Forget Cloverfield! I'm going with zombie master George A. Romero for using a handheld digital camera to cut deep into the YouTube-ification of America. The Sundance Film Festival offers midnight screenings of new movies to scare the bejesus out of you. And pride of place for 2008 goes to Romero's Diary of the Dead. Yes, it's the fifth chapter in a zombie series that began with the classic Night of the Living Dead forty years ago. The great thing about Romero is that his horror movies always have a subversive subtext. "I see something shitty happening in the world," Romero told me, "and I slap some zombies on it." Romero tacks a wicked laugh onto his statement, but he's dead serious. The something shitty this time—joining dehumanization and consumerism—is our tendency to stick a camera in front of everything. As one college babe tells her student filmmaker boyfriend, "for you, if it's not on film it never happened." Unlike Cloverfield, which uses the woozy handheld camera as a gimmick, Diary of the Dead uses it to ask what the hell out there is turning us into a nation of peeping Toms and Tinas. His characters, in the process of making an amateur horror flick outside of Pittsburgh, find terror for real: the dead are rising from their graves and looking to chow down on new victims. The students try to make their getaway in a Winnebago, but zombies are persistent. A mindblowing sequence in a hospital—one of Romero's most nervefrying— turns a place of safety and healing into a breeding ground for ravenous, drooling creatures who can only be stopped by blowing off their effing heads. And through it all, the camera is always there, showing the worst of us, such as two good old boys using zombies for target practice. Romero is asking us: do we stop at the scene of an accident to help or to look? The best scary movies show the monster invading us from the inside. This is one of the very best.

Here in the cinemas of Sundance, sex is everywhere — at least on screen. As if the sight of Mary Kate Olson making out with Sir Ben Kingsley in The Wackness wasn't enough to make you choke, along comes Choke, an entry in the dramatic competition that twists sex into exotic new shapes. The movie is based on a novel by Chuck Palahniuk, which should tell you something. The author of Fight Club cooked up fresh shocks in this one.The book opens with these words:

"If you're going to read this, don't bother. After a couple of pages, you won't want to be here. So forget it. Go away. Get out while you're still in one piece. Save yourself."

Try resisting that. The movie version, adapted by director Clark Gregg, stars Sam Rockwell in the role of sex addict Vincent Mancini. Rockwell is now and always has been a swing- for- the- fences actor. And to see him screwing his brains out in various public places, including a recovery meeting, reveals a new side to his acting. Rockwell told me me it took eleven hours to film one scene of him getting a blowjob in a confined space. When I mentioned there could be worse acting assignments, he said that they sent the girl home after two hours. "The other nine hours," he says, "was just me faking an orgasm." On the basis of this performance, Rockwell is hereby declared the Brando of cum shots. As a movie, Choke is all over the place. But they plugged in a livewire with Rockwell, an actor with the skills to capture Palahniuk' s dark humor without missing the pain that keeps the character human. When the great performances of Sundance 2008 are tallied at the end of the week, Rockwell has to be up near the top. No wonder Fox Searchlight bought Choke for $5 million. Rockwell and Palahniuk are kindred spirits, fearless tightrope walkers in a Hollywood of image-shining wussies.

The shocking death of Heath Ledger stopped all the usual yammering here at the Sundance Film Festival. It was a day that started with the Oscar nominations and news of the big sale of Hamlet 2 to Focus Features—the Sundance jackpot at last. And yet this afternoon, just after I finished interviewing Josh Peck and Olivia Thirlby, the gifted young stars of The Wackness , one of the hot films in competition, the news of Ledger's death in his apartment in Manhattan hit us like a cold slap. Thirlby sat quietly by herself collecting her thoughts. This was a huge day for the young actress, her film Juno in which she played the pregnant teen's bff, had just been announced as one of the five contenders for the Best Picture Oscar. Both Thirlby and Peck had just talked about where they'd like to be as actors ten years from now. Peck saying that he'd hoped to keep challenging himself to reveal something about the human condition, that acting if it was honest and fearless united us somehow as human beings. His remarks reminded me of my first meeting with Ledger seven years ago when A Knight's Tale put him on the Hollywood map. He and his blond ringlets became prettyboy poster art and he damn near choked on it. Not the movie, just the image branding. Like Peck and Thirlby, Ledger thought of acting as something deeper, a striving toward goal he'd probably never reach. Ledger told me then that if his only offers were for movie-star posing he'd bag the whole thing. Instead, he went on to capture the loneliness of the guarded heart— as a gay cowboy in Brokeback Mountain, as a heroin junkie in Candy, and as a fame-resistant Bob Dylan in I'm Not There. The last time I saw Ledger, just before he started on the role of the Joker in this summer's The Dark Knight, he wore the same crooked grin, the same drop-the-bullshit attitude. He knew acting as an adventure couldn't match being a father to his daughter Matilda Rose. As movie enthusiasts, we will all miss seeing Ledger push against the barriers in roles he'll never play. But the end of his life at twenty eight is the real tragedy. Here at Sundance, in the swirl of deals and Oscar buzz, priorities—at least for the moment—were set straight.

U2 worked up the crowd on Saturday night with their concert film U23D. Wearing the 3D glasses gave new meaning to the word vertigo. Bono was there, hanging with his pal Al Gore and Sundance founder Robert Redford. The movie brings you pore close to the band.

But then I saw Patti Smith: Dream Of Life, a documentary eleven years in the making that brings you in artful proximity to the soul of the godmother of punk. Fashion photographer turned director Steven Sebring creates a raw tone poem that is less a concert film than a odyssey into Smith's creative essence. And Sebring used only one camera. Smith joked to me this morning that her film could be called Patti Smith-1D. It fits right into this fest's independent spirit. No flash, but genuine scrappy substance. Smith confesses to being a film freak, with her friend Michael Stipe as her sometime guide. Her eyes light up when she mentions silent film and the work of Carl Dreyer. In conversation, Smith is intimate and warm. None of the spitting and guitar-bashing temper is in evidence. Tonight I'll watch her take the stage live in her own personal three dimensions. Wouldn't miss it.

At last night's screening of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh I ran into a new phenom that beats cell phones for a blight on Sundance. Sitting in the back row of the theater, I watched row after row light up with the glow from the audience Blackberries. It was like a planetarium in there, and a total distraction from the action on screen. I'll give you that the movie isn't very good—there were at least a dozen walkouts. Director-screenwriter Rawson Marshall Thurber seemed to miss all that was nuanced in Michael Chabon's debut novel of family and sexual confusion. But that doesn't excuse the shitty manners. Some of these clowns were messaging each other—the new way of talking at the movies. I kept wishing Rip Torn's coach from Thurber's much better movie Dodgeball had shown up to throw wrenches at them.

Good news later about Ballast, one of the best movies in the competition. First-time director-writer Lance Hammer is a name to remember.

Just arrived today for the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. When I asked the driver about the buzz he said that Paris Hilton was lunching right this minute at the GrubSteak restaurant. Later I learned that Bruce Willis was so happy at the bar at Zoom restaurant the night before that he fixed a toilet.

What about movies? For perspective I sat down with Mr. Sundance himself, Robert Redford, who said that "having Paris Hilton at Sundance was the reason I invented the place." He was joking of course. In an interview with Redford I did for ABCNow, he talked seriously about the need to separate the movies from the hype around them. Good luck with that.

Big news: The first movie I see, Hamlet 2, is a special kind of fun. Steve Coogan is hilarious as a TV commercial actor reduced to teaching drama at a high school in New Mexico while his wife (Catherine Keener) hustles him off to the sperm clinic so she can get pregnant. More on this later, but let the biddng wars begin. It could be the next Napoleon Dynamite.