Diary of the Dead (2007)

 

Diary of the Dead (2007)

 

Decades ago, the late Author Jack Ketchum told me that that the legendary, and now also late, Director George Romero faced continuous challenges financing his movies. This seemed to make no sense, but a quick review of his career certainly bears this out.

 

His first feature film, “Night of the Living Dead” (1968) was among the most important landmarks in the cinema of the USA, even the whole world, both inside and outside of the genres of SF,F&H. It was, in its day, the biggest money making, independently produced, movie of all time, but Romero saw only a fraction of that because the Distributer botched the copywrite, and it fell into Public Domain shockingly quickly. In the film, he created a new Monster, redefining the idea of the Zombie forever, and now, more than fifty-years later, the creatures’ Haitian roots are all but forgotten, but Romero’s Apocalyptic SF take on the Supernatural is a global media obsession.

 

He would make five more features in the next ten years, all extremely-low-budgeted despite his freshman triumph. None were hits (one even disappeared before release and the reels were not discovered until after his death in 2017) but most earned respect and one, “Martin” (1977), is considered a small masterpiece.

 

Finally, he returned to Zombies with “Dawn of the Dead” (1978), which was profitable and considered by Critic Roger Ebert to be among the greatest Horror films ever made. This launched the most comfortable period of his career, lasting into the early 1990s, when his films appeared with some regularity, were reasonably-budgeted, well-distributed, and though not all were successes, most got decent returns (a third Zombie film, “Day of the Dead” (1985) is in this bunch). Also, broad critical respect was finally arriving.

 

Then there was a long dry spell. Romero loved Horror, and he was proud of his Zombies, but that wasn’t all he wanted to do with his life. It was during this long dry-spell that Ketchum told me what Romero told him, that there were stacks of unproduced scripts in his files, but no one was willing to finance the films despite his successes. (Note: from interviews I learned Romero was sometimes paid handsomely for the movies that didn’t get made.) This was absurd as most of his produced films were more popular then than when they were originally released and his name was recognizable in most house-holds in the USA.

 

Romero said in an interview, “I’d love to be able to go in and pitch another kind of film and be taken seriously, but I’m generally not taken seriously. So that’s a bit frustrating because you don’t grow up wanting to be a horror filmmaker, you grow up wanting to be a filmmaker. I wish that I had a wider range. I tried early on to do several films that were non-genre and 9 people saw them, so I don’t have the credentials in that regard. On the other side of that coin, and far outweighing it, is the fact that I’ve been able to use genre of Fantasy/Horror and express my opinion, talk a little about society, do a little bit of satire and that’s been great, man. A lot of people don’t have that platform.”

 

Finally came his biggest-budgeted movie, “Land of the Dead” (2005), his fourth Zombie film, but sadly inferior to the previous three. Even though it was his biggest budget ever, it was still $10 million less than someone else’s remake of one of his earlier films released just the previous year.

 

“Dairy of the Dead” came two years later. There was nothing in between. As it was another Zombie film, one has to wonder if Zombies were all that anyone was willing to finance for him. The fact that it was extremely low budgeted (only 13% of his pervious film, which had been profitable) seems to confirm that.

 

Romero did insist that it was his choice, “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.”

 

This movie made money, but only tiny money. It was not well-marketed or distributed, but still pulled in about two-and-a-half-times its initial budget. Still, budgeted at $2 million, that’s still only a meager $5.5 million, or just slightly less than two of Donald Trump’s golf trips to Marti Largo while he was President.

 

This film is inferior to the first three, but superior to the fourth. Like its predecessors, it was political, but in its best moments, it reflected a then-67-year-old Director being aware of the cultural phenomena he’d created and sitting back and having some fun goofing on it.

 

It’s a Pseudo-Documentary/Found Footage film, all the rage in low-budget Horror since the mega-success of Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s “The Blair Witch Project” (1999). Set in Pennsylvania (as are most Romero’s) but filmed in Canada (I’ll get back to that), it both justifies and mocks its conceit as the main characters are film students making a project for school. The project just happens to be a Mummy film (think Zombies for White People before Romero reinvented Zombies) and before the Horror begins there’s some wonderful in-jokes about the silly fan-debate concerning if fast-or-slow Zombies being scarier (Romero’s Zombies have always been slow and shambling, but since the non-Romero “The Return of the Living Dead” (1988), allegedly based on a sequel to “Night of …” penned by Romero’s one-time collaborator John A. Russo, the animated corpses seem to run faster and faster every year).

 

 

Importantly, these poor kids, and their teacher, don’t know anything about the Zombie Apocalypse, because they haven’t seen any of Romero’s films, so they don’t know what to do like the audience does. The previous films were in chronological order, but this one goes back to the very first days of Hell on Earth (a date-less past that could be 1968, 1978, or maybe last Monday as this film includes laptops, the internet, and cell phones), and even features a short-scene involving characters who appeared in “Dawn of …” though characters that most of the USA audience won’t recognize, as they only made it into the Italian cut of the film.

Our lead is Michelle Morgan, who plays Debra Moynihan. She’s both immensely likable and grating, as she represents the elements of the film that are simultaneously dead-on target and ill-conceived in the same gesture. In her opening narration, we learn she’s a survivor, and refers to her boyfriend Jason in past-tense so we know he’s already dead. She’s finishing his film, “The Death of Death,” an accidental documentary created only because Jason just happened to have a camera on hand for the End of the World. Reflecting many who talked with too much self-absorption about their 9/11 experiences, she both totally true and really annoying with almost every word. She admits upfront that in assembling the film she added a dramatic score and engaged in editing indulgences because … well … don’t believe her explanation, she’s an art student, and that’s just what they do.

 

Joshua Close is her boyfriend Jason Creed. He hides behind the camera for most of the film. He had more interest in Documentaries than the Horror film he was making in the first scenes, and clings with desperation to the idea that having the camera is the same thing as doing something important. The scariest sequence in the film is early on, when the main cast find an abandoned hospital and finally start to fully accept their new reality. It climaxes with a demonstration of Jason’s deranged obsession with documenting this new reality proves he’s still in denial, just in a different way than the Zombie-deniers.

 

Shawn Roberts plays Tony Ravello. He’s another student, but a tough guy from New York City, not one of the simpering trust-fund kids from Pennsylvania area. He’s the movies most stand-up guy. Debbie should’ve sooooo be dating him instead of Jason.

 

Scott Wentworth plays Andrew Maxwell, the student’s Professor and almost the only person over thirty-five-years-old in the cast. Though clearly meant to be Romero’s stand-in, the key elements of the character presented are things we don’t associate with Real-Life Romero -- He’s an immigrant, a former soldier, and an alcoholic. As the film progresses, he becomes increasingly disgusted with the processes of documenting the crisis, even though that is what he supposed to be teaching these kids. Even disgusted, he keeps insisting the kids keep the documentation up. He’s also the most skilled with a handgun, but still hands it over to another, knowing it must be used, but, like the camera, unwilling to use it himself. (Later, proves pretty good with a bow-and-arrow.)

 

Philip Riccio plays Ridley Wilmott, a spoiled little rich kid, and by design, the film’s most annoying character. When his role as the Mummy is interrupted by the End of the World being reported by the news, he must be credited with being the first do the smartest thing, go to his family’s house, which is huge, isolated, and kind of a fortress. All others eventually follow a similar path, but Jason first insists they rescue Debra from the college dorm, then they drive to Debra’s home. In the end, after several bleak adventures, they land at Ridley’s house for the finale. 

 

There are several more characters, several deliberately, thinly, sketched at first, just so Romero can surprise you with their intelligence and pluck later on (Romero has always been a master of thumbnail characterization). A notable thing about this film is that it differs from all previous ones in that that though it gives you some characters your supposed to like less than others, it doesn’t dwell on human venality. With all the rhetoric about media manipulation that impresses itself on this script, “Diary of …” has the most positivistic view of humanity of any of Romero’s Zombie flicks. In “Night of …” Romero killed everyone. With “Dawn of …” he did the same thing in the first draft of the script, but then relented and let two people live. The survival rate of central characters has increased with each successive film. I guess with old age, Romero’s just turned into a softie.

 

There’s basically two ways to tell a tale of the Zombie Apocalypse, Base-Under-Siege or Road-Film. Romero mostly ignored the Road-Film option until this one. The various episodes along the way swing from the nightmarish (the hospital) to the hilarious-but-gruesome (a very funny bit with a deaf-mute Amish guy played by R. D. Reid).

The film also returns to Romero’s always interesting approach to racial-issues.

 

In “Night of …” the original script called for the lead to be a working-class White guy, but he was impressed enough with actor, Duane Jones, to reinvent the hero as an educated Black guy. Even with that change, the film never brought up the issue of race, both bold and subversive in an era when the Freedom Riders were still riding.

 

In “Dawn of …” he did the same thing with his new lead, Ken Foree, a Black cop who takes charge.

 

In “Day of …” he still cast a Black lead, Terry Alexander, but this time around, the was nothing subversive in it; by 1985 it seemed that prominent Black players in any ensemble wasn’t bold, just normal. 

 

Romero’s faith in the successes of the Civil Rights movement seemed undermined by the time he got to “Land of …” made in 2005 and released just months before the Federal Government left the majority-Black city of New Orleans drown in a Hurricane. He cast Eugene Clark as a Black Zombie, suddenly more self-aware, leading a racially-diverse revolution to literally “eat the rich.”

 

Here, all our main characters are White (well, they are pampered college kids, aren’t they?) but they also encounter a group of Black Revolutionaries led by Martin Jamie Roach, who now control (or think they control) Pittsburgh because all the White folks fled. Roach’s character is clearly in the same mold Forbee’s from “Dawn of …” and given how reasonable and co-operative he and his cadre prove to be, seem to reflect Romero’s idealized view of the by-then long-defunct Black Panthers.

 

Soon after leaving the Black Revolutionaries behind, there’s an encounter with rogue National Guardsmen (all-White). These are the characters carried over from “Dawn of …” (or at least the Italian release of the film) and led by actor Alan van Sprang, so not the same actor from thirty-years prior. They’re thieves, but not really villainous, and would by the leads in Romero’s next (and last) Zombie film, “Survival of the Dead” (2009).

 

I get the impression that Romero’s embrace of the Pseudo-Documentary/Found Footage motif was not only for the satirical possibilities, but also because it would make the movie cheap, fast, and easy. In later interviews, it was clear it was cheap, but as for the other two things … well … “It was hell, man! We were shooting 360 around the room. We were doing 8-page shots. It really needed to be choreographed down to the shoelaces. It was really, really tough. The DP [Director of Photography, Adam Swica] did a great job making it seem very off-handed but it wasn’t at all. It required more discipline than anything in ‘Land of Dead’ or anything else I’ve ever done.”

 

 

Unlike even lower-budgeted “Blair Witch …” which inspired this, or mega-budgeted “Cloverfield,” which Romero must have been unhappy to learn he was competing with the same year, he wanted professional camera work, not the jumpy unstableness that one would expect from the YouTube generation. Perhaps because he, like many in the other two film’s audiences, was made physical ill by that stuff.

 

Though done on the minimum budget, the newest, and presumably most expensive, FX tech came into play. Computer Generated Imagery is an illusion associated with big-budget films, but it has, in fact, made some things a bit cheaper. “Some of these effects are fantastic. Actors don’t let you melt their heads, so some of those things were predictably CG … We shot this film – the principal framework of it – in twenty days; then we did three days extra. The whole idea is to get off the set, so it’s a lot easier to have somebody hold up a gun and a zombie falls. Then you paint in the flash and paint in the splatter.” In the old days, wounds exploding with blood were done with squibs, and if the squib blew off-cue, one needed a costume change, clean the walls, and reshoot.

 

Romero already had a rough draft of this script while working on “Land of …” It concerned an issue that fascinated him: As we moved into an Internet-driven Society, what if documenting reality resulted in distancing ourselves from it? From Debra’s narration, describing a car crash on a freeway, “But we don’t stop to help, we stop to look.”

 

Media-manipulation was a part of “Dawn of …” which had early scenes at a local news station where the staff didn’t know what to say, so they lied instead. That is in evidence here too, like when a Police chief (played by Romero himself) denies the existence of Zombies and blames it all on Immigrants, but the focus is on the greater unreliability of “citizen journalists” and the conquest of opinion over hard news. Debra again, “The more voices there are the more spin there is and the truth becomes that much harder to find.” And, of course, what we see is not raw footage, the opening narration informs us it was manipulated.

One of the odder elements of Romero’s career is that he often extracted better performances from no-name casts (every Zombie movie except “Land of …”) than big-name casts (so, “Land of …”). That is true here, though there are more big names than you might realize. With so much TV, radio, and internet news worked into the storytelling, Romero reached out to his many friends in the cinema and Horror community, and got some surprising narrators for tiny roles like Simon Pegg, Wes Craven, Stephen King, Guillermo Del Toro, and Quentin Tarantino.

 

Romero is associated with Pittsburgh more than any other film-maker in the USA, but certainly not the only, nor the first. Romero’s first paid job was for Fred Rodger’s for the classic children’s TV show “Mr. Rodger’s Neighborhood” (first aired in 1962, then produced in Canada, but moving production to Pittsburgh in 1966). After enjoying a couple of decades of Pittsburgh’s most famous film-maker Romero was pleased that USA film-making suddenly discovered the beauty of his city:

 

“[F]or a while there, it looked like it was going to become a production center. The city was talking about building stages and stuff, because man, there were a couple of $400 million years. Everybody was shooting in Pittsburgh. ‘Silence Of The Lambs’ [1991] … I mean, big movies were coming there to shoot…

 

“But what really kicked Pittsburgh off was a movie called ‘Flashdance’ [1983] that shot there, and made Hollywood discover Pittsburgh. Beautiful city, tremendously diverse. I mean, you could make it look like the 1800s, like ‘Mrs. Soffel’ [1984], or you could make it double New York. And you get 15 minutes out of town and you're in the mountains or in farm country. So, there were a lot of advantages to shooting there, and it was very friendly to producers.”

 

Well, the good thing didn’t last:

 

“But all of a sudden it dried up! I was used to working with friends and a sort of family of colleagues, and everybody moved away in order to get work. So that was one of the reasons I left. And then the first film that we shot in Canada, ‘Bruiser,’ [2000] we had a limited budget, but in Canada, we were able to get 20 percent extra on the dollar. So, we went to shoot there, and I just fell in love with it. Fell in love with the crews, and just loved working there. So, when we did ‘Land Of The Dead,’ [set in Pittsburgh, despite the actual filming locations] we went back, firmed up some relationships with people that we'd worked with before, and it was terrific. Again, sort of having a family of people that you really enjoy working with. It's no longer as economic, because I think the Canadian dollar is now stronger than ours—or at least it was a few days ago—so there aren't those advantages. But I just love working there.”

 

A last note before I go:

 

 

All of Romero’s Zombie flicks (and pretty much everything he ever did) we intended as social satires. Unlike the first three, and a bit too much like the fourth, “Dairy of …” it’s heavy handed in its dialectic. As Manohla Dargis put it, “Having already scared the stuffing out of us with his past films, Uncle George has decided it’s time for a good talk.”

 

 

It’s a legit criticism, but not a deal-killer for me. Early in the film Jason complains to Ridley, “There’s always a market for horror — believable horror.” Since the surprise success of “Night of …” an absurdist nightmare if there ever was one, various Writers and Directors have tried to give us Romero-style Zombies that stake a little ground in Scientific realities in an attempt to make them scarier, but mostly they only give us the empty rhetoric of a Bela-Lugosi-style Mad Scientist (Romero himself deftly mocked this in “Day of …”).

 

Romero has never explained his Zombies in any meaningful manner, his “believable horror” is wholly in how we respond to crisis we don’t understand. Here, it may be a bit too heavy on the narration, but there’s not a moment we don’t believe these kids as they’re trapped in a nightmare not of their making …

 

And that is believable horror.

 

Trailer:

Diary of the Dead - Official Trailer (2007) - YouTube