Remember when you first watched "Night of the Living Dead," George Romero's classic zombie opus? I do. The movie is dark and creepy and the message seems to be that the world is a pretty hopeless place. That feeling stuck with me more than any other image from the film. Now I'm not dissing Romero's OTHER zombie movies, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, even Land of the Dead, because I love those movies too, but for me, none of them retained that bleak little indie feel, and it's something I wasn't sure Romero would ever capture again. He now has the budget to make his movies "bigger" in every sense of the word, and while "bigger" leads to more gore, more stunts, more mayhem, there's something to be said for that cozy little feel of a small group of characters fighting for their lives while the world is collapsing around them. "Diary of the Dead" is a return to that gritty, bleak spirit that made me love "Night of the Living Dead" so much.

"Diary of the Dead" is set in the YouTube generation, where any event that happens can be videotaped and broadcast all over the world in a matter of minutes with the help of the Internet. Our culture is media-saturated, and we the concerned public are aware that images on the Internet can be altered with photoshop and editing techniques to make it look like something happened when it didn't. We hear that the media does this as well, selectively reporting the news and editing footage to achieve maximum impact and ratings. Quite simply, it's hard to get at the truth these days. But what if something horrible started happening; what if the world as we know it started to crumble around us? The news would spread quickly through viral video on websites like YouTube, and soon everyone with an Internet connection would know that something horrible was happening.

It's a simple enough premise, and it's one that catches him a lot of flack from his friends as he goes around filming each and every event that happens. They see him as cold and detached from reality, not caring about his friends or family or other people who are dying. They don't see that he's just trying to cope, and that documenting these events is all that he has to cling to when the world is coming to an end. It's giving him a purpose, and it's a purpose that becomes more and more necessary as it becomes clear that the media is editing clips and putting them on the news to make it look like things are under control and everything will be ok. Jason wants people to see the horrific truth of what's really happening, and while there are some clips shown from other countries, displaying the zombie mayhem occurring there, this film is mainly concerned with what happens to this small band of survivors. That's what makes it personal.

Of course, what would a zombie movie be without the murder and mayhem and munching? The zombies in this movie are effectively oogy and gooey and nasty. One sequence in a hospital is especially gory, as the group moves from room to room, looking for help but instead witnessing scene after scene of bloody chaos. In this brave new world, every institution upon which we used to rely for help has failed us. As one character put it, from now on, every person who dies will come back. But they won't come back with any higher consciousness, they will exist simply to eat the flesh of the living and make everyone else like them. There is no escape, because eventually, we all must die, and then we will all come back like these creatures. So what are we to do? The best zombie movies ask this question (the best apocalypse movies of any kind, really, but zombie movies are more effective for me because they show humans devolving and becoming a shadow of their former selves... it's the reason Alzheimer's syndrome scares me so much, the thought of losing my consciousness and my ability to reason and philosophize and becoming part of a collective mindlessness). Movies seem afraid to address these issues nowadays. For me, the biggest consequence of the much maligned "PG-13" horror craze is that horror is afraid to be bleak anymore. Instead of beating us over the head with images of what we are and the evil we're capable of, movies seem to need to have a happy ending, or at least a hopeful ending. Even the movies that end with the killer coming back (gasp! He wasn't really dead after all!) would never have the balls to ask the question "Are we worth saving?" What a ridiculous question! Of COURSE we're worth saving, right?

That may be what we believe, but movies that dare to make us even question such a thing are dark and bleak and dangerous, and this movie is all that and more. It's a return to what I loved about Romero's movie, the movie that introduced me to horror, and for that, I'm grateful.

This movie proved to me that Romero hasn't lost his edge. I hope this and "Inside" are good portents, announcing a return to the bleak days when horror was horrible.

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