Already a Diary of the Dead?

From Creature-Corner:

News broke a couple of weeks ago about Romero's new film- Diary of the Dead, and while most were surprised that he wasn't doing one of the many films he's already been attached to, the film being described as Night of the Living Dead meets The Blair Witch intrigued everyone.

Strange thing is that the film has already been made... sort of.

We were recently contacted by Michael Bartlett, director of The Zombie Diaries- which is set for release on October 28th. It does indeed sound very similar to Romero's idea..

We wrote the script in spring 2005 and went into production June of that year. The film was inspired by a film called EVER SINCE THE WORLD ENDED which played at the Raindance Film Festival in October 2001. The idea behind that film was that a documentary crew make a film about the world after it has been ravaged by a virus - they show how people have survived and adapted.

I really liked the idea and think most good DV films take advantage of DV as opposed to trying to make it look like film. The immediacy of OPEN WATER really worked in its favour. However I wanted to make a horror and Kevin was a horror nut who has just completed a horror feature (THE UNSEEN).

Thus Kevin and I wrote the film about three groups of survivors. Instead of making it a 'documentary' we felt the BLAIR WITCH format worked better - i.e. people trying to hurridly document what they could for posterity. We saw a lot of areas that could be improved with this format too. For example, our film has music (which seems initially counter-intuitive but works a treat) and does not have annoying sequences with characters constantly arguing with each other. We also broke the story up and shot in Pulp Fiction style. It jumps across timelines and stories and does a pretty neat job at keeping the viewer's attention, which we felt one single story
wouldn't achieve.

A lot of work went into making this a believable world- as you can tell by the trailer. It definitely seems like the film has that documentary feel down pat, with a little Blair Witch thrown in for good luck. Hopefully the rest of the film will have the same bleak look, as this is definitely an interesting concept.