YouTube, Not Zombies, Indicates the Downfall of Society

If the apocalypse were to happen today, would you think to quickly grab your video camera in order to capture footage for YouTube? George A. Romero thinks so, and believes this insensitivity makes you worse than the zombies that inhabit his films.

Diary of the Dead is the fifth film in Romero’s zombie series that began with 1968’s classic Night of the Living Dead. His work is less about gore than it is about critiquing the society of the time. His 1979 film Dawn of the Dead focused on the consumerist market that drove society. Day of the Dead, 1985, can be seen as examining post-nuclear holocaust survival, and his 2005 effort, Land of the Dead, is a blatant critique of American business and poverty.

Diary of the Dead is stylistically different—it is shot from a first-person perspective (à la The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield), depicting a group of teens recording the beginning of a zombie invasion.
Filming this installation of the Living Dead series represented a challenge for the now 68-year-old director, as using a personal handheld camera required a completely different style of filmmaking. “Setup usually took six hours,” he said. “It really required a lot more discipline. We never lost a shot from an actor blowing a line, but when something accidentally fell into the shot.”

There was also a large change in how Romero approached the zombies in the film. This was his first time working on digital film, and some scenes required CGI, which he had never used before in his films. “I would love to use mechanical effects all the way through, but it’s a 20-day shoot. It becomes easier when you can say ‘shoot it flat and fix it later.’ I miss editing on film though, and I wish there was more time.”

And while his film is a horror flick, he really does not care about his zombies as much as his themes. “My films don’t have stories,” he said. “They have ideas. The story always comes after the idea. It’s always the sociopolitical idea that comes to me first.”
Romero’s zombies move slowly—he is less interested in them than the strange kids that seem obsessed with feeding into the media machine. Halfway through the film, one of the students finds a computer and quickly adds his amateur footage to MySpace, and then screams in happiness when he gets 72,000 hits in eight minutes, completely oblivious to the zombie apocalypse.

Romero appeared at a screening of the film in Times Square, sponsored by the Museum of the Moving Image, to speak with an excited crowd about the similarities between the media and zombies.

“I know that as a journalist, what you’re supposed to do is document. But isn’t there a line of humanity?” he said. “We’re all being co-opted by this octopus of new media. You see something happening outside your window? Get a shot of it and send it to CNN. Everybody wants to be a reporter. There’s a tremendous attraction to it, and I think there’s a tremendous danger as well.”

And Romero’s film sticks to that idea. Throughout the film, a voice-over warns us about the danger of becoming immune to the violence around us. Romero called it his most angry film since his original Night, and criticized other filmmakers for not putting their emotion into their work.

Romero also criticized the current generation of horror films that dominate the screens, better known as torture porn. He seems distraught that films such as Saw or Hostel could even exist. “Is there even a reason for that torture porn?” he asked. “If there is, please let me know, because I just don’t see it. It’s almost as if these new directors are afraid to add a human element to the whole thing. There is no purpose to the killing, just blood. That isn’t scary to me—it’s pointless. I’d rather go home and watch Beauty and the Beast.”

In the end, Diary of the Dead stands as another cautionary tale from one of the greatest horror directors alive. As our generation continually pumps videos, pictures, and audio into MySpace and Facebook, Romero warns that we may be cutting ourselves off from society. This modern society may be much more dangerous than the dead rising up to walk the Earth.