[Welcome back, readers! With the 2017 Sundance Film Festival beginning this week, we thought it would be fun to take a look back at some of the great midnight movies that have come out of the fest over the years. Be sure to check back here each day this week for more Midnight Memories from Daily Dead!]
After George A. Romero brought Bub to the big screen in 1985’s Day of the Dead, audiences would go on to wait nearly 30 years before his next zombie film, Land of the Dead, shambled into cinemas. Thankfully, the Godfather of the Dead only took a quick breather before returning with his fifth—and arguably most ambitious—zombie movie, Diary of the Dead, which screened at the Sundance Film Festival on January 18th, 2008 (following its 2007 screening at TIFF).
When the film was shown at Sundance in 2008, the Internet was expanding into more homes and sites like YouTube were making it possible for people to easily access videos from around the globe, increasing the intake of news both real and manipulated. The social structure of the world was literally changing overnight for better and for worse. Romero used Diary of the Dead to explore how this new screen-centered society would hold up against a hypothetical zombie apocalypse, and in the process he created an immersive and intimate horror film that raises compelling questions that are still relevant today.
Shot in a found footage style—the entire film is shown via characters’ cameras as well as security camera footage—Diary of the Dead follows University of Pittsburgh students shooting a mummy movie in the woods. When news reports on the radio declare that the dead are waking up and attacking citizens, they gradually realize that they are living a horror story of their own, and aspiring filmmaker Jason (Joshua Close) is intent on filming every second of it.
Does being too plugged into the online world disconnect you from the tangible one in front of you? When his friends search for help in the halls of an abandoned (at least by the living) hospital, Jason stays behind so that his Panavision camera can charge. “I should be with them,” he whispers to himself. “Maybe I could help. But I can’t. I can’t because I’m f***ing plugged in.”
Jason is addicted to filming his friends’ survival story. He uploads, edits, and updates his documentary The Death of Death online, and it quickly becomes a beacon of truth in the midst of online rumors, speculations, and outright lies about the zombie uprising. Jason wants his documentary to save people’s lives, but his absorption into filming his own life puts himself and those close to him at risk.
Romero turns Jason into a fascinating reflection of the pros and cons of constantly being plugged in, of falling in love with the emotional detachment of the camera, of becoming desensitized (like a zombie) to violence by surrounding yourself with news of horrible atrocities on a daily basis. Yes, Jason is helping to inform other survivors of what is really going on out in the crumbling world, but by doing so, he loses touch with the people standing right in front of him, including his girlfriend, Debra (Michelle Morgan).
When Debra makes it to her parents’ house and discovers the terrifying truth of what happened to her family (in a masterfully constructed scene of dread), Jason chooses to cradle the camera in his arms instead of holding the love of his life. After all, he has to keep his distance to document her reaction to her family’s grisly end. As Debra says at one point in the film, “If it’s not on camera, it’s like it never happened, right?”
In addition to its thought-provoking social commentary, Diary of the Dead is admirably ambitious in its scope, featuring one of the most expansive—if not the most expansive—storylines of all of Romero’s living dead films. While the individual movies in Romero’s original Dead trilogy primarily took place in one area—a farmhouse in Night, a mall in Dawn, and an underground bunker in Day—Diary of the Dead’s only main location is the road that Jason and his friends travel in their RV.
Romero gets behind the wheel of that Winnebago, slams his foot on the gas pedal, and literally keeps the plot moving down the highway, creating a horror film that features genuine fear (and his trademark humor) in a wide variety of locations, including the woods, a college campus, a hospital, an urban warehouse, a farm, a suburban home, and a mansion. The result is an all-encompassing look at how the zombie apocalypse affects different communities, and it’s great to see Romero bring his eerie cinematic touch to so many destinations on the road.
And what a blood-stained road it is. On nearly every pit stop that Jason and his friends make, Romero delivers spectacular zombie carnage, finding increasingly clever and entertaining ways to dispatch the living dead, including a defibrillator to the head (complete with fluids spewing out of the eye sockets, followed by a gunshot to the cranium), hydrochloric acid smashed against the brain, a scythe slammed through the skull, and a stick of dynamite tossed by a deaf Amish farmer in a scene that is pure cinematic perfection. Romero does rely a little too much on CGI for the gore, and fans of his earlier work will miss the palpable practical effects of Tom Savini, but the creativity of the kills makes up for the slightly dated CG imagery.
Not much else from Diary of the Dead feels dated, though. In fact, nine years after it screened at Sundance, the fifth film in the Living Dead franchise feels even more relevant now than it did in the mid-2000s. Back then it held up a mirror to our fascination with the online world and the many lies and truths that can be found there, and for the most part, that reflection remains the same.
Diary of the Dead isn’t a perfect movie, and it may often be forgotten in the shadows of its bigger brothers in Romero’s zombie universe, but it features the iconic filmmaker working at the top of his creative game and taking risks on the road—and that’s something to treasure. The next time you feel like watching a Romero movie, consider hopping in the RV and taking a ride down this memory lane for a zombie road trip you won’t soon forget.
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Click here to read more Sundance Midnight Memories from the Daily Dead team.
Raised on a steady diet of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps books and Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Derek has been fascinated with fear since he first saw ForeverWare being used on an episode of Eerie, Indiana.
When he’s not writing about horror as the Senior News Reporter for Daily Dead, Derek can be found daydreaming about the Santa Carla Boardwalk from The Lost Boys or reading Stephen King and Brian Keene novels.
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