The Zombie Diaries (2006)

I wouldn’t be surprised that anyone familiar with George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead would think I am talking about that film, giving it an incorrect or alternate title. Maybe they would think this is a rip-off of that film. But both of those are incorrect.

The Zombie Diaries is a film that has no connection to George A. Romero and was released before Diary of the Dead (which I will hopefully be watching soon). Instead, it is an independent British film released in 2006 (DVD in 2007).

The film revolves around three groups of people, all conveniently having a hand-held camera in order to film the zombie invasion of the UK. Thankfully, the people behind the camera do explain why they have the cameras with them, even if it is basically “because we might come across something interesting.” All of these groups of people are made up of your ordinary British civilians trying to cope with living in a Britain full of zombies. We’ve all seen it done before.

But for some reason this film seems to do it well. Sure, the acting can get pretty poor at times and there being not so much of a story, but it’s interesting to see how people cope with the invasion. It is obviously taking a lot of influence from the Romero films, concentrating on the people more than the zombies. This is very refreshing and something I prefer compared to the extent films seem to concentrate on the zombies these days.

I also find that this coupled with the fact that we can tell there is a real person behind the camera really helps. A lot of the films in this sub-genre seem to forget there is someone holding the camera, making it so that they don’t do anything when they really should do. But in The Zombie Diaries we see the person putting the camera down and running over to help their friends.

Sadly, the use of a hand-held camera can get rather nauseous and I couldn’t quite understand what was going on because the camera was shaking too much. Though I didn’t like it I feel it did help me feel the confusion and horror the characters felt at the time.

Which is something else this film does well: horror. Some of the moments in this film felt like proper horror. I was getting tense when they slowly opened each door in an abandoned barn, waiting for the undead to appear in one of the rooms. As the undead slowly approached the heroes I was on the edge of my seat, hoping for them to get away. I truly cared for them, hoping they would escape.

I was surprised about how much I liked this film. It was only cost £8,100 to make and at times it shows. But the effects are solid, looking realistic (another testament to actual effects as opposed to CGI), the story is interesting, the characters are likeable and their actions are believable. More horror films need to have the feel of this film, where there is legitimate horror as opposed to jump scares, and more zombie movies need these slow zombies as opposed to the speedy zombies that we see nowadays, which oftentimes don’t make sense or aren’t scary at all.

I seriously recommend this film. It might not be to your tastes, and doesn’t appear to be overly popular, but hopefully you can appreciate it the same way I did.

Final Verdict: 7/10