ZombiePAGES.com

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We get the zombies we deserve. Over five films and four decades the director George Romero’s slack-jawed undead have been our tour guides through a brainless, barbaric America that seems barely hospitable to the living. They lurch across a bigoted civil-rights-era countryside (”Night of the Living Dead,” 1968), claw at a suburban shopping mall (”Dawn of the Dead,” 1978) and wander dazed in an anxious post-9/11 world (”Land of the Dead,” 2005).

Romero is now 68, and his influence has long saturated the cultural mainstream, but he has exhumed his living dead yet again for “Diary of the Dead,” opening Friday in the United States, next month in Britain and in May in Japan. The zombies’ - and Romero’s - current bugaboo? The blogging, uploading, navel-gazing infotainment age.

“It’s scary out there, man,” Romero said, gesturing at a laptop as he sat in his apartment here, chain-smoking Marlboros. “There’s just so much information, and it’s absolutely uncontrolled. Half of it isn’t even information. It’s entertainment or opinion. I wanted to do something that would get at this octopus. It may be the darkest film I’ve done since ‘Night of the Living Dead.’ ”

Since Romero’s head-eating friends made their debut four decades ago in the cult classic “Night of the Living Dead” - now in the National Film Registry - zombie variations have kept coming. Last year alone brought “I Am Legend”; Robert Rodriguez’s “Planet Terror” in “Grindhouse”; “Resident Evil: Extinction”; and “28 Weeks Later.”

Romero’s latest offering seems modest in comparison. “Diary of the Dead” is about a group of Pittsburgh college students shooting a cheapo mummy movie in the woods when the zombies start swarming. These kids will go down filming, and the result is metazombie; a film within the film is called “The Death of Death.” Shot for under $4 million in Toronto (Romero’s hometown for three years or so, since he decamped from Pittsburgh) and starring a largely unknown Canadian cast, “Diary of the Dead” also marks a return to Romero’s signature filmmaking style: cheap, local and studio free.

After the $16 million Universal production “Land of the Dead,” starring Dennis Hopper, Romero decided to scale back. (The movie made about $21 million domestically.) “It was a grueling shoot, and it was all getting too big, too ‘Thunderdome,’ ” Romero said. “I wanted to make something with some film students, find a dentist that would put up a quarter of a million and do it way under the radar for DVD release.” Instead Romero’s producing partner, Peter Grunwald, showed the script to the Los Angeles company Artfire Films, which put up the money. “But we had absolute control,” Romero said, emphatically. The Weinstein Company bought North American distribution rights.

“Diary of the Dead” enters a horror market dominated by all-gore-all-the-time franchises like “Saw” and “Hostel.” “I don’t get the torture porn films,” Romero said. “They’re lacking metaphor. For me the gore is always a slap in the face saying: ‘Wait a minute. Look at this other thing.’ ” The man who made entrails-chomping a horror staple shows restraint in “Diary of the Dead.” Sure, a daughter catches her mom devouring her dad’s heart, but Romero doesn’t linger on it. The moderation was partly a function of the plot: the film is supposedly shot by a film student running for his life, with no time for close-ups. But Romero said he also felt little need to add to the landslide of violent images in the news.

“I was glad to back off the gore in the current political climate,” Romero said. Using stock footage from recent disasters like Hurricane Katrina, Romero makes a dark joke out of a zombified, politically inert populace. The video gamer kids in the movie are either watching horror or recording it, forever at a distance.

“I always thought of the zombies as being about revolution, one generation consuming the next,” said Romero, who has a gentle hippie quality about him (gray ponytail, propensity to use the word “man”). “But I wasn’t trying to come down hard on these kids particularly. This blogosphere thing is our time. All my films are snapshots of North America at a particular moment. I have an ability within the genre to be able to do that.” Among the masters of horror, Romero joked, he has the “the Michael Moore slot.”

Romero was raised in the New York City borough of the Bronx, a horror-comic fan and self-described “film freak” who would ride the subway into Manhattan to rent the reels of “The Tales of Hoffmann” (1951), an outsized Moira Shearer musical based on the Jacques Offenbach opera. On those rare occasions when the movie wasn’t available, he was told that the only other person who took it out was around his age. “And that kid was Martin Scorsese,” Romero said, grinning.

He briefly studied film and drama at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh (then Carnegie Institute of Technology), landing his first paid directing gig shooting documentary segments for the public television children’s show “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.” “Mr. Rogers Gets a Tonsillectomy” may have been his first experiment with gore.

In 1967 Romero and a group of friends pulled together $114,000 and ventured into the woods south of Pittsburgh to shoot “Night of the Living Dead,” a black-and-white horror film inspired by the Richard Matheson novel “I Am Legend.” (Romero said he hadn’t seen the recent Will Smith version.) The book, about the last man alive in Los Angeles, was more vampire than zombie; Romero drafted his own mythology of the undead.

“Before George zombies in movies were voodoo,” said Max Brooks, author of “The Zombie Survival Guide.” “He redefined the zombie as a flesh eater created from science, not magic. He took the zombie from fringe horror to apocalyptic horror. Suddenly they could be anywhere.”

A decade later, after “Night of the Living Dead” had been championed in the pages of Cahiers du Cinema and established a following, Romero set the sequel in a shopping mall. “Dawn of the Dead” is poppy and cartoonish, with zombie escalator gags and canned-music-theme slayings.

“Other zombie movies don’t match George’s eye for satire or wit,” the actor Simon Pegg wrote in an e-mail message. Pegg was a writer and star of the 2004 zombie sendup “Shaun of the Dead.” “Even films such as ‘28 Days Later,’ which I really enjoyed, delivered the allegory but with a very straight face. George seems able to scare, disgust, challenge and amuse, simultaneously.”

In Toronto, and everywhere he goes in the iMovie age he satirizes, people slip Romero homemade zombie movies. “There’s enough of them out there already,” he said with a sigh, though he admitted that he’s working on a sequel to “Diary of the Dead.”

“It always comes down to: ‘Well, what’s your idea? What’s the film about?’ Because zombies alone. …” He laughed. “Like, get off it, man.”