Diary of the Dead

Forty years ago, director George A. Romero changed the way the movie world looked at zombies by giving audiences an entrails-eye view of what it must really look like when the undead rise from their graves to feast on the flesh of the living.

Last year, the director, who has made a career out of milking that original Night of the Living Dead formula with sequels and remakes, went back to the drawing board to create one of the best horror movies of the past decade.

Diary of the Dead follows a group of Pitt University film students as they graduate from making their own cheap horror movie to documenting the horror that surrounds them as the dead start coming hungrily back to life. Unlike the teens in the vast majority of horror movies, these kids aren’t pretty and vacant; they have brains and use them so they won’t become a meal for some stumbling zombie.

The film, told from the students’ hand-held video camera perspective, takes a little getting used to stylistically, but unlike the amateurish trickery of the Blair Witch Project it isn’t there just to make viewers so nauseous they won’t realize how pitiful the actors are and how dumb the story is. Under Romero’s sure hand, the style of Diary comes with substance.

Like all the Romero zombie films, Diary of the Dead is filled with plenty of literally gut-wrenching moments, but they are usually delivered with the kind of dark humor that the director specializes in. Like all Romero movies, however, Diary is as much social commentary as it is scare-fest and it leaves the audience plenty to chew over regarding the voyeuristic world we wallow in even in the direst of circumstances.