The Gonk”, the eerily cheerful song that plays over the credits as the zombies shamble through the abandoned mall, is a perfect cap to the film. The juxtaposition of an upbeat, cheery tune playing as dead people stumble through the mall is hilarious (which obviously was the desired outcome). But “The Gonk” also pulls together the movie in a strange way, a shallow song to reflect our shallow consumerist culture.
Not bad for a song that was tucked away in a stock music library.
Stock music are a series of cues recorded for use in television and film. All the songs are cleared for licensing, so anybody can take the songs and use them for their commercials, films or TV shows. It’s a cheap alternative to hiring a composer, and even though some people use it to cut corners on production, stock music is perfect for low budget movies that don’t have a lot of money to work with. Dawn of the Dead pulled music from the De Wolfe Music Library—an extensive collection featuring over 70,000 songs.
George Romero was no stranger to stock music—he used it for his first Dead film, Night of the Living Dead. But the score for Night of the Living Dead was used in a simple, straightforward way, and one of the biggest reasons it stuck in my memory was because it shared its music with a 50’s B-Movie classic called Teenagers from Outer Space.
For Dawn of the Dead, Romero seemed to take more care in choosing the stock music. The cues sounded like they came from a variety of eras; some of the songs had a heroic sounding 50’s sci-fi epic feel to them, while others sounded like early 70’s lounge music. And then, of course, there’s “The Gonk”, which sounds like it would fit nicely on The Lawrence Welk Show, if that show was kind of demented (which it kind of is).
Despite the seemingly disparate nature of the songs, Romero managed to bring it all together so that it seemed like these songs were composed specifically for his film. In fact, Romero tapped into something that Quentin Tarantino would make cool decades later: using previously released music to score a movie.
And like Tarantino, who uses scores as another homage to the movies he loves, Romero’s Dawn score also works as an homage of sorts—to the weird and cult movies of the 50’s and 60’s. It’s not as carefully thought out as Tarantino’s scores (he uses actual pieces composed for other movies instead of stock music), but the fact that Romero dipped into a catalogue that many other low budget genre directors dipped into brings their movies together in an unexpected way.
In Zack Synder’s remake of Dawn of the Dead, he tries to tap into “The Gonk” humor with the lounge cover of the metal song “Down with the Sickness” by Richard Cheese. And while the song is pretty funny, it doesn’t pack the punch that “The Gonk” does. “The Gonk” wasn’t a throwaway “funny” track to lighten the mood of a “heavy” movie. “The Gonk” worked into the themes of the original Dawn of the Dead seamlessly, so that you felt like no other song could’ve been used over the closing credits. It captured the humor, the horror and the weird. That song—and all the others—belong with Dawn of the Dead.
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