Zombie film auteur George A. Romero has posted some new pics from the set of his upcoming film Diary of the Dead, which can best be described as The Blair Witch Project with zombies. I'm interested to see where Romero goes with this, as it's an infintely better concept than another "the zombies are so like us" allegory.
Don't get me wrong: I love Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead. They're undisputed horror classics that every movie fan should own. But then there's Day of the Dead, which, due to severe budget constraints, looks and feels like a cheesy Sci-Fi Channel Original Movie. And 2005's Land of the Dead was friggin' ridiculous. If zombies' brains are literally decomposing, how the hell are they getting smarter? Zombies don't fire guns: They eat you alive.
But given the approach Romero is going after, using handheld cameras and telling the story from the point-of-view of a small group of survivors, Diary of the Dead could give us a fresh approach to zombie survival stories in a genre that's beginning to look a little crowded.
I'll be flogged for this, but I found the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake to be a lot better than the original. Shaun of the Dead gave us a brilliant romantic zombie comedy (rom-zom-com) and movies like 28 Days Later have reinvented the zombie concept and have made it even more terrifying. That's not even mentioning video games like Dead Rising and the Resident Evil series (and, yes, the terrible film adaptations of that series) and the must-read Max Brooks titles: The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z.
Is there still room for George Romero in the genre he created? I certainly hope so. Check out the stills at the film's MySpace page here.
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