly, the dead came back to life and began attacking the living. The resurrected dead = Dawn of the Dead eat the flesh of the living, and those who are eaten are also resurrected as their companions. The world has turned into Inferno. Francine, who works at a TV station, Stephen, a pilot, and Peter and Roger, SWAT officers, try to escape from the city by helicopter as the Dawn of the Dead continues to increase. They finally arrive at a huge shopping center on the outskirts of town, where they find some temporary peace, but Roger is bitten by a Dawn of the Dead. Eventually, Roger dies and comes back to life as a Dawn of the Dead. Peter's bullet sent him into an eternal sleep. The three of them feel tired and gradually lose their purpose in life as they repeat the same routine every day. Then, biker gangs who have survived the frenzy of the world burst into the area in search of supplies. The barricade is broken and a large number of Dawn of the Dead rush in. A three-way war between Peter and his gang, motorcycle gangs, and Dawn of the Dead has begun.

Index

• Speedy editing of a total of 3,000 shots
• Romero's skills as a commercial director
• An editing approach that defines independent film

Speedy editing of a total of 3,000 shots

Anyone who watches The Godfather of Dawn of the Dead movies, George A. Romero's masterpiece " Dawn of the Dead of the Dead" (1978), will notice one major feature. It's not just the horror of the Dawn of the Dead attacking humans and multiplying exponentially, but also the pleasure of the story of the survivors defeating the Dawn of the Dead and taking over a huge shopping mall. What supports this is the unusually fast-paced "editing."

The deterioration of a film over the years is most easily felt in the editing. More recent films have a greater number of shots (uninterrupted fragments of footage) that make up the entire film, and the tempo is speedy. Older films, on the other hand, have fewer constituent shots, and give the viewer a leisurely impression. However, in the case of Dawn of the Dead, the total number of shots that make up the entire film, or what are generally called "cuts," is incredibly high, even though it was made 40 years ago. Over the course of a running time of 2 hours and 7 minutes, the film was made with tightly packed editing, consisting of approximately 3,033 shots.

"Dawn of the Dead" (C) 1978 THE MKR GROUP INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

This is an actual measurement by the author, so please forgive any slight inaccuracies, but it's easier to understand how large the number 3,033 is if you have something to compare it to. For example, even Star Wars (1977), which was released around the same time as Dawn of the Dawn of the Dead and was touted for having "faster tempo in its battle scenes than previous movies," only had a total of about 2,128 shots in its 2 hour and 2 minute running time.

Taking a more recent example of an action movie, the fifth film in the popular series starring Tom Cruise , Mission: Impossible- Rogue Nation (2015), is 2 hours and 11 minutes long and has a total of about 2,848 shots. Dawn of the Dawn of the Dead is four minutes shorter and is longer. With the shift from analog to digital, editing has changed from "linear editing," in which the film is physically cut into pieces, to "non-linear editing," in which footage imported onto a hard disk is linked on a computer. Cameras have also become digital, and with the increase in recording capacity, the amount of footage has become enormous, so the number of shots produced by editing is on the rise. Even when compared to cutting-edge action movies born under such circumstances, you can see that the number of shots and editing tempo of Dawn of the Dead are unique.