- Director
- John Gilling
- Year
- 1966
- Country
- UK
- Runtime
- 90 min
Also released as
- La plaga de los zombis
Filed under
The Plague of the Zombies
Hammer's only zombie film, set in a Cornish village, and it beat Romero to the mass grave by two years.
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.
Where to watch
UK
Legal sources only. Availability data from JustWatch via TMDB.
Checked 9 Aug 2026
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