Dawn of the Dead (1978): Image analysis 3

This is the character Francine in DOTD. She is an example of how Romero uses his auteur status to this classical character stereotype. As we can see she is blonde, and in the horror genre is stereotypical of the female victim. She starts off as a character that doesn’t do a great deal.  Standing by as Flyboy fights for his life at the hangar, and can’t deal with one zombie in the mall. You assume that she is going die. However she doesn’t and becomes a very strong character. She learns to fly the helicopter and becomes a good shot as we can see in the car park scene with her cover fire for Roger. Also he does this twist on the male hero. With Stephen the character who is fighting the zombie. He should be this incredible guy who saves the day for everybody. However he is a really bad fighter and is nearly beaten by the zombies. Also his position in the mise-en-scene and expression angles he is shown to be very small, this connotes his weakness.

Romero never has Francine scream, and- not once does she enter a sheer state of panic towards her situation. She also she survives to the end of the film. The blonde surviving a horror was, - something rarely done before.  Romero loves to battle the Genre Theory (Thomas Schatz concept from the Hollywood Genres). Schatz writes about how audiences expect certain things when going to see a genre and while Romero keeps many things from the genre, his Auteur (Sarris) side twists things. For example he hates sexism. So he creates these strong final girls. This can be seen through Francine (DOTD 1979). Also with Sarah Bowman, who survives Day of the Dead (1985).  This shows how Romero would use his own ideologies and soul and out them into his films. If he had an opinion on it he would talk about it through his characters and events on screen.