Forty years after the revolution in low-budget nightmare splatter that was Night of the Living Dead, it’s worth remembering that that film’s garish power, apart from the sheer, outrageous, who will be the next to get chomped? insanity of its violence, arose out of the scary elusiveness of what it said about America. There was no exact correlation between the attack of flesh-hungry zombies—and the attack on them (”Kill the brain and you kill the ghoul!”)—and the horrors of Vietnam or the general late-60s breakdown. The metaphor was there, but it was ominously free-floating.
Contrast that with Diary of the Dead, in which Romero has the dead rising up for the umpteenth time, this time chowing down on a new generation of human meat. The opening sequence, in which a local news report gets turned into an eyewitness slaughterhouse on the street, is vintage Romero: explosive, funny, bristling with dementia. But the half-dozen college kids who scurry, by van, from one location to the next (abandoned hospital, Amish farm, rich kid’s mansion), fleeing the zombies at every turn, aren’t too much different from the Abercrombie & Fitch ciphers of Cloverfield. Here, as well, we track the characters through one kid’s shaky camcorder, a trendy device that has never worked as effortlessly as it did in The Blair Witch Project. There’s a great deal of babble about how images of the zombies are being taped, all over the world, on personal cameras and shown on the Internet. The film keeps telling us that we’ve become a society of passive voyeurs, hiding behind our technology. (We’re the real zombies, get it?) But the message is far from fresh, and you didn’t have to pretend Cloverfield was making a statement.
After the initial frames turn an immigrant family into a bunch of slow-moving flesh-chewers taped by a local newsman, the perspective shifts directly to Creed’s camera as he shoots the zombie rampage that was meant to be his senior thesis for his professor, a world-class alcoholic. As his star takes off for his mansion with the sound girl, Creed and his crew start hearing broadcasts over the internet and the radio about the dead coming back to life: the death of death indeed.
Though it takes place on the road, Diary‘s aesthetic is the most claustrophobic of the Living Dead cycle since the original terror, and it’s certainly the most perceptive since Dawn of the Dead. Romero sets Creed and his crew in a Winnebago heading through the suburbs, dead towns, and top-tier estates of Pennsylvania’s back country with Creed’s camera documenting everything they go through. Every refuge of safety they encounter (hospital, Debra’s home, an Amish farm) has been overrun by the rotting nibblers; even a mansion, the hope of fiscal safe haven, becomes overrun with the zombies.
What separates Diary from the rest of Romero’s work is the lack of even a loose military presence against the living dead. Almost every other film in the cycle offers the idea of an organized opposition to the epidemic: the sheriffs at the end of Night, the military in Dawn and Day, and the makeshift stronghold of the living in Land. It seems apt that one of the first flesh-mongers the group encounters is a sheriff stumbling from a car accident. No one’s fighting for civilization anymore, and the only notions of defense and survival arise from a renegade black militia, bunkered in a warehouse.
There’s always been a political edge to George’s zombieland epic, which he began during the civil rights and Vietnam era and is now using to engage with the contemporary American scene. Cloverfield trades on the iconography of September 11, turning familiar images of billowing smoke and swirling paper into virtuosic production design. By contrast, in Diary of the Dead Romero pokes and prods and awkwardly struggles with some aftershocks of that day, specifically, what happens when a culture—particularly one gripped by fear—is overrun with images, particularly atrocity images, that ostensibly numb and dumb down that culture by blurring the real and the unreal, true life and its canned image. Never mind that movies are part of the mix and that the movies lie too, sometimes beautifully. This is still proof of how to do a zombie movie correctly.