Fran won't scream
In this scene of Francine, who is not the typical female victim/final girl, Romero and the actress Gaylen Ross flipped character stereotypes around to show her as as strong rather than weak. She fights off a zombie with a flare in a later scene, and she doesn’t scream in this scene or throughout the movie. She can protect herself and learns how to fly and fire a gun and is generally a lot tougher, even though she’s blonde and pregnant she still do all these things. Dawn of the Dead (1979) is an early feminist movies taking movies into “new places” (as Gaylen Ross says in the documentary The Dead Will Walk). In the shot it also shows Stephen who would be expected to be the male hero due to being a TV traffic reporter, but he is actually not the stereotypical horror male hero. Stephen is dull and whiny- with no muscles, and he also seems a bit harsh towards Francine. Furthermore he’s terrible with a gun and nearly shots Peter (the true hero) and gets bitten by the zombies in the end. This shows Romero changes around a lot of characters and representations.
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