Zombie godfather stockpiling ideas
A box office-gobbling monster trashing New York City in Cloverfield generated plenty of heat for its narrative told through a hand-held video camera. In Park City, Utah, however, another kind of genre film, implementing the same storytelling technique (and made before Matt Reeves’ blockbuster) recently screened at the Sundance Film Festival. Audiences digested George A. Romero’s latest horror offering Diary of the Dead which played during the fest’s Park City at Midnight program.
ShockTillYouDrop.com met up with the writer-director to talk about his modern zombie opus. And while we discussed everything from its place in undead universe to the guerilla nature of the production, the topic of Artfire Films’ proposed untitled sequel was inevitably broached.
“I would love to do it, if it happens,” he says. “Right now I think it is going to happen which is great for me because there’s a lot that I didn’t talk about yet in [‘Diary’]. This would be the first time, if it happens, that I will do a direct continuation. Those same characters from ‘Diary’ will come out of that room [we left them in] and will march on. There was a lot I wanted to say that I couldn’t squeeze in.”
When Land of the Dead was released in 2005, Romero expressed interest in doing an immediate follow-up, if Universal was interested. “What I did at the end of ‘Land’ is this detente. They don’t blow the zombies away, there’s an understanding, I always thought, during the initial four films, if there’s any way to end this, it has to end with some sort of peaceful coexistence. I didn’t want to go to Armageddon.”
And with that original arc (somewhat) closed, Romero’s eager to explore the new beginnings Diary of the Dead poses. “Thematically, there’s so much you can do with just the dangers of us being ‘plugged in.’ Just the dangers of this thing. I’m not down on media, it’s down on making this mechanism available to anybody. It’s bad enough I have to listen to Arianna Huffington, now I’ve got to listen to Joe Blow from Chicago.”
Our full interview with Romero is forthcoming.
Source: Ryan Rotten
