The true creator of the genre is back for one more: George A. Romero ventures into zombie territory for the fifth time with Diary of the Dead. The movie follows a student film crew that hears reports of the dead coming back to life while shooting a scene. Finding themselves on the run from zombies, the crew films video diaries of everything that happens to them.

“It’s funny, I just kept going back to the well over the years,” Romero said. “The earlier films were each a decade apart. They weren’t really sequels, even in the Writer’s Guild sense of the word. None of the same characters. They just took the same disaster, which could have been a hurricane or a flood. But it happened to be that the dead were coming back to life!”

But rather than simply returning to the well, Romero has always used his genre as a vehicle to take on whatever is happening in the world. From corporate culture to race relations to rich versus poor, Romero's zombies don't just eat brains, they provide social commentary.

With Diary, the messages are about emerging media—“this many-tentacled beast that we’ve all been captured by,” said Romero.

He feels that owning a camera or website does not automatically make you part of a movement. “I feel that it’s creating more tribalism,” Romero said. “That’s all it ever does. There is a line in the film, ‘When there were three networks, there were three lies.’ Now some lunatic Hitler could write a blog and have more followers than he ever had in Germany. There is the danger in it. We have long been reliant on media, but at least it used to be managed, for good or bad.”

While the past Romero zombie efforts had successively bigger budgets, the writer-director loved going back to his roots both in story and in production for Diary. The film takes place as if the other stories did not happen.

“What I wanted to do with this film is have a situation where I completely control it,” Romero said. “Live or die on it, [it is] me all the way. It really did transplant me back to the roots with a little more knowledge, a little more skill, and that was terrific.”

Whether or not people clawing their way out of the ground and biting you is scary, Romero likes the humor that comes with the genre, influenced by the tongue-in-cheek EC Comics he grew up reading.

“I have never tried to do scares in the traditional sense. Maybe the first film, maybe. Dawn of the Dead, forget about it man, it was comic book splatter all the way. The blood’s too red. I know people come up to me and say, ‘Oh God, when the Hare Krishna came upstairs it horrified me.’ Man, it made me laugh.”

In Diary of the Dead, Romero also gets in a jab about running versus walking zombies, a long-argued point among fans.

Romero gives 28 Days Later the benefit of the doubt. “Those aren’t zombies, they’re living humans,” he opined. “Just infected somehow. But a dead guy, man, as the character says in the film, his ankles would snap off if he tried to run. Some things about me are just stubborn.”