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February 15, 2008 > Arts & Entertainment > More than just gore in Romero’s Diary of the Dead

More than just gore in Romero’s Diary of the Dead

By Evan Mintz | Thresher Editorial Staff

For the past 40 years, George A. Romero has made his distinct, if gory, cultural commentary through films featuring stumbling, dead-eyed zombies. Night of the Living Dead reflected upon the conflict and racial struggle of the ’60s. Dawn of the Dead was a blunt satire of consumerism, with zombies trapping people in a mall. And the recent Land of the Dead was a wonderful Marxist interpretation of the post-9/11 world.

While the symbolism of these films may have been bluntly obvious to audiences, the characters seem oblivious to the overarching metaphor, as fictional characters are wont to do. Not so in Romero’s latest installment, Diary of the Dead.

Following in the footsteps of Romero himself, a group of young filmmakers head out to the forest to make a zombie movie just at the moment of a great zombie apocalypse. Soon enough, their innocent movie turns into a video document of their attempts to escape the zombies and find their families. How meta!

Diary is supposed to be a retroactive continuity change of Romero’s zombie canon, and appropriately so. The last several years have seen resurgence in zombie lore largely centered on Max Brooks’s books Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z. But this resurgence did not develop in a cultural vacuum. The events of 9/11 certainly cemented the fear of the insurgent other, living right under our noses, ready to destroy the world we know. And it is in this world of the War on Terror where Diary of the Dead takes place.

While the original Night of the Living Dead filming style was reminiscent of a war-era newsreel or documentary, Diary is explicitly a blog entry placed on the characters’ MySpace. Indeed, at the midst of the zombie outbreak in Diary, people find themselves turning to the Internet for facts, with the mainstream news unwilling to accept that, yes, the dead are returning to life. It almost suggests that the official 9/11 reports are lies and that we should reconsider those conspiratorial Paultard videos about the melting point of steel. Now who is the real zombie?

Diary does not skimp on Romero’s usual racial imagery, either. The use of news footage of mobs during Hurricane Katrina matched with utter government ignorance of the zombie outbreak is certainly no kind metaphor for the Bush Administration.

However, these symbolic threads all weave one main question throughout Diary: Why do we film? Why do the characters feel such a need to record events? Why do people post their daily lives on the Internet? Is it the drive of each individual to scream out, “I’m here, look at me, I exist?” If you are not on camera, are you real? The irony is that in striving to be recognized, each person merely falls into the moaning mob of YouTubers, each stumbling to recreate but another My New Haircut parody.

Of course, all this deep meaning is hard to take seriously when combined with Romero’s thoroughly entertaining gore, which combined with the first-person perspective, gives the movie a startlingly accurate video game feel. But when Diary does not feel like the game “House of the Dead,” it feels like a student film, which may or may not be a good thing.

Admittedly, fans of World War Z will be somewhat let down by the lack of massive scale implied by Brooks’s false history. But this is not CNN International; it is a YouTube video. After all, that is how people get their news these days.

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