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Don't expect to see George Romero in line for the next sequel to 28 Days Later. As the legendary horror director told SuicideGirls when we sat down with him last week, he's just too old-school to get excited by this new generation of running, jumping zombies who look like they "just came from the gym." It's that touching dedication to a bygone era of brain-eating that makes Romero a fan favorite with a rabid following -- his quirky Coke bottle-glasses and grandfatherly demeanor have turned him into something of a Stan Lee for the horror set -- and this week will see the opening of his fourth zombie movie since 1968's landmark Night of the Living Dead.

Some may be surprised at what a dramatic departure Diary of the Dead is from Romero's previous film, 2005's Land of the Dead, which was a relatively big-budget, sprawling action-horror film about a world overrun with zombies. That film had stars and a progressive spin on zombiedom -- in the story, the undead start to learn and become self-aware -- but all of that has been chucked for Diary, which is another low-budget Day One story, an updated version of Night of the Living Dead, in which a group of blog-savvy film students document an initial outbreak of zombies. As Romero waited for a Girl Friday at the Weinstein Co.'s Manhattan office to bring him a gin and tonic, we discussed his new film and exactly why he wanted to go back to the beginning.



Ryan Stewart: Land of the Dead was your biggest zombie movie to date, by far. What made you want to go back to the basics with Diary, and do another zombie "origin" story? Was doing a sequel to Land too costly?

George Romero: No, man. I had an idea that I really wanted to do something about this emerging media. I had this perception that it's really getting dangerous out there. Everybody is a reporter and the whole blogosphere is becoming, you know ... I joke about it and I say that if Jim Jones had a blog, millions of people would be drinking Kool-Aid. It seems to me that any lunatic out there with an argument -- it may be radical but if it sounds halfway reasonable, it's gonna get millions of followers, just like that. It seems to be creating tribes and we don't need more tribes. In that sense, it just strikes me as dangerous. People are getting seduced, they're being invited in by CNN and everybody else, "Hey, there's a tornado, go get me a shot of it, man!"

RS: That's interesting, that you don't see the emergence of the blogosphere as a democratization of information. More information is not necessarily more empowering to people, then?

GR: No, I don't think it is, cause it's not information. It's opinion. It's not straight information, never. In some cases it's not even spin, it's just what somebody happens to believe.

RS: Wasn't it always sort of that way, to an extent?

GR: Sure, but it was controlled. It was being managed. There was nothing out there that was incitable, I don't think. I find this as sort of ... it's a bit too radical to say "letting the lunatics running the asylum" but that's potentially what it is. People don't do their homework, that's the problem. You know, Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in America. Now, it might be Joe Blow from Cincinnati, who just happens to have a blog up that people are loving. And that's all preaching to the converted. People who tune in to Limbaugh already know what he's going to say and they already agree with him, so it's just self-reinforcing and I think that it's not good. I mean, my big fear is that people can't handle it all. They're not discriminating enough to be able to say, "That's bullshit." Nobody bothers to see through it, so they take it as gospel. They go quote it, "You know what I heard? I heard this!"

RS: How does that tie into the opening scene of Diary, where we're watching a news team on the scene at an apartment building where there's been some drama involving an immigrant family there. Is your fear that people are passively watching this kind of stuff, consuming it, without being emotionally affected?

GR:Yeah, partly that. Also, I was just trying to trace this legend over the course of those three days and how the mainstream [media] sort of -- first you see it lying and then it sort of collapses and the Internet takes over. I wish I could have gone further with it. If there is a possibility of a sequel, I'd actually love to do it, cause there's a hell of a lot more. I'd love to go further with that theme. But to answer your original question, I wanted to do something about that and I felt that the only way, or at least the idea that I had for that, was that I would start out with a bunch of film students that have a camera and they're out shooting a student project when the shit hits the fan. I felt that needed to be on the first night, so I said, "I'll just start over on the first night." There are collections of short stories, "Book of the Dead" and "Book of the Dead 2", they're all collections, stories by horror and sci-fi writers, of things that happened to other people on that same night -- the night of the living dead. So I said, "Well, if they can do it I can do it!" So I decided to go back and ... you know, all those ideas just fell into place. Plus, I really wanted to get back to the roots. I mean, I liked Land of the Dead, I was very satisfied with it, but it seemed like it was just getting too big, you know? It had lost touch with its roots.

RS: That's surprising, because that's the movie where you seem to show a great interest in doing something new with zombies, pushing the mythology forward a little bit. For example, I want to know what happened to Big Daddy [the self-aware zombie.] Maybe he's got his high-school diploma by now, for all I know. Are you interested in pushing that whole thing any further?

GR: I am and I would be -- I don't have the idea for it yet. I mean, where do you go? Does it go Planet of the Apes? You know what I mean? I don't know how far you can go with that. Do they start farming? I don't know. I haven't found an idea that I thought would be ... reasonably believable. I haven't found it yet and I don't know where to go with it. If I think of something, sure, I would try and write something. But also, I just like the idea of just starting another, parallel set of stories.

RS:You know what Roger Ebert said about it? He said you should do a sequel set entirely inside Fiddler's Green [the heavily-fortified apartment tower in Land where all the rich, white people live securely, while everyone else fends off zombies outside.] We only focus on the drama inside, and we never see zombies, except maybe at the windows.

GR: [Laughs] Just the drama inside, yeah. Beyond the Valley of the Zombies! You know, that would be great.

RS: By the way, why did you choose a mummy movie for your film-student kids to be shooting when the zombie outbreak happens? Is that something you attempted as a kid, or was it just something simple?

GR: Yeah, I loved the old Christopher Lee Mummy. I was still young enough that I thought it was terrific, and I like the idea of a slow, lumbering creature, you know? That was always more scary to me than something that ... Michael Myers never hurries up, right? He just walks.

RS: Sure. Jason Vorhees, same kind of deal.

GR: Yeah. But he's still there, you know? So, it's all part of that reaction, a sort of running joke in the film, that dead things don't move fast. So I thought I'd use [a mummy] because that was the first thing that came to my mind when I thought about this -- slow-moving, you can drill him full of holes, but he just keeps coming very deliberately at you. To me that's much scarier than these things all wearing Nikes and they all, like, just came from the gym.

RS: So you're not on board with the new generation of zombies that flat-out run at people, chase them, like in the 28 Days Later movies.

GR: Oh boy, I don't believe they can do it. I mean, the stuff I said in the film is exactly [what I think.] I think their ankles would snap. It doesn't make sense to me. I used to get asked, after the Return of the Living Dead movies, "Well, how come your guys aren't coming up out of graves?" Because no individual zombie has the strength to dig through all that mahogany, man. So there's a little set of rules there, anyway, that keeps it, at least in my mind, somewhat reasonable.

RS: Do you approach your zombie movies the way an A-list actor approaches, say, an action movie? One for them, one for me? Since you're so identified with it, does a zombie movie help you finance other, potentially less bankable or more personal projects?

GR: No, there's certainly not a strategy or a pattern, in any way. When we did Land of the Dead, I was happy to get the gig, I was happy to have a little more money to work with. It wasn't enough -- it was still sort of guerilla filmmaking. We were still basically under-financed, as ambitious as that script was, and no, man, it was just grueling. It was just too hard. I just had this sense of it getting bigger and bigger and, "Where's it gonna go?" So initially I had this idea for Diary and I fleshed out the script. I literally wanted to go to this -- there's a film school called Full Sail in Orlando where I've taught a couple of classes and I've spoken a couple of times -- I wanted to go down there and shoot this movie there, with the kids, completely under the radar, you know, raise money from a couple of dentists and do it almost as a vacation, a school project, and see what happens, you know? Maybe we get a DVD release and I split the money with the school. It was in the back of my mind, like that. But the people at ArtFire read it and said, "No, man, you're throwing it away that way." They said, "We'll give you all the control if you can keep the budget reasonable." So my partner Peter and I, we literally picked at it and picked at it and we got the budget down as low as we possibly could. That was the tradeoff, for having complete control over it.

RS: Are you gonna do the movie about the explorers on the deserted island, Solitary Isle, next?

GR: No, no, it doesn't look like it. These things keep coming back. I worked for years on a project called Diamond Dead, and it looked dead, and I got a phone call two days ago, before I came here, from the producer saying, "We're back!" Sometimes things revive ... you just never know. We'll see.



Diary of the Dead hits theaters today, February 15. For more information, check out the official site here.