Almost a decade after the
Blair Witch Project first mixed conventional horror movie shock tactics and plot twists with "realistic" amateur-style footage to bring fright fans a unique and involving take on an already well tried and tested formula, it seems that movie studios have managed to tear themselves away from constantly remaking ("ruining") classic movies long enough to use this "faux documentary" style as their new way to teach old dogs new tricks.
Mere months after the giant monster movie
Cloverfield stomped its way into cinemas worldwide - obliterating the box office rather than breeding in pound shop DVD baskets in large part thanks to the hype over its
"unique perspective" - the godfather of zombie movies George A. Romero has hopped on the bandwagon in an attempt to revitalise the long-running franchise that began with 1968's groundbreaking, independent
Night of the Living Dead, travelled through genre classics
Dawn of the Dead and
Day of the Dead in the late 70s and mid-80s, before winding down with 2005's $8million budget, middle-of-the-road effort
Land of the Dead.
A lot has changed in the movie industry over the four decades since a young Romero first unleashed
Night of the Living Dead, but with each big release he has mixed his classic formula with a savvy knowledge of up-to-date techniques, trends and social commentary to remain relevant. At almost 70 years old, can the master reinvent the wheel and roll out the guys in ripped shirts and fake blood one more time to make another film capable of rising above the hundreds and hundreds of other cheap modern zombie flicks that have tried and failed to follow his forty year old blueprint?
The first and most important piece of advice I can offer to anyone curious enough to find out the answer to this question is to leave any technical know-how you may have at home. You'll need to suspend your disbelief a fair bit with regards about how easy it is for the in-movie "film makers" to get various tapes of security footage, how there are
so many cameras
everywhere, the technological capabilities and limitations of these cameras, and all that other crap that people on the internet love to pick at. In all honesty, the amount of different cameras popping-up all over the place, offering multiple angles for every scene, kind of negates the "amateur, limited footage" vibe and makes it feel pretty much just like watching any other regular ass film. This sort of detracts from the "involving realism" aspect that you'd expect to be the whole point in going for this style in the first place, but HEY! IT'S A MOVIE. ABOUT ZOMBIES. Realism should not be expected,
entertainment should be. And I thought it was
very fucking entertaining, but I'll address that in a second.
Right about now, internet haters are probably hyperventilating at their keyboards, taking a rare break from shit-talking in YouTube comments and shouting at their mum to stay the fuck out of their room to groan "uhh, if it doesn't feel like you're watching a believable documentary, then WHAT THE FUCK IS THE POINT YOU FUCKING DOUCHE?" at their monitors. However, Romero's use of the "protagonist's POV" style actually seems less to do with suckering the viewer into a false sense of realism and more to do with bolstering
Diary of the Dead's plot / background message.
Anyone familiar with Romero's previous work will no doubt be aware of the social and political commentary that is deeply sewn into the fabric of his gore-splattered, cannibalistic story-lines;
Night of the Living Dead highlights the inability of human beings to work together as being just as dangerous as the undead who hunt them,
Dawn of the Dead attacked America's growing consumerist tendencies, and so on.
Diary of the Dead has a comparatively more contemporary theme than the timeless messages of its predecessors, focusing on the possibilities of user-created news sources provided by internet blogs and YouTube videos versus the oft-corrupt mainstream media interpretation of current events.
Unlike in previous films, where radio and TV stations where shut down and communication with the outside world limited or entirely cut off, first-hand experience of zombie attacks are captured on film and uploaded to a MySpace Film site, with this raw information quickly becoming more popular than the scripted reporter-spouted statements available from major television and radio news sources. The resulting "internet fame" is another subject tackled in the movie, as the characters sometimes seem to concern themselves more with "website hits" and growing popularity than with the survival of their friends and family. It's interesting to see Romero tackle such a modern topic, but in covering a still-growing phenomenon it runs the risk of being the first movie in his "Dead" series to look stale and dated in ten year's time. Should video blogging and user-generated media on the internet lose popularity or suddenly be superseded by something else over the next few years, a lot of the message will probably still stand true but it'll feel a bit like watching a TV show from 1991 where someone rattles on about MiniDiscs being the next big portable music storage medium.
But it's not
all about a grim foretelling of a mass media apocalypse is it? Is it fuck - like any other good movie, it's also about FUN and that "entertainment" thing I mentioned earlier. Any fan of the genre will be glad to hear that
Diary of the Dead is gored out of its box, and is in fact SERIOUSLY brutal in some places. In addition to Blair Witch style aesthetics, Romero has clearly been taking notes from other modern popular horror series such as Saw and Hostel in cranking the "gritty death" knob up to 11. These more extreme scenes will no doubt serve to alienate a lot of the mainstream movie-going audience, and the the lack of technical accuracy in the plot as well as characters who are frankly unlikeable and difficult to sympathise with will definitely turn off a lot of film snobs as well. Indeed,
Diary of the Dead is by no means on a par with Romero's previous work, but it still stands head and shoulders above a lot of the crap in the over-saturated zombie movie market as something that fans of the bloodthirsty undead should check out and enjoy.
Diary of the Dead is on general release in the UK from Friday 7
th March 2008.
http://www.myspace.com/diaryofthedead Trailer
George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead 
