Diary of the Dead

Undead in the Information Age

George Romero rejiggers his gory social satire for the MySpace generation.

DIARY OF THE DEAD WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY GEORGE A. ROMERO
Opens Fri 2/15 at Pipers Alley

By J.R. Jones

February 14, 2008

Like many characters in his movies, George Romero knows how it feels to be hemmed in by zombies. Romero revitalized the horror genre with his underground classic Night of the Living Dead (1968) and eventually followed it with the uncompromising Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the Dead (1985). But Romero’s forays outside the genre—the 1972 romantic comedy There’s Always Vanilla, the 1981 biker epic Knightriders—have been critical and commercial flops, and for the past two decades even his non-zombie horror movies have tanked. After his supernatural corporate thriller Bruiser (2000) went straight to video, Romero returned to the well again for Land of the Dead (2005), a modest success. Now he’s back with the independently financed Diary of the Dead, which marks the first time he’s directed two zombie flicks in a row.

Yet even as his career options have narrowed, Romero has continued to broaden the acerbic social commentary of the Dead movies, creating a fun-house-mirror image of American culture that elevates them above such knockoffs as Resident Evil and 28 Days Later. Released two months before Hurricane Katrina, Land of the Dead offered a bitter assessment of class warfare in the new millennium: zombies have all but conquered the planet, and human survivors in a walled city are brutally divided between haves, who live in a fortified luxury high-rise, and have-nots, who fend for themselves on the streets. Diary of the Dead proceeds as if the events of the first four movies never happened, starting over in the present with a handful of film students whose no-budget shoot for a mummy thriller is interrupted by an outbreak of zombie violence. The premise allows Romero a second childhood of sorts, a chance to revisit the independent spirit of his first big hit even as he reflects on how much America has changed in the past 40 years.

Romero’s movies are notoriously misanthropic, but there’s something affectionate, even sentimental, in his treatment of these young people and their movie project. As a college student in the late 50s and early 60s, Romero was the center of a small group of cinema enthusiasts who borrowed 16-millimeter camera equipment from the University of Pittsburgh to shoot amateur art films. He and a few others eventually formed a production company called the Latent Image, and after a big commission for a soap commercial funded the purchase of 35-millimeter equipment, Romero and his friend John Russo came up with the idea of soliciting a small circle of acquaintances to bankroll a low-budget horror movie. Night of the Living Dead was shot for $19,000 (the equivalent of about $113,000 today), with some of the investors doubling as actors, and after its runaway success as a midnight movie, the story of its shoestring production became one of the enduring legends of the indie film movement.

This time around, Romero introduces his young film crew out in the woods shooting a nocturnal chase scene, and the situation gives him a perfect opportunity to spoof his own career. Jason, the director, is primarily interested in frightening the audience, while Maxwell, the alcoholic professor who’s supervising the project, reminds him that they also want “an underlying thread of social satire.” Jason can’t get the shot he’s after because Ridley, who’s playing the mummy (and whose name recalls Judith Ridley, an actor in Night of the Living Dead), isn’t lumbering slowly enough. Tracy, the damsel in distress, is skeptical of the scene anyway: “Can someone explain to me why girls in scary movies have to fall down and lose their shoes and shit?” Fans will remember the first movie’s traumatized heroine doing just that. Romero can’t resist referring to these scenes with one last punch line: near the end of the movie, Ridley has become a real zombie, unbeknownst to the others, and as he stomps after Tracy, Jason calls out, “See? I told you dead things move slower!”

The shoot in the woods breaks up after the filmmakers hear radio reports of zombie-related carnage, but Jason refuses to shut off his camera; to the dismay of his girlfriend, Deborah, he insists on documenting everything that happens to them from that point forward. In fact, her voice-over reveals that the movie we’re watching was edited on a laptop from footage she and Jason shot, with surveillance video, Internet downloads, and even music added to make it scarier. This mockumentary premise requires a fair amount of indulgence, and it isn’t exactly fresh in horror movies: The Blair Witch Project pulled it off much more convincingly back in 1999, and the gimmick has already been absorbed into the Hollywood mainstream with the recently released Cloverfield. But Romero has more on his mind than either of those filmmakers did, using the device to comment on the noise of the information age and to question his own motives as an artist.

Night of the Living Dead has been so widely copied that one might easily forget how innovative it was. As the director John Carpenter has pointed out, the movie’s handheld, black-and-white photography was particularly gripping in the 60s because people associated it so closely with TV news reports. And at a time when most horror movies were confined to vaguely gothic settings, Romero devoted a fair number of scenes to characters huddled in front of a TV set, hungry for information. What sketchy backstory there is comes from an emergency broadcast, including a remote in which a dogged correspondent (Romero himself) trails after a trio of government officials who won’t come clean. Ten years later, Dawn of the Dead memorably opened inside a TV studio that’s rapidly descending into chaos (with Romero as the director), and later in the movie, as the main characters hole up in a shopping mall, they watch news broadcasts that have disintegrated into feverish arguments.

Romero returns to this motif in Diary of the Dead, and with jagged irony: despite the proliferation of news sources since the late 60s, people still can’t figure out what’s going on. The movie opens with a terrific set piece: ostensibly unedited TV footage, downloaded from the Web, of a news report turning into a bloodbath. But when the kids see it broadcast later, it’s been doctored to obscure the truth. This only strengthens Jason’s resolve to record their experiences, and when he uploads some of his footage to MySpace, it gets 72,000 hits in eight minutes. Yet when he and his friends surf the Web in search of hard news, they find only anecdotal accounts identical to theirs. Like every other facet of society in the Dead movies, mass communication succumbs to entropy: the old media are hopelessly corrupt and the new media are hopelessly atomized.

Less persuasive is Romero’s heavy moralizing over our voyeurism and appetite for violence. “This is a diary of cruelty,” the professor tells Jason, and Deborah constantly reprimands her boyfriend for his willingness to tape horrible images. If Romero feels any guilt over his own 40-year celebration of gore, it’s hard to tell: Diary of the Dead features some of the most hilariously gross images since Dawn of the Dead. In one online video the filmmakers find, a father playfully pulls off a birthday clown’s red rubber nose and the guy’s real nose comes off with it. During a zombie attack at an Amish farm, the owner gets bitten from behind, which means he’ll be infected, so he rams a scythe through his own forehead, killing both himself and his attacker. Another zombie gets doused with hydrochloric acid, which burns a gigantic crater in its head. But my favorite has to be the zombie nurse that charges at the students in a hospital; one of them sandwiches its head between two defibrillator paddles and zaps it until its eyeballs explode. Ah, youth.   

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