Day of the undead

But dismiss their cultural relevance at your peril. Zombie-meister George A Romero has always understood the inherent metaphors.

Building on Afro-Caribbean voodoo legends, his seminal 1968 Night of the Living Dead echoed public reaction against what seemed like an eternal, unwinnable war in Vietnam.

Today, he calls himself "the Michael Moore of horror."

In a decade dominated by Bush's declaration of war against an abstract noun, Romero's returned, joining the Coen brothers to address the confusion of the populace with a new twist on his tried and tested technique.

On his recent publicity tour, he admitted: "I can't believe all these years later that we elected Bush twice and people are still sitting in front of the television, giving their last dime to some evangelist."

Romero's latest Diary of the Dead catches the troubling zeitgeist, exploiting modern technology to highlight the escalating paranoia that's fuelling restrictive legislation designed to curb the very freedoms that we're supposed to be protecting.

State terrorism aside, a trail of bodies in Sudanese villages and along Baghdad roadsides testifies to an unseen enemy. Arguably, suicide bombers are the "undead," mindlessly bent on killing.

After many decades of being spoofed, ripped off and "homaged," Romero may be forgiven for borrowing Blair Witch techniques for his latest wry and unexpected take on a society increasingly enamoured with the digital.

His very premise - amateurs making a home horror movie unexpectedly document a "real" zombie attack - drives the narrative into social comment.

Have the dead become the undead, haunting us with careless political choices?

We've become footage fetishists. Did it really happen if it's not on camera?

It's not such an idle query, implying doubts about our desperate attempts to shape reality.

Now that technology has democratised film-making and major news outlets utilise publicly supplied clips, where does the authority lie? Who becomes the artistic arbiter?

Such musings seem all too appropriate for a director who acknowledges the influence of both The Tales of Hoffman and Citizen Kane. Even as he channels his anger at the unintended consequences of a society in fear, he still wants to let the genre do its work.

As Debra declares at the beginning of the student film, "I want to scare you."

It's precisely because his films satisfy on the more populist level that Romero's ever able to get production finance. As he laughingly declared on Radio 4, "if they nuked Washington, I could glue zombies onto it and get a movie deal."

Apparently those undead are sturdier than they look.