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Director
John Gilling
Year
1966
Country
UK
Runtime
90 min

Also released as

  • La plaga de los zombis

The Plague of the Zombies

The Plague of the Zombies is a 1966 British zombie film directed by John Gilling.

Hammer's only zombie film, set in a Cornish village, and it beat Romero to the mass grave by two years.

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A Cornish squire is raising the dead to work his tin mine after an accident closed it and the local men refused to go back down.

John Gilling shot it back to back with The Reptile on the same sets, and it is the better film: the class politics are explicit, the squire is exploiting corpses because live labour has become inconvenient, and the film sides entirely with the villagers.

The dream sequence, in which the dead rise from a churchyard in a green fog, is two years before Night of the Living Dead and clearly in Romero's DNA.

The makeup, grey with clouded eyes, established the look most zombie films used for a decade.

It is one of the best things Hammer made and one of the least seen.

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Trailer

The sleeves

The same film, sold as a different film in each territory. Click any of them.

poster
EN · poster
IT · poster
EN · poster
FR · poster
EN · poster
EN · poster

Where to watch

Legal sources only. Availability data from JustWatch via TMDB.

Checked 9 Aug 2026

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Goreledger 8/10