A group of film students shoot zombies in more ways than one in this found footage flick from 2007, the fifth chapter in George A. Romero’s zombie saga.

This is the only entry in the series that is not a continuation of the ongoing story, instead retelling the start of the Zombie outbreak. It could be viewed as a 21st-century remake of Night of the Living Dead; a self-referential retake about young filmmakers from Pittsburgh making a zombie movie, which also updates the original’s newsreel style for a modern riff on citizen journalism.

In a way it is sad to see the ultimate trendsetter following the found Footage fad (this was the era of Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity), but Romero uses the format as a vehicle for what turns out to be remarkably prescient commentary; how do we navigate the truth in a digital sea of voices all spouting opposing versions of reality? This was years before the Covid pandemic, the Capitol attack, the Arab Spring and the Christchurch shooting, but the picture discusses the merits and horrors (mainly horrors) of social media that those events would later expose.

And the word “discusses” is unfortunately accurate. Not only does every conversation spell out the film’s arguments, each is immediately followed by a voice-over explaining exactly what the conversation meant. It is a shame for a film with such intelligent ideas to so readily insult our intelligence, and nowhere is this more apparent than the embarrassingly contrived ending. The film begins with the students shooting a hokey horror movie where a girl is attacked by a mummy, and ends (spoiler alert) with the guy inexplicably still dressed as the mummy attacking the girl for real. “This is like a goddamn mummy movie!” she helpfully observes.

Diary of the Dead is a welcome return to Romero’s independent roots after the big-budget blandness of Land of the Dead, and is probably one of the more interesting uses of found footage. But the constant need to explain things like why the footage has non-diagetic sound (“I’ve added music for effect”) gets in the way of basic storytelling, not least because the audibly bored narrator (Michelle Morgan) sounds like she doesn’t want to be there. Maybe she thought she was auditioning for The Vampire Diaries.