“Deadened by Blood and Gore”:Censorship

Although Dawn of the Dead polarized critics and shocked audiences, the biggest challenge it posed was to the film industry’s regulatory bodies, as this chapter discusses. Dawn of the Dead’s financial success as an unrated film undermined the MPAA rating system, putting pressure on the MPAA to make changes to the system, which eventually resulted in the replacement of the “X”-rating with the “NC-17”. In Britain – according to then BBFC president James Ferman – Dawn of the Dead was considered a threat in terms of confronting the BBFC with “violence never before passed by the Board.” In Ontario, Canada it suffered severe cuts; and in Australia it was initially banned. Part of the threat Dawn of the Dead posed to these regulatory bodies arose because of its status as an independent film. The chapter argues that studio films, such as Friday the 13th (1979) were felt by the regulators to be mitigated by their essentially conservative moral messages; Romero’s satire of consumer-capitalism was, by contrast, ideologically troubling to censors.