Diary of the Dead is the latest in George Romero's now forty-year-old "[Noun] of the Dead" franchise. It's back-to-basics in tone and production, after 2005's massive Land of the Dead. It would be easy to accuse Romero of trend-hopping, based on the film's "found footage" presentation and release in proximity to Cloverfield and Brian De Palma's Redacted. But the film parts from the recent surge of Blair Witch-ian diegesis by opening with narration: a character explaining that she's edited and produced the film you're about to watch with the intent not just to record but to frighten. Instead of coming off as pretentiously meta, this contextualizing helps you suspend your disbelief. Romero makes the most of that suspension, and the result is a strange movie that succeeds far more often than it fails.

Foregoing the established continuity of the previous Dead films, Diary begins on day one of the zombie apocalypse. A group of film students are shooting a horror movie in the woods when they hear on the radio that the dead are rising from the grave. It's a simple set-up, colored by Romero's trademark winking humor, but it works thanks to the reactions of the cast. There's no panic, just a dumbstruck acceptance. Protagonist Jason continues to film as the group begins their journey to his girlfriend's home. Where Cloverfield and Blair Witch used a camera-wielding character to emphasize how technology acts as a buffer between humanity and disaster, Jason's compulsion to keep documenting the end of the world is actually the core conflict in Diary of the Dead. The camera, the character it's tied to, and its angry, incredulous subjects emphasize conflicting human impulses during disaster: do I document or do I help. As one puts it, "I want to help them, but I can't, cause I'm fucking plugged in," and to Romero, that about says it all. — John Constantine