Top Film for Each Year of My Life – 1978 (The Prequels)

Top Film for Each Year of My Life – 1978 (The Prequels)

By: Paul Toohey

When Nate first started doing this series of posts, I mentioned to him that I liked the idea and I might one day steal it for my own blog. Then he offered to let me guest post on his blog and I thought, what better way to use his idea then as a guest poster on his blog? So that’s what this is. If you don’t know me already, my name is Paul Toohey and I’m a friend of Nate’s. We met through Allen and Becky, who are two of Nate’s grad school friends (I went to UT with Allen, where we both got our BS in RTF, if you’re keeping a scorecard). Nate and I are currently working on a project together that we should be sharing with you all soon, so hopefully this will be a good opportunity to get to know me a little before that happens.

I have the fortune of being born a bit earlier then Nate, and right in the heart of a really good string of cinema. Now I’m not trying to say that all the movies in and around 1978 were great. There were some great film there was also Convoy (film) (or the many rip-offs). I was born one year too early for Star Wars, but the same year that The Star Wars Holiday Special was released on the masses. 1978’s Best Picture Oscar was awarded to The Deer Hunter, which is a deserving film (and one of the only nominees that I can actually recognize as a film I’ve heard about). Ok, so it was also the year of Jaws 2. Piranha (1978 film), Every Which Way but Loose (film), and The Bad News Bears Go to Japan. But to me, of all the films from 1978, one stood head and shoulders above the rest. And that masterpiece is George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead.



“When there is no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth.”
No, I did not see Dawn of the Dead in 1978. At least I hope I didn’t, I would really have a problem with my parents taking infant me to a zombie movie (although I did once see a mother change her infants diaper during Mimic in a theater I used to hang out at). I am not really sure when I first saw it, but I remember it vividly. The movie spoke to me. I was young enough to envision me and my brothers taking over a shopping mall and bunkering down like Flyboy and the gang. Making it our playground. Running around, having fun. You see, at the time I didn’t quite understand what the movie was trying to tell us. At a later viewing the message of the film crept up on me (get it, like a zombie…who creeps, but never runs). The Romero zombie films, like all great movies, tell more of a story with their subtext then is actually present in the text. This was Romero’s commentary on the consumerification of America.

Francine Parker: What are they doing? Why do they come here?
Stephen: Some kind of instinct. Memory, of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.

Even before the over indulgence of the upcoming 80s Romero could sense where we were headed, and he wanted to warn us against being zombies and focusing on materialistism and consumerism.