Fiction turns into reality for a group of film students who set out to shoot a low-budget horror flick in the woods of Pennsylvania. When the dead come to life before their eyes, director Jason Creed decides to capture these startling events with his camera, even as members of his cast and crew become prey to the increasing army of walking corpses that surround them. Mainstream media coverage of this plague is manipulated and unreliable, so the only way to get the real story out to the public is by posting raw footage on the Internet. As the group make their way back home in an old Winnebago, they are met with death at every turn, and the realization sets in that the only remaining audience for Jason's film may be the same undead subjects he is risking his life to document.









Review by white_raven23: Finally, someone does the “Reel” horror right….and it was George Romero. It was a phenomenon that began with Blair Witch Project, a trend more recently pushed back into the limelight by the likes of Cloverfield. But all the prior “live” filmed horror movies made ONE mistake that Romero did NOT make in Diary of the Dead. And my stomach thanks him for it. Diary of the Dead is specifically absent of JigglyJogging camera work. Any sudden camera movement is mercifully brief. It’s like Romero actually took the time to CARE that the major quality that makes so many home movies unbearable, is not the banal content of watching someone else’s kids bicker at the beach for the 20th time, but the nausea inducing camera work. Pans from person to person are cautiously slow instead of ripping from face to face and blurring the surrounds. I did not feel hung over when I walked out of the theater. In fact…it wasn’t until I thought about it today that I realized it. Romero had done a First-person “live” movie perspective film without giving me motion sickness. With this movie, he clearly and openly disputes the “viral Speedzombie” perpetuated by the Dawn remake. In Land, he only clearly disputes the Dawn remake (virus theory) in the director’s cut. In Diary…its back to zombies as he meant them to be, slow, shambling, and the inevitable end result of death by any means other than severe cranial damage. You hang yourself to escape from zombieworld? Your corpse is coming back to life. You die peacefully of old age in bed? Your loved ones will be bringing back the Old Time purpose of having a ‘Wake’ to make sure you stay down. And with Diary, we have come full circle back to the beginning. The socially appropriate message in Night comes all the way back around. Our most threatening enemy has been, and always will be, ourselves. The one theme in Romero’s Dead movies that has never changed. The tools have changed, we’ve traded the analog antenna tvs in for live streaming 24/7 internet, cell phones have replaced the rotary, and we can have cameras and alarms watching our homes every minute. And it just doesn’t matter. The tools changed, but human nature has not. We still panic, we are still afraid of the dark, and we still blunder screaming where we should tread slowly and quietly. We deny to our dying breath that the comfortable rules of life have changed, even as a walking corpse chews our lips off. Damn beautiful movie!

Review by Spraymachine: While not high on action, running for dear life, mass killing, or very violent scenes, it is still a decent zombie flick. I was somewhat disappointed that is came from Romero. I would give it a 2.8/5, while all of Romero's other movies are 3.75+. I was thinking that since they were all film students, they would of seen enough zombie movies to know how to deal with zombies, but they weren't especially knowledgeable. Overall, the movie had a slow pace.