George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead appeared destined for greatness based on early audience reactions from a 1978 screening questionnaire that has recently resurfaced. It is not surprising that viewers would find the sequel to 1968's Night of the Living Dead favorable when considering the staggering influence that film has had on the horror genre and cinema in general. While Night revolutionized on-screen brutality taking place close to home, Dawn, released ten years later, expanded the scope of the preceding film by portraying a large-scale zombie invasion.
While Romero returned to direct the sequel, Dawn of the Dead is practically a different picture than its predecessor, not only in regards to characters and setting but the technical makeup of the film. With over five times the budget of Night of the Living Dead and the talented hands of Tom Savini behind the film's special effects, Dawn finds a group of survivors taking refuge at a shopping mall while fending off the reanimated corpses of their fellow (former) human beings. Shot in color instead of Night's black and white, Dawn was significantly gorier and initially given an X rating by the MPAA but released at the box office unrated.
The brutality in the film did not dissuade people from enjoying the final product. The George A. Romero Foundation on Twitter has shared a questionnaire from a test screening of Dawn of the Dead in 1978, revealing some intriguing fan reactions. The questions are basic, asking viewers to share their perspectives about the quality of the movie and the violence in it, specifically. For example, out of 230 responses, a combined 78% of people found Dawn of the Dead to be "good" or "excellent," and, unlike the MPAA, only 18% thought the film deserved an X rating. Check out the results below:
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The data from this questionnaire is fascinating for any movie buff but perhaps not surprising when assessing the primary age group polled at the test screening. 75% of people were between the ages of 18-25, the ideal audience for a horror film at the turn of the decade—a time that many genre fans regard as the golden age of horror, no less. After experiencing movies like Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Last House on the Left, and a slew of other video nasties, these young adults would have no problem finding the violence in Dawn of the Dead "fun" (42% of them, anyway). Perhaps the most curious metric is that the test audience seemed split on whether or not they would rewatch the movie, which could go hand-in-hand with the fact that nearly 80% of them found the movie too long.
Today, Dawn of the Dead is considered a horror classic that satirizes "mindless" American consumers while employing daring gore effects that cemented Romero and Savini as masters of their craft. In 1978, the director and his team may have been lucky to see such positivity from a younger crowd. If prudish older adults had any meaningful impact on the film's release via questionnaires like this one, it could have been far less successful. It also could have meant that Zack Snyder's 2004 remake of Romero's classic wouldn't exist, or at least not in the way that it does. Advanced screenings are still generally exclusive now, and studios favor social media over paper questionnaires, but looking back on reactions to such an iconic film is a charming piece of cinematic history.
Source: The George A. Romero Foundation