Diary of the Dead: George Romero's Back

Although the matters on Romero's mind weigh heavy, the movie he's made is anything but heavy-handed. Clocking in at a svelte 95 minutes, Diary of the Dead zips along, with loads of the EC Comics gore (including what I believe to be the cinema's first act of human-zombie murder-suicide) that loyal Dead-heads have come to expect. Therein lies Romero's subversive genius — he gives the audience what it craves, and a whole lot more it never bargained for. But pay close attention to Diary of the Dead and you may detect something less than its maker's customary exuberance in each successive popping eyeball and exploding head. As Creed and company boldly go where no cameramen have gone before, Romero himself seems to step back, staging certain violent encounters just outside of viewfinder range, or during that bane of every videographer's existence — battery failure. "It's too easy to use," says one of Romero's characters of a camera, moments after another says the same of a shotgun. And watching Diary of the Dead, you feel that Romero has been made weary by a historical moment filled with so much indiscriminate pointing and shooting, whether with zoom lenses or smart bombs.

"It used to be us against us; now it's us against them ... except, they are us," Deb remarks in one of the movie's most quotable bits of zombie pocket wisdom. And above all, Romero's Dead pentalogy has always circled back to the question of what it means to be human, for both the living and the undead. But as early as Night of the Living Dead's brutal finale, Romero established that the line separating human from zombie was a fluid one, and in each successive film he has only further muddied those waters — from Day of the Dead's endearingly servile, Frankenstein-like zombie Bub to Land of the Dead's black and proud Big Daddy, who leads the zombie dispossessed in something like a class revolt. In Diary, the landscape is murkier than ever, as Deb, traumatized by what she has seen of her fellow survivors (including one shattering act of zombie imprisonment and torture), questions whether mankind is really worth saving. In most horror movies, it's a given that we should root for the heroes to make it out alive, but Diary of the Dead isn't nearly so certain, and so it terrifies us all the more.

Steve Wilkie/The Weinstein Company

Diary of the Dead: Smile, you're on candid camera.

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More About

• George A. Romero
• Jason Creed
• Pittsburgh
• Sam Englebardt
• Ronald Reagan

GEORGE A. ROMERO'S DIARY OF THE DEAD | Written and directed by GEORGE A. ROMERO | Produced by PETER GRUNWALD, ARTUR SPIGEL, SAM ENGLEBARDT and ARA KATZ | Released by the Weinstein Company | Nuart