Every kid with a taste for horror movies knows that vampires hate garlic, sleep in, and can be dispatched with a wooden stake through the heart. Also that werewolves are allergic to full moons and silver bullets. But these basic ground rules were cobbled together from a mix of fictional sources and ancient folklore, whereas George Romero, starting with Night of the Living Dead and then with its sequel Dawn of the Dead, actually created a new, long-lasting set of basics for a breed of movie monster. There had been zombies in movies before, but they tended to be dullish, pop-eyed stranglers whose strings were being manipulated by the local voodoo master. Now, thanks to Romero, everybody knows that zombies are carniverous and can only be taken out with a brain-pulverizing blow to the head. Now Romero is getting proprietorial about it. In his new Diary of the Dead, a student crew filming a mummy movie argues over whether a mummy could run; the director is clearly on the side of the guy who says that "dead things" can't move fast because "their ankles would snap." Speaking to the BBC as his movie arrives in Britian, Romero acknowledges that there is a trend build to update his concept by flooding theaters with fast zombies, and he ain't having it.

The "fast zombie" prototype can be found in 28 Days Later, even though the frothing speed freaks in that movie are not, strictly speaking, "zombies." They're living people suffering from a kind of hyper-rabies, and in the end of the movie they basically starve to death, but there's enough of a family resemblance to Romero's creatures that it's easy to understand why so many have, adopting a kind of genre shorthand, referred to it as "a zombie movie." What really hurt was when Zach Snyder's 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead came out and betrayed a clear 28 Days Later influence. Romero, who didn't have a hand in that movie, was horrified to see zombies sprinting around in a movie nominally connected to his own body of work. "Zombies don't run. They can't! Their ankles would snap. What did they do — wake from the dead and immediately join a health club?" Perhaps to avoid asking Romero just how much actual research he had done in this area, the BBC also asked him the seeming prevalence of the "found-footage" gag that his new movie, like Cloverfield and Redacted, is built around. "We thought we were going to be the first ones out there," says Romero. "But now we have to settle for being part of a trend. I guess there must be some sort of a collective subconscious."