After the disappointing Land of the Dead, George Romero’s latest foray into zombie territory is both something of a return to his indie roots and a reboot of the whole franchise that wipes the slate clean and starts the story afresh. Diary of the Dead (Optimum £22.99) begins with a group of student film-makers shooting a cheesy horror film in the woods (“There’s always an audience for horror,” one of them intones) who soon find that such gothic fictions can’t keep pace with the stream of real-life horr­ors coming at them via radio, TV and the Internet. Yes, the dead are walking, and despite initial suspicions of a Welles-style media hoax, we’re soon in the familiar territory of Romero’s Zombieland. But, like Cloverfield and The Mist, this is a post-9/11, post-Katrina take on the genre, and its central conceit, like Cloverfield’s, is to pose as ‘real-life’ footage, evid­ence of our current compulsion to record – to blog, to video, to upload – every detail of an unfolding disaster, bypassing the ‘official version’ offered by the government and mainstream media. Which soon fall silent, leading one character to observe: “Now it’s just us: bloggers, hackers, kids.” While George might want to be down with the kids, this particular diary doesn’t have the freshness Blair Witch possessed a decade ago or the blockbuster credentials of this year’s Cloverfield – and with the ætiology of zombiedom so well known from previous films (not to mention the cure: Yes! Shoot ‘em in the head, dammit!) there’s not much Romero can do to surprise us here. Nevertheless, Diary is a modest, enjoyable movie which attempts to rethink Night of the Living Dead’s social commentary in terms of a different media age.

The bluntly (and rather misleadingly) titled Zombies (Wicked Little Things in the US; Momentum, £15.99) on the other hand, is as trad as you can get. Young widow Karen (Lori Heuring) and her two daughters settle in the Pennsylvania backwoods only to discover – when the youngest daughter makes a new imaginary friend – that the place is haunted by zombie kids killed in a mining accident back in 1913 and still out for revenge. The nasty little nipp­ers aren’t really zombies at all, in my book, and this isn’t so much a flesh-munching shocker as an old-fashioned tale of the grateful dead, in which a wrong must be avenged before these junior revenants can find their rest. JS Cardone’s film is nicely shot and decently acted, but ultimately too nice and too predictable to shine.

There are more imaginary friends, spooky kids and long-unrighted wrongs in Juan Antonio Bayona’s The Orphanage (Optimum, £19.99), in which Laura (Belen Rueda), along with her husband and adopted son Simon, returns to the rambling house where she grew up with hopes of turning it into a school for children with special needs. The orphanage’s previous inmates, though, still seem to be in residence and have a particular interest in Simon. Exec produced by Guillermo del Toro, this is for the most part a genuinely spooky experience, playing on our memories of everything from the Lost Children of Peter Pan to the teasing ambiguities of The Turn of the Screw. Ultimately, it’s also unexpectedly magical and affirmative, somewhat in the mode of, if not in the same league as, del Toro himself.

After zombies and spooky kids we turn, unfortunately, to another staple of the genre: the unhinged family of rural maniacs. There are days when one would gladly strangle the likes of Herschell Gordon Lewis and Tobe Hooper for unleashing this seemingly never-ending cinematic curse upon us all. This month brings two of the worst offenders in a while: Xavier Gens’s Frontiers (Optimum, £17.99) is an irritating attempt at splicing a confused political satire on Sarkozy’s France with a typical ‘torture porn’ scenario in which some unsympathetic young Parisian looters end up in a remote hostel run by inbred neo-Nazi cannibals. As well as being derivative (particularly of 2006’s much better Sheitan) and devoid of anything to say, it’s genuinely unpleasant and best avoided.

Then there’s Peter Stanley Ward’s Small Town Folk (DNC, £15.99), an amateurish and unfunny British horror-comedy about the unsavoury inhabitants of the village of Grockleton, made for a mere £4,000. (Ward appeared in 2004’s equally grim super-cheapie Freak Out). Imagine TV’s League of Gentlemen remade by a bunch of retarded teenagers with a penchant for badly done gore and you’ll get the picture…