The horror world lost the man behind one of its most memorable characters when actor David Emge died January 20 at age 77. Emge will forever be remembered as Stephen, a.k.a. “Flyboy,” the helicopter pilot who’s one of the four people struggling to survive in the Monroeville Mall during a zombie apocalypse in George A. Romero’s 1979 classic DAWN OF THE DEAD.
After stage work in Pittsburgh, Emge made his movie debut in the 1976 sex comedy THE BOOBY HATCH, written and directed by Romero associates John A. Russo and Rudy Ricci, before Romero cast him in DAWN. His portrayal of the fallible and, ultimately, tragic Stephen is key to some of DAWN’s most dramatic moments.
Emge made only two more films post-DAWN, playing the freaky Half Moon in Frank Henenlotter’s BASKET CASE 2 (1990) and the reporter Robert in Douglas Schulze’s HELLMASTER (1992). “I got to know Dave quite well during the filming of HELLMASTER,” Schulze tells RUE MORGUE. “We’d managed to secure access to film inside a closed-down wing of an old asylum in Pontiac, Michigan known as Clinton Valley Mental Hospital, and Dave and the other cast had their own padded cells to hang out in between takes. Dave was in town for the entire run of the shoot, and actually came in a few weeks prior to filming to rehearse. We shot mostly at night, which made the atmosphere even more surreal, but Dave helped keep the mood light with his wit and dry sense of humor.
“Dave was a veteran of the Vietnam war,” Schulze continues, “and I got the sense that it really shaped his postwar life. He didn’t want to talk about that experience beyond saying that after serving, he was simply ‘happy to be alive.’ On a lighter note, one night while filming in one of the abandoned wings, our sound mixer noted a mysterious ‘singing’ that was preventing us from getting clean audio. Take three, take four, still no good because of this very faint singing. Neither I nor most of the crew could hear it, but when I put on the sound man’s headphones, there it was, like three out-of-tune tenors. We split up to locate the origins of the sound, and traced it back to Dave’s cell, where he and co-stars John Saxon and Ron Asheton [guitarist for Iggy and the Stooges] had gathered for their usual wrap drink or two. They were singing Frank Sinatra’s ‘Fly Me to the Moon’! Dave wasn’t a drinker, but whenever he got together with John and Ron, they could be a rather mischievous bunch. I was tasked with having to ask them politely to refrain from singing so we could resume filming!
“I feel very fortunate to have gotten to know Dave and call him a friend,” Schulze adds. “It dawned on me that now John Saxon, Ron Asheton and Dave have all passed away; life truly is short, and I look back on those memories fondly.” And we’ll never forget the indelible mark Emge left on the genre. RIP, David.
