While LAND OF THE DEAD (2005) was a smart, exciting movie in its own right, George A Romero has never belonged in the Hollywood system. Prior to making the slightly anonymous LAND for Universal, his mainstream, studio-backed work included the powerful but compromised MONKEY SHINES and the slick but empty Stephen King adaptation THE DARK HALF.
Four decades on from NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, and in the same year as the tiny-budgeted Romero-influenced, stylistically similar THE ZOMBIE DIARIES, Romero has returned to the small scale roots of his zombie saga. Made cheaply with an unfamiliar cast, DIARY OF THE DEAD, like NIGHT, offers a microcosmic view of a zombie-based apocalypse just as it begins to unfold. It’s a first-person take on the NIGHT premise, updated for the You Tube generation where, as one character states, nothing is “real” until it’s on camera. The theme echoes THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, with which this shares obvious parallels (albeit this is professionally shot – too professionally to be the work of amateur filmmakers – on visually appealing hi-def video rather than the famously shaky cams of BLAIR WITCH).
In rural Pennsylvania, a bunch of Pittsburgh university students – and their boozing British stereotype professor – are filming a cheesy horror movie in the woods about a marauding mummy. This set-up allows Romero to have playful fun with horror clichés : in the students’ film, a buxom blonde in a corset falls over branches as she flees from the lurching mummy ; the director wants her dress to fall down too. Later in the film, the “actress” playing the feeble babe-in-peril temporarily loses her dress, stumbles over and is pursued by the “mummy”-turned-zombie. In the early stages of the film, Romero also makes gags at the expense of the post-28 DAYS LATER trend for unnaturally sprinting zombies (their ankles would snap, someone accurately points out).
The students’ project is interrupted upon their realization that they are caught up in a swiftly escalating epidemic causing the dead to rise and spreading like a deadly virus. The media in all its 21st century forms fails to offer the answers or help they need, so one of the students (Joshua Close) films everything they experience as the group hit’s the road in a Winnebago and discover a nightmare scenario spiraling out of control.
Your appreciation of DIARY OF THE DEAD depends on your acceptance of a few factors. A key one is that its social satire is unsubtle, even spelled out at times. This in-your-face approach social commentary is not uncommon to Romero’s DEAD series : DAWN OF THE DEAD, with its unveiled sustained assault on consumerism and “they’re us and we’re them” theme being perhaps the most blatant example. Secondly, the film requires that you not only believe in these people (the performances are mostly, though not universally, convincing) but also, as in BLAIR WITCH, you accept that some of them would continue filming even when the lives of friends (and their own) are under threat.
In the latter case, Romero makes Close’s obsessive documentation of the crisis part of the film’s key themes : we live in a cynical age where people’s first thought during a calamity might be “Did I get that on tape?” rather than “Are my friends/family OK?”. The somber narration heard throughout by one of the female protagonists (Michelle Morgan) – again unsubtle, but effective – puts it in perspective : we slow down at road accident sites not because we’re so eager to help our fellow man, but because we just need to see what happened in all its gory glory.
Four decades on from NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, Romero’s cynical world view has, if anything become sharper with the rapid advancement of technology. In NIGHT, the characters are too stubborn, too eager to selfishly argue their corner to put their heads together and come up with anything resembling a sound survival plan. Here, certain characters are too focused on getting their voice heard, getting their footage uploaded they forget the importance of working together. In NIGHT, the survivors relied on singular TV and radio broadcasts to tell them what was happening and what to think. In DIARY, the characters have the ability to create their own “truth” but no one is any better off. The presence of limitless channels of information on TV, on the radio and the internet, merely means a limitless array of contradictory, filtered versions of “reality”. In these “enlightened” times, no one knows what’s real or what to do anymore than they did in 1968.
In the wake of mass-broadcast disasters like Hurricane Katrina and 9/11, this movie’s sense of widespread confusion and panic – heightened and confused by the intervention of the media that documents it – makes suitably uneasy viewing. Occasionally, Romero strays from the core characters to offer a glimpse of the bigger picture in the form of uploaded snippets of destruction. Consistent with the earlier films, he also reminds us to take no solace in our government, who are depicted as being in denial at a key early stage in the crisis and, when the shit really hits the fan, have nothing to bring to the table. The characters’ only direct encounter with the authorities – in the form of what remains of the National Guard – fails to alter or aid their predicament.
DIARY’s approach and narrative doesn’t lend itself to the kind of over the top action-splatter set pieces found in fan favorite DAWN OF THE DEAD but, when it comes, the gore is visceral and inventive : grisly head-shots, acid-dissolved faces, a head cleaved in two, and a reprise of DAY OF THE DEAD’s great entrails-spillage moment when a zombie with an open chest cavity sits up. Romero also retains the gallows humour of his classic zombie outings. There is a wonderfully quirky, crowd-pleasing interlude with a scythe-wielding deaf Amish guy named “Samuel”, and a grimly amusing sequence at a kids’ birthday party where the fun is muted when the (zombie) clown’s nose falls off.
The film’s biggest achievement, however, is in showing how one of the key players in the evolution of the modern American horror film is still making thought-provoking, angry, socially relevant zombie movies. DIARY’s tone is set by a superb prologue in which a self-aggrandizing TV news reporter encourages an ambulance to move out of the way because it’s blocking her crew’s view of corpses on gurneys. Soon after this it becomes clear the human race is doomed. Everyone, naturally, wants to put their experiences on film/tape/disc but, as one unusually wise secondary character asks rhetorically, “Who’s gonna be left to watch?”
Appropriately enough, the final stages show the changing world, for all its advanced technologies, resorting to the same kind of primal, callous behavior as the rednecks at the end of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. The heroine, pessimistically reflecting on the crisis and the response of those it hasn’t yet claimed, poses the question “Are we worth saving?” and the answer seems horribly obvious. Romero has made another timely, powerful movie with a lot to say about our culture of fear and a haunting final shot.
Trivia note : listen out for the voices of Guillermo Del Toro, Quentin Tarantino, Tom Savini, Wes Craven and Simon Pegg (among others) during some of the broadcasts; and watch out for a knowing cameo from Romero himself. Talking after a screening of this film in London on November 2nd, Romero was quick to assure everyone that, despite rumors to the contrary all over the internet, he has yet to commit in anyway to any kind of sequel to DIARY OF THE DEAD.
– Steven West
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
