The “unbelievable” movie that shaped Peter Jackson’s career: “Absolutely blew my mind”
Peter Jackson is Hollywood royalty, best known for directing, writing and producing some of the most successful films of the 21st century, including, most famously, the Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit trilogy.
The New Zealand-born director also made the 2005 remake of King Kong, the 2018 war documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, and the 2010 adaptation of Alice Sebold’s novel, The Lovely Bones. But let’s rewind to the turn of the 1990s, when Jackson was just a small-time director from Wellington, New Zealand, making cult splatter films and science fiction action comedies. One of these was Brain Dead, or Dead Alive, as it has come to be known in the US.
Released in 1992, the film follows a zombie outbreak caused by a bite from a Sumatran rat-monkey. One infected mother becomes a crazed zombie and infects the local neighbourhood. For this film, Jackson drew inspiration from one of his favourite movies of all time, the original 1978 Dawn of the Dead by the zombie genre’s founding father, American-Canadian director George A Romero.
The majority of the film takes place in a Pennsylvania mall and features a horde of zombies who have come to take over the USA, with a small group of humans comically battling it out against the walking dead.
Dawn of the Dead has widely been hailed as Romero’s best zombie movie, taking on a wider cultural currency as a commentary on the excesses of capitalism and consumerism. But its cult status has also been cemented by its high-impact gory nature—at one point, a man’s head is completely blown apart with a shotgun, with chunks of it flying across the screen.
Speaking about the film’s impact for Rotten Tomatoes’ five favourites, Peter Jackson said it “absolutely blew my mind” and was an “unbelievable” film at the time it was released. He also highlighted how the film shaped his sense of humour and splatter style of filmmaking, referring to the term coined by Romero to describe a sub-genre of horror film that deliberately focuses on graphic portrayals of gore and graphic violence.
Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, along with its sister films, Night of the Living Dead and Day of the Dead, also influenced a host of modern-day zombie movies, including the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead, directed by Zack Snyder, which introduced the iconic film to a new generation of fans, alongside Land of the Dead and Survival of the Dead. And, of course, we would be remiss not to mention Edgar Wright’s zombie comedy and the first instalment of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost’s Cornetto trilogy, Shawn of the Dead.
In terms of TV inspiration, the hugely popular series, The Walking Dead, which starred Andrew Lincoln and Norman Reedus, drew on many of the well-established characteristics of the zombie genre as defined by Romero. Indeed, today’s indie body horror obsession can be traced back to this fascination with the human body and how it can be theatrically manipulated and mutilated onscreen.
Alongside Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, Jackson’s collection of favourites also housed Steven Spielberg’s deep-sea horror Jaws, Buster Keaton’s The General from 1927, the original 1933 King Kong and Martin Scorsese’s mob epic, Goodfellas.
