The Big Picture
- Diary of the Dead is a forgettable entry in George A. Romero's Living Dead franchise, lacking the impact of his earlier zombie films.
- The film attempts to utilize the found-footage style, but falls short due to its theatrical elements and attempts to make it feel more cinematic.
- In addition to its shortcomings as a found-footage film, Diary of the Dead also fails in terms of its screenplay, CGI effects, pacing, and commentary on news sources and social media.
There's a recipe that almost always amounts to a killer movie-going experience. When you mix George A. Romero with zombies, you can't go wrong... most of the time. After all, he is the father of cinema's (un)deadliest genre! Romero broke onto the scene in the late 1960s with Night of the Living Dead, a gory, unintentional-yet-perfect social satire that paved the way for the most gruesome movie monster that the form had ever seen. He'd up the ante a decade later with what many consider to be the greatest zombie movie ever made, Dawn of the Dead, and would cap it all off in the '80s with the epic Day of the Dead. He'd take the '90s off but come back hard in the wake of 28 Days Later by dishing up Land of the Dead, an unusually big and expensive studio picture by Romero's standards. The king was back and doing what he did best!
It was the best of times... until it became the worst of times. Land of the Deadshook up Romero's zombie world by basically being the blockbuster version of everything that he had ever done before (even though its budget was only $15 million). In the quickest turnaround between Dead movies, 2007 saw the release of the followup to Land — Diary of the Dead. This project was intended to take things back to basics for Romero. Unfortunately, it made things a bit too basic. Despite taking on a new storytelling device with a found-footage angle, Land suffers from having too low of a budget and is a jumbled take-down of news sources and internet culture. It might have come out at the beginning of the found-footage boom, but Diary fails to stack up against its contemporaries in any meaningful way.
Diary of the Dead
RA group of young film students run into real-life zombies while filming a horror movie of their own.
- Release Date
- February 22, 2008
- Director
- George A. Romero
- Cast
- Michelle Morgan , Joshua Close , Shawn Roberts , Amy Ciupak Lalonde , Joe Dinicol , Scott Wentworth
- Runtime
- 94
- Main Genre
- Horror
'Diary of the Dead' is a Forgotten Entry in Romero's Living Dead Franchise
If you're unfamiliar with Diary of the Dead, then truly do not worry. Many of the biggest zombie fanatics out in the world would probably consider this one to be a blind spot. The story is pretty simple: a group of film students try to capture the first few days of a zombie apocalypse. That doesn't make this a prequel or mean that you should expect things to lead into any of the previous Dead movies, though. Like the others in this franchise, Diary seems to be connected to its predecessors solely by name and titular ghouls.
The ideas for this project started cooking earlier than you might have expected! In a 2007 interview with CinemaBlend, Romero detailed the conception of Diary by saying,
"Before we shot Land of the Dead, I had this idea that I wanted to do something about emerging media. I thought, well that’s a way to get back and do something really inexpensive and simple and see if I still have the chops and the stamina to go make and make another little guerilla movie and relate back to the origins of the thing. I had this idea that I could use film students out shooting a school project and zombies begin to walk and they document it."
On paper, found footage is a pretty interesting direction for the Dead franchise to go in. Romero had just about tackled every kind of zombie movie possible with his first four entries, so if a fifth were to be made, something would have to change. It's also a fascinating take considering Romero was a more-than-well-established filmmaker by 2007. Unless you are Romero or M. Night Shyamalan, most found-footage movies are made by up-and-coming directors who are trying to find an inexpensive way to make a movie.
‘Diary of the Dead’ Came Out at the Beginning of the Late 2000s’ Found-Footage Boom
Speaking of which, the mid-to-late-2000s saw a boom in these types of movies. The biggest horror movie of 2007 was the original Paranormal Activity, and just across the new year, we got Cloverfield. Found footage might have been born in the '80s with Cannibal Holocaust and seen its defining entry with 1999's The Blair Witch Project, but this is when these movies started releasing into theaters on a regular basis. In that same CinemaBlend interview, Romero acknowledges this by saying, "I wanted to do this subjective camera thing before I knew anybody else was working on it. I didn’t know about Cloverfield or anything else. I thought we were going to be the first guys out there with one of these."
George Romero Came Close to Adapting this Stephen King Classic
Well, we'll always have 'Creepshow.'Romero Made ‘Diary’ Into a Confusing Found-Footage Experience by Adding Theatrical Elements
The biggest difference between Diary and its contemporaries is that Romero's film uses traditional theatrical elements to add a hefty dose of atmosphere. After the opening scene, the film's protagonist, Debra (Michelle Morgan), explains that she added music to make the footage that's being found even scarier for viewers. In the actual production of this movie, Romero hired a traditional cinematographer to shoot everything (that being Adam Swica), instead of letting the actors film it like most other found-footage movies. In the same CinemaBlend interview, Romero elaborates on this decision by saying,
"I wanted it [Diary] to be theatrical. The one thing about this film is that it sort of walks that line. Maybe unsuccessfully, it might be a little too arch and a little too theatrical, but I didn’t want it to be Blair Witch Project. Blair Witch was dizzying to me and it didn’t quite make sense. So I wanted to explain a little more and I wanted it to have some traditional elements, some gothic elements in it, which requires a bit more staging and carefully constructed, not only plot elements, but production elements."
While the added music and actual cinematographer might have been intended to make the film feel more cinematic, those elements ultimately pull the audience out of the movie. If you're going to make a found-footage movie, you have to dive right in. You can't have it both ways! This is a subgenre that's entirely built on putting the audience in the shoes of the main characters. If you add capital M movie elements by giving the picture a soundtrack and trying to make it look nicer than other found footage projects, then it becomes and feels like a full-on production. These movies are meant to feel like you found a weird video file on a computer, watched it, and saw a feast of terrifying images. You can't get that feeling by sprucing things up.
Now, you might defend Diary for these elements because Debra states that she wanted to add them to scare people. While that explains their presence, it doesn't make them okay. What kind of a person would turn footage of their friends' and colleagues' deaths into something that's meant to cinematically scare people? Debra isn't some deranged, evil figure, so why would she do this? Aside from being unbelievable, it just makes her wholly unlikable. Why would I root for someone that has chosen to do this? On top of all of this, the steady and professional cinematography is not explained. If someone in real life is running and filming their friend's death, they aren't also going to be able to make this footage look cinematic. The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield, just to name two that Romero was vocally aware of, work because they aren't trying to be classic Hollywood movies. They immerse us by trying to make us forget that we're watching a film. Don't try and remind us, George!
Romero's 'Diary of the Dead' is an Ineffective Horror Experience
On top of falling short as a found-footage experience, Diaryfails on almost every other front. The movie has a clever opening in which a news crew is attacked by zombies (a framing device that excuses the professional cinematography and the addition of music). Don't let these promising couple of minutes fool you though, because from there, the film rocks a tacky screenplay, disappointing CGI gore effects, and lacks any sense of pacing. On top of all of this, it hammers you over the head with obvious commentary about not trusting news sources and spreading information through social media. If we continued following newscasters for the rest of the film, this might go down easier; but instead, we have to hear this commentary from pretentious film students, which ultimately makes Diary pretentious in and of itself.
Despite trying to improve upon The Blair Witch Project, Diary of the Dead does nothing of the sort. It's a failure on both found footage and horror movie fronts. Not only does it fail to reach the peak of its subgenre, but it doesn't even stack up to the highs of those that came out with the late-2000s boom. Still, Romero's legacy remains intact. This guy made zombies into what might be the most popular monster in the history of horror movies. Not only that, but he made four killer films with these undead beasts! He can take this one blemish and be okay. Survival of the Dead, his sixth Dead film, has its fans and its detractors. By going back to a traditional narrative, it already tops its predecessor. With that in mind, it's safe to say that Diary of the Dead is the weakest entry in Romero's zombie canon.
Diary of the Dead is available to watch on Tubi in the U.S.
