From the 1930s to the modern era, zombie movies have terrified audiences. They’ve also occupied a unique position in the horror genre in that they can serve as sociopolitical allegories. But of course, there are some zombie movies that exist solely to make you laugh.
As with any genre, there are plenty of terrible zombie movies. But if the undead are used for sociopolitical commentary and the film is replete with all the frights and thrills that it can be and the audience cares about the characters, then it can result in a real masterpiece. So, before a virus turns us into flesh-eating monsters, here are the 10 Best Zombie Movies Of All Time.
Top 10 Zombie Movies You Probably Missed
#10 Zombieland
Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, the writers behind the Deadpool movies, spent years developing ideas and concepts and gags for their zombie comedy before finally writing the screenplay. It was developed as a TV series before being turned into a movie.
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100 episodes’ worth of material was squeezed into an hour and a half and it resulted in the highest grossing zombie movie in the United States (at the time).
#9 World War Z
It bears very little resemblance to its celebrated source novel, but World War Z stands as perhaps the only all-out zombie blockbuster. With Brad Pitt in the lead, a globe-trotting scope, and a considerable studio budget behind it, Marc Forster’s film presents the zombie movie as a summer action spectacle with a worldwide outbreak threatening global collapse.
Where most zombie films are claustrophobic, this is the opposite, offering up inventive widescreen imagery of zombie swarms – crowds of the undead running en masse, scrambling over each other in insect-like mounds, able to scale walls through sheer force of will.
#8 Re-Animator
Based on a short story by H.P. Lovecraft, Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator presents a different spin on the undead. Here Jeffrey Combs’ unhinged professor Herbert West invents a lime-green liquid capable of reanimating dead animal tissue – and which, before long, he starts applying to dead bodies. It’s a swirling, pulpy blend of horror and comedy, and a bloody affair even by gore-soaked ’80s standards. With a tight script and bravura approach, it remains sickeningly entertaining.
#7 Rec
A horror film that’s actually scary. In fact, it’s one of the scariest. Watching this film snowball into a seething siren of panic and dread is the most thrilling film experience we’ve had in the last 10 years. Rec takes the found footage Blair Witch Project style of filmmaking to the next level.
The real scares come from what’s framed off the camera. There’s never a moment when sheer terror isn’t lurking around the corner. The staging in Rec is equally as brilliant. Rec also has the creepiest kid zombie ever. One things for certain, the last few minutes of Rec will truly mess with your psyche, sticking with you long after the credits roll.
#6 Braindead (1992)
Long before he went off to Middle-earth, Peter Jackson was painting the town red with his ludicrously bloody Kiwi zombie flick – sometimes hailed as the ‘goriest movie ever made. Equally inspired by Romero and Raimi, there’s a real Evil Dead streak to the cartoonish splatstick on display. Set in 1957, Timothy Balme plays Lionel Cosgrove, caught in a sticky place when his meddling mum is bitten by a ‘Sumatran rat monkey when stalking her son on a date at the zoo. She dies. And then un-dies. And that’s only the beginning.
#5 Night Of The Living Dead
‘They’re coming to get you, Barbra!’ With his directorial debut, George A. Romero invented the modern zombie movie as we know it. An independent film shot in grainy black-and-white on a shoestring budget, Romero delivered a stark and subversive horror that established the most important facets of zombie lore and proved the director as a filmmaker adept at genre-infused social commentary. As Ben, Barbra and more hide away from the rising corpses in a rural farmhouse, Romero reflects ideas of racism in the USA, the ongoing trauma of the Vietnam War, and the American public facing up to the realisation that their greatest enemy might actually be themselves.
#4 Train To Busan
Four words: zombies on a train. Korean director Yeon Sang-ho takes that elevator pitch and elevates it into a gripping, action-packed horror movie, using cramped interior space (and moments in more wide-open environments) to stage breathlessly tense sequences. Train To Busan’s zombies are mesmerising to watch – aggressive and animalistic, their limbs and spines contorting as they rise up to claim more victims. The result is stylishly-shot and pulse-pounding, with a host of memorable characters – particularly Ma Dong-seok’s hulking hero Sang-hwa.
#3 28 Days Later
Purists will tell you it’s not a zombie movie. If they’re technically right, they’re also totally wrong – Danny Boyle’s film about a deadly rage infection reinvented and redefined what a zombie film could be, taking the idea of running infected from Return Of The Living Dead and, er, running with it. It’s a gritty, gripping work with an iconic opening, as Cillian Murphy’s hospitalised Londoner Jim awakens to find the capital city eerily deserted – until it becomes all-too-clear what’s happened to everyone. If the rage infection wasn’t perilous enough, Alex Garland’s screenplay highlights how the surviving humans are just as deadly.
#2 Day Of The Dead
The final part of Romero’s landmark original Dead trilogy is a more meditative affair than the previous instalments – but it’s a powerful piece, with an angry resonance that continues to reverberate. Set even further into the zombie apocalypse, Day finds the non-infected population dwindling, with surviving scientists and soldiers properly cracking up, and the undead themselves beginning to evolve.
Enter Bub, an actual zombie hero – reliving echoes of his past life, and with a cognitive function that suggests not all of the undead are mindless monsters. Taking place largely in the confines of an underground facility, Day is a claustrophobic and pessimistic affair, wrangling with meaty themes of hope, faith, and the futility of combat, as human in-fighting leads to more carnage with tragic consequences.
#1 Dawn Of The Dead
If Night Of The Living Dead was the birth of the contemporary zombie flick, Dawn Of The Dead was its coming-of-age – bigger, bolder, more confident, and, this time, in color. The eerie tone of its predecessor is swapped for a rising tide of chaos and panic as the unfolding apocalypse spreads, and a group of survivors hunker down in the local mall.
If it initially seems like an ideal place to wait out the downfall of society, rife with supplies, it proves anything but – the zombies are instinctively drawn to the place they were programmed to devote their free time and money to back when they were alive. It’s another piece of potent satire, packed with playful imagery – though that never gets in the way of Romero telling a compelling, nightmarish tale, exploding with visceral effects from Tom Savini, drawing from the horrifying sights he witnessed as a Vietnam War photographer.
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