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The 20 Best Zombie Movies of All Time

If zombies seem infinitely spongy as functional allegories, it’s their non-hierarchic function that retains the kernel of their monstrousness.

The 20 Best Zombie Movies of All Time
Photo: Well Go USA

Zombie movies not only endure, but persist at the height of their popularity, neck and neck with vampire stories in a cultural race to the bottom, their respective “twists” on generic boilerplate masking a dead-eyed derivativeness. For the zombie film (or comic book, or cable TV drama), that boilerplate was struck by George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, and its subsequent sequels established a loose conception of the undead threat: lumbering, beholden to no centralized authority, sensitive to headshots and decapitations.

If, according to Franco Moretti’s “The Dialectic of Fear,” the vampiric threat (at least as embodied in Count Dracula) operates chiefly as a metaphor for monopoly capital, binding those English bourgeois interlopers to his spell and extracting the blood of their industry, then the zombie poses a more anarchic, horizontalized threat. In post-Romero, hyper-allegorized zombie cinema, the hulking undead mass can be generally understood as the anti-Draculean annihilation of capital. Flesh and blood are acquired but not retained; civilization is destroyed but not remodeled. If zombies seem infinitely spongy as functional allegories for this or that, it’s their non-hierarchic function that retains the kernel of their monstrousness.

At their apex of their allegorical authority, zombies may fundamentally destroy, as attested by our favorite zombie films of all time. But that doesn’t mean their inexhaustible popularity as monster du jour can’t be harnessed to the whims of real-deal market maneuvering, their principally anarchic menace yoked to the proverbial voodoo master of capital. John Semley

Editor’s Note: This entry was originally published on October 21, 2019.

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Night of the Comet

20. Night of the Comet (1984)

Night of the Comet’s scenario reads like the bastard child of countless drive-in movies, in which most of humanity is instantly reduced to colored piles of dust when the Earth passes through the tail of a comet that last came around—you guessed it—right about the time the dinosaurs went belly-up. Then again, just so you know he’s not adhering too closely to generic procedures, writer-director Thom Eberhardt irreverently elects a couple of pretty vacant valley girls—tomboyish arcade addict Reggie (Catherine Mary Stewart) and her blond cheerleader sister, Sam (Kelli Maroney)—and a Mexican truck driver, Hector (Robert Beltran), to stand in for the last remnants of humanity. With regard to its bubbly protagonists, the film vacillates between poking not-so-gentle fun at their vapid mindset, as in the Dawn of the Dead-indebted shopping spree (obligingly scored to Cindi Lauper’s anthemic “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”), and taking them seriously as agents of their own destiny. Lucky for them, as it happens, that their hard-ass old man taught them how to shoot the shit out of an Uzi—and look adorable doing it. It also doesn’t hurt that Eberhardt filigrees his absurd premise with grace notes like the cheeky cinephilia informing early scenes set in an all-night movie theater. Budd Wilkins



The Living Dead Girl

19. The Living Dead Girl (1982)

In The Living Dead Girl, the gothic ambience that elsewhere suffuses Jean Rollin’s work smashes headlong against the inexorable advance of modernity. The film opens with the vision of bucolic scenery blighted by the scourge of industrialization: rolling hills sliced up by concertina-capped fences, billowing smokestacks visible in the hazy distance. When some dicey movers deposit barrels of chemical waste in the family vault beneath the dilapidated Valmont chateau, a sudden tremor causes the barrels to spring a leak, reanimating the corpse of Catherine Valmont (Françoise Blanchard) in the process. Despite the gruesome carnage she inflicts on hapless and not-so-hapless victims alike, it’s clear that Rollin sees the angelic Catherine, with her flowing blond tresses and clinging white burial weeds, as an undead innocent abroad in a world she can no longer comprehend. The flm builds to a climax of Grand Guignol gruesomeness as Hélène (Marina Pierro), Catherine’s girlhood friend, makes the ultimate sacrifice for her blood sister. It’s an altogether remarkable scene, tinged with melancholy and possessed of a ferocious integrity that’s especially apparent in Blanchard’s unhinged performance. The film’s blood-spattered descent into positively Jacobean tragedy helps to make it one of Rollin’s strongest, most disturbing efforts. Wilkins

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They Came Back

18. They Came Back (2004)

They Came Back is a triumph of internal horror, and unlike M. Night Shyamalan’s similarly moody freak-out The Sixth Sense, Robin Campillo’s vision of the dead sharing the same space as the living isn’t predicated on a gimmicky reduction of human faith. Campillo is more upfront than Shyamalan—it’s more or less understood that the presence of the living dead in his film is likely metaphoric—and he actually seems willing to plumb the moral oblivion created by the collision of its two worlds. Though the fear that the film’s walking dead can turn violent at any second is completely unjustified, the writer-director allows this paranoia to reflect the feelings of loss, disassociation, and hopelessness that cripple the living. It’s rather amazing how far the film is able to coast on its uniquely fascinating premise, even if it isn’t much of a stretch for its director: Campillo co-authored Laurent Cantet’s incredible Time Out, a different kind of zombie film about the deadening effects of too much work on the human psyche, and They Came Back is almost as impressive in its concern with the existential relationship between the physical and non-physical world. Ed Gonzalez



Zombi Child

17. Zombi Child (2019)

Restlessly shuttling between 1960s Haiti and present-day France, Bertrand Bonello’s Zombi Child is a quixotic, slow-burn genre film is political largely in the abstract. While there are moments in in the film where a history of exploitation informs the relationship between the French, lily-white Fanny (Louise Labeque) and Haitian refugee Mélissa (Wislanda Louimat)—classmates at an all-girls school established by Napoleon Bonaparte—Bonello’s interests go much deeper than race relations. Zombi Child suggests two temporalities that exist parallel to each other. The film’s off-kilter mix of horror, historiography, and youth movie affords Bonello plenty of opportunity to indulge his pet themes and motifs. He spends much time lingering throughout scenes set at the academy on the sociality of the young women and their engagement with pop culture. In fact, Bonello’s fascination with the dynamics of these relationships seems to drive his interest in the horror genre more so even than the film’s most obvious antecedent, Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie—as is indicated by a pretty explicit homage to Brian De Palma’s Carrie. Sam C. Mac

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Train to Busan

16. Train to Busan (2016)

When divorced of message-mongering, the film’s scare tactics are among the most distinctive that the zombie canon has ever seen. The zombies here are rabid, fast-moving ghoulies that, as Train to Busan’s protagonists discover, are attracted to loud sounds and only attack what they can actually see. This realization becomes the foundation for a series of taut set pieces during which the story’s motley crew of survivors manipulate their way past zombies with the aid of cellphones and bats and the numerous tunnels through which the train must travel. The genre crosspollination for which so many South Korean thrillers have come to be known for is most evident in these scenes (as in the survivors crawling across one train car’s overhead luggage area), which blend together the tropes of survivor-horror and disaster films, as well as suggest the mechanics of puzzle-platformer games. Gonzalez



Zombi

15. Zombi (1979)

Zombie lacks Romero’s allegorical undercurrents and horror-comedy hybridization, substituting instead a streamlined narrative that owes a substantial debt to H.G. Wells’s Island of Doctor Moreau and an all-encompassing mood of claustrophobic desolation. Taken on its own terms, it works quite agreeably as a visceral blow to the breadbasket, with one of the most outrageous and apocalyptic final scenes in the entirety of the subgenre. Some of the film’s most inventive shots are from zombie-cam POV, as the dead rise, shake off clods of dirt, and slouch toward the mission church. Attacks come fast and furious now, setting a frenzied pace that later zombie films like Evil Dead II and Dead Alive will utilize to infinitely more comic effect. By film’s end, only one couple remains, fighting their way back to a crippled ship. Adrift on the open sea, they catch a radio broadcast from New York. As it will in every mid-period Fulci film, hell has broken loose, and zombie hordes have overrun the outlying boroughs. In the fantastic final shots, as the panic-stricken newscaster narrates the zombie invasion of his radio station, a mass of zombies cross the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan. Wilkins

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Cemetery Man

14. Cemetery Man (1994)

Michele Soavi’s Cemetery Man begins with an archetypal zombie-movie setup: On the seventh night after their burial, the dead return to life clamorous for fresh flesh, only to be summarily dispatched via the requisite bullet to the brain by cemetery custodian Francesco Dellamorte (Rupert Everett). But the film soon veers off into left field, becoming more than just a blackly comic object lesson in gruesome special effects. It also works as an unexpectedly poetic (not to mention melancholic) rumination on the pains and pleasures of romantic obsession, and, even more impressively, as a deliriously detailed descent into sheer madness. Soavi and screenwriter Gianni Romoli cleverly blur the lines between dream, delusion, and mundane existence, setting up a jaw-dropping finale that calls into question not only the reliability of the characters’ distinct identities but the very nature of reality itself. Wilkins



The Return of the Living Dead

13. The Return of the Living Dead (1985)

“Not one more preppy!” vowed writer-director Dan O’Bannon when talking about the victims from The Return of the Living Dead, his tongue-in-cheek, splatter-laden homage to George A. Romero’s zombie pictures. Fed up with the generic Barbie and Ken-style actors that were getting sliced up wholesale in 1980s fright flicks, he fills his zombie movie with a group of snarling punk rockers (“What do you think this is, a fucking costume?” grouses one of them, whose studded leather jacket and lip chain define his character, “This is a way of life!”) and a soundtrack of West Coast punk music. The punk attitude, a combination of posturing and self-destructive irony, is a fine match for this most postmodern of zombie movies. O’Bannon’s filmmaking techniques are simple and resourceful, with shots following the actors around the room in consistent medium shots as they volley rapid-fire (and quotable) dialogue off of one another. It’s the zombie movie Howard Hawks never got to make, and frankly it’s less Rio Bravo than His Girl Friday with all the ribald humor on display. Jeremiah Kipp

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Let Sleeping Corpses Lie

12. Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (1974)

Unfairly dismissed as a Night of the Living Dead knockoff, Jorge Grau’s Let Sleeping Corpses Lie possesses a sensibility all its own. Grau eschews the claustrophobia and siege mentality of George A. Romero’s film, instead playing out some of his more disturbing set pieces against the painterly verdure of the British countryside, as well as making the most of the uncanny atmosphere provided by the Gothic Revival architecture of the film’s locations. What Grau and Romero do share is a profound mistrust of authority figures, exemplified here by the Inspector (Arthur Kennedy), a religious zealot who thinks nothing of gunning down an unarmed suspect in cold blood. So entirely does the Inspector represent the name of the law that he doesn’t even have his own name. Like Jean Rollin did with Grapes of Death, Grau shows a concern for environmental issues: Experimental farm machinery utilizing ultrasonic radiation instead of pesticides turns out to be the cause of the undead uprising in the first place. Wilkins



Day of the Dead

11. Day of the Dead (1985)

The pop-cultural relevance of Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead may be partially responsible for Day of the Dead’s continued neglect. Who needs a new social problem put through Geroge A. Romero’s allegorical wringer when the pathologies of the first two films are still pervasive today? Which is exactly why the film is worth serious discussion: recognizing Romero’s attempt to eschew the distancing effect of satire by refusing to invoke the social ills of the Reagan era alone. With this film, Romero chose to directly address the nature of human emotions and prejudices that tear us apart regardless of whatever global hot spot is inspiring newspaper headlines and political debates. Day of the Dead’s resistance to being pigeonholed into its decade frees it from merely being the ’80s zombie movie. Henderson

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Prince of Darkness

10. Prince of Darkness (1987)

Prince of Darkness, the middle child in John Carpenter’s “Apocalypse Trilogy,” doesn’t get nearly as much attention as its bookends, The Thing and In the Mouth of Madness, despite having a truly killer premise: Scientists gather in an abandoned church to investigate an ancient canister containing a swirling green fluid that may in fact be Satan himself. This liquified Lucifer soon possesses a horde of local homeless folks, including rocker Alice Cooper, who proceed to besiege the building. Nor is this the only sort of zombification on display here: The newly undead reveal a penchant for dissolving into masses of squirmy insects, or spraying jets of viscous goo into the mouths of the living, thereby zombifying them in the process. But Carpenter’s film is about far more than the ichor-laden effects. It possesses a wonderfully surreal sensibility, full of portentous dream imagery, and some porously two-way mirrors that could have come straight out of Jean Cocteau’s “Orphic Trilogy.” Wilkins



28 Days Later

9. 28 Days Later (2002)

Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later is a post-apocalyptic zombie movie indebted to the traditions of John Wyndham and George A. Romero, opening with its young hero wandering abandoned streets calling out “Hello! Hello!” into the void. A marvel of economic storytelling, the film follows a handful of survivors that evaded a deadly Rage virus that tore across England, the riots and destruction that ensued, and the legion of infected victims who roam the streets at night for human meat. A bleak journey through an underground tunnel brings to mind one of the finest chapters in Stephen King’s The Stand; similar such references are far from being smug in-jokes, but rather uniquely appreciative of previous horror texts. The Rage virus itself feels especially topical in our modern times. But maybe the more appropriate metaphor is that anyone who’s struggled through a grouchy, apocalyptic mood during 28 days in rehab will find their hostile sentiments reflected in this anger-fueled nightmare odyssey. Kipp

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Deathdream

8. Deathdream (1972)

A grindhouse threnody for the Vietnam generation, Bob Clark’s emotionally overwhelming Deathdream is a raw nerve radiating pure shock and grief, as evidenced by the reunion of Faces’s Lynn Carlin and John Marley to play the parents of a young private who, after apparently dying in battle, returns to their doorstep. With echoes of “The Monkey’s Paw,” it gradually dawns on the initially relieved family that Andy’s purple heart may no longer beat, and yet he thirsts for blood, which would be horrifying enough if the film didn’t also seem to be suggesting that, whether soldiers return home from war decorated or draped by the flag, they never return as they were before. Eric Henderson



Rec

7. [Rec] (2007)

Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza give the enervated “found footage” genre a fresh infusion of creditability by splicing together strands of the ungovernable viral epidemic from 28 Days Later and The Evil Dead franchise’s fixation on sudden demonic conversion. The making of an innocuous documentary about firefighters leads reporter Angela Vidal (Manuela Velasco) to an apartment building in Barcelona whose residents are quickly succumbing to some kind of plague. With its lean-and-mean 75-minute running time, [REC] unreels almost in real time, giving viewers precious little breathing room between increasingly ferocious attacks. As the survivors fight their way toward the penthouse, surely there’s some diabolical revelation at hand. What’s more, the film’s final image of a woman dragged off into all-consuming darkness has been endlessly imitated ever since. Wilkins

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Pontypool

6. Pontypool (2008)

As rabble-rousing talk radio host Grant Mazzy, Stephen McHattie has a voice like a baritone snake, equal parts silky and sinister, and it’s very pointedly the main attraction of Bruce McDonald’s Pontypool. When his A.M. gig reporting school closings and interviewing clownish local theater troupes is interrupted by reports of unruly mobs tearing people to shreds with their mouths, he and the radio station’s producer and technician must sense of the apparent mayhem brewing outside, the cause of which eventually turns out to be the spoken word itself. Talk Radio by way of George A. Romero, the film implies that terms of endearment, baby gibberish, and military-related talk—all of which seem to be particularly contagious—have been so misused as to have dangerously lost all meaning. Nick Schager



Shaun of the Dead

5. Shaun of the Dead (2004)

Edgar Wright often concedes in his work that life is complicated and exhausting. The stuff we deal with every day, from relationships to familial responsibility to even just getting up for work in the morning, makes fending off zombies or cultists or straightforward baddies of any kind seem preferable. In the short-lived Channel 4 series Spaced, the struggle of two twentysomething creatives to claw their way out of dead-end minimum-wage jobs and see their loftier professional ambitions realized was tempered by fleeting retreats into pop-culture daydreams, where reality might look like Murder, She Wrote one moment and Resident Evil 2 the next. Shaun of the Dead took this device a step further: When a breakup violently disrupts the complacent man-child bubble of its hero, zombies arrive to violently disrupt the whole world along with it, reframing one man’s personal efforts to grow and learn the value of responsibility as a more literal question of life and death. Calum Marsh

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Re-Animator

4. Re-Animator (1985)

Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator might be one of the most generous of all American horror movies—a low-budget go-for-the-guts splatter film that is simultaneously a parody and celebration of American chaos and kookiness. Many films have copied its memorable gore effects, but few have ever captured its remarkably sweet temperament. At its simplest, the film is a mad-scientist story, and Gordon and his co-writers, working from a series of stories by H.P. Lovecraft, are clearly aware of the classic implications of the horror film’s prototypical mad scientist—namely, that he’s an eccentric, largely lacking the social graces necessary to getting laid, who sublimates his unmet desires with experiments designed to render the traditional sexual act moot. Creating, or in this case, re-animating life is an act of playing God, but it’s also a hostile gesture toward womankind, an attempt to rob women of their monopoly on the perpetuation of the species as well as embrace a less emotionally complicated form of coitus. The mad-scientist story, then, is a revenge-of-the-nerd tale, and the film often plays as a well-made Revenge of the Nerds if it had featured non-traditional zombies. Bowen



Dawn of the Dead

3. Dawn of the Dead (1978)

Whether he knew it or not, George A. Romero was working toward Dawn of the Dead throughout the 1970s, his ambitions crystallizing into an operatic, seamy, tragic and trashy horror-action canvas. The film dramatizes cycles of revolution, following working-class characters as they get a taste of rarefied life, walling themselves off from the populace, in the traditions of our political leaders and celebrities, and resenting the people who come clawing at the gates for a taste of the wealth. When the protagonists are overthrown from the perch of their shopping mall, the new revolutionaries are corrupted as well, destroying a utopia that’s really a hell of impersonal corporate consumerism, leaving the dead—an endlessly evolving symbol of society’s marginalized outliers—to finally inherit the Earth. Yet Dawn of the Dead also revels in the promise of America. The film’s most exhilarating scenes show a miniature democracy in action, as men of color bond with white men and women to course correct a society that’s in its death rattle. They fail, but, in an ending that implicitly reverses Night of the Living Dead’s hopeless coda, they will themselves to rise again. Bowen

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I Walked with a Zombie

2. I Walked with a Zombie (1943)

“Everything seems beautiful because you don’t understand,” warns cynical Brit Paul Holland (Tom Conway) to a naïve Canadian woman as they both travel by boat to the West Indies. Considering the deceptive menace that plagues every sweaty frame of Jacques Tournuer’s woozy I Walked with a Zombie, his wise words act as an omen for things to come. Death here is elemental, riding on the wind, buried beneath the earth, and glimmering like fluorescents in the ocean current. Western stoicism proves to be useless in an exotic place with such deep-seated historical trauma. For the emotionally frustrated living of the film, survival means respecting local traditions and superstitions, even if that means jumping headfirst into a voodoo-tinged rabbit hole of horrors. Glenn Heath Jr.



Night of the Living Dead

1. Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Roger Ebert memorably described the effect George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead had on a group of Saturday matinee kids, writing that their accelerating awareness that the film wasn’t going to play nice—and was, in fact, going to plunge a garden trowel deep into Mommy’s chest cavity—drove them to hysterical tears. Perhaps they subconsciously recognized in the film’s political and social subtext the many ways adults were failing them, how upheavals were destroying all illusions of social stasis, how the arms race was pushing the doomsday clock toward midnight, how the nuclear family unit was on its deathbed. Or maybe Romero’s pitch-black, impressionistic, gory depiction of the living under siege by the dead simply was and remains among the scariest goddamned films ever made. Henderson

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