Zombie maestro lays down the lore, BBC News (via thinkpol)
I was excited about the new Romero film Diary of the Dead and saw it recently. Not very impressive. Not the worst of the five-film mythos, though, that goes to the previous Land of the Dead. That was bad.
Diary wasn't zombie enough. It was too preoccupied with Blair-Witch-Projecty collegiate angst and social commentary on modern media. The gore was disappointingly minimal. Maybe Romero learned too much of a lesson from the Land fiasco, because that film was just a lame B-plot zombie flick with no script quality, and Diary seems too be a failed effort to make a great quality script + zombies. Unfortunately it's too heavy on (poor) script and too light on (mediocre) zombie action, leaving both independent film dorks and zombie horror geeks wanting.
Horror vs. Slasher
"That's where the applause comes from in my films - good zombie kills!" -Romero
Sorry George, but in my experience the greatest applause comes from good human kills. With few exceptions, we don't empathize with zombies so there is no horror in their destruction. There is certainly fascination with the mechanism of death, but it's really just good fun when zombies are destroyed.
The great kills, for cheering or for horror, are when the humans fall prey to zombie depredation. There's always the bastard human everyone hates, and the highlight of the films are when these guys become zombie-jerky. Then there's the inevitable sympathetic character kill, when we mourn (a little bit) for the loss of a good character.
That, in my mind, is part of the distinction between horror films and merely scary or slasher movies. Real horror exploits emotion to create truly gut-wrenching and horrendous scenes, often difficult to watch (and I can only imagine how difficult to film), and their value lies in the psychic trauma they inflict. Slasher films focus on merely on body counts with spectacular death scenes that are often as comedic as they are scary.
I've always though Romero's films danced at the border of horror and slasher, and the best films like Dawn of the Dead did it very well and delivered the goods to both horror and slasher fans, and even squeezed in some respectable social commentary to boot. That was a big part of the problem with Diary: really lame human (and zombie) death scenes, and none of the characters were interesting enough to inspire sympathy or even hatred. I cared no at all when they died off, and the film probably would have ended better had everyone died. It didn't deliver the horror, because you couldn't develop enough connection with the characters to care if they lived or died, and it didn't deliver the hallmark Romero outrageous deaths. Too bad.
Zombies Reinvented
I understand the complaint about running zombies was directed specifically at the Dawn of the Dead remake that trampled his shambling corpse paradigm with fleet-footed dead, but I can't help feeling this is a swipe at all depictions that depart from mobility-challenged undead. George, don't even rip on 28 Days/Weeks. 28 Days Later didn't invent the speedy zombie (I believe that credit goes to the hilariously awesome 1985 Return of the Living Dead), but it put it squarely into the popular conscious. The film reinvigorated the zombie genre, which had gone underground through the 90s, and it's success finally got Romero the funding he needed to do Land and Diary. I believe Day of the Dead would still be the last Romero zombie film were it not for 28 Days.
What Romero owes to 28 Days aside, it and the sequel 28 Weeks Later are excellent films, and true horror films. There are no ludicrously convoluted deaths, and no hilarity when people or 'zombies' die. The films inspire a fantastic moral sickness in me like few other films ever have, and that's what horror is about.
Run, Zombie, Run.
