The films

WATCHobscure

Forest of Fear

Marijuana growers, a herbicide and some very slow zombies. On the list by accident of title.

WATCHcult

Messiah of Evil

A California coastal town waiting for a blood moon, made by the writers of American Graffiti, and it looks like nothing else.

WATCHcult

Cannibal Apocalypse

Vietnam veterans come home with a bite that spreads. A better idea than the film delivers.

WATCHcult

Pontypool

The infection is carried by the English language, and the whole film happens in a radio booth.

WATCHcult

Zombie Creeping Flesh

Bruno Mattei splicing stock documentary footage into a zombie film and hoping nobody notices.

WATCHcult

Tales from the Crypt

Amicus adapting the EC Comics, with Joan Collins menaced by a killer Santa and Peter Cushing as a wronged dustman.

WATCHcult

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.

WATCHcult

The Sadness

Taiwanese, and among the most extreme things released this decade. Go in warned.

WATCHknown

Cemetery Man

The last great Italian horror film, and it is a romantic comedy about a man who shoots the dead for a living.

WATCHknown

Night of the Comet

A comet turns most of Los Angeles to dust, and two Valley girls inherit the city.

WATCHknown

The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue

Zombies caused by an agricultural radiation device, shot in the Lake District. Much better than it sounds.

WATCHknown

Dead & Buried

Eerie, well made, and completely undeserving of the list. Stan Winston's effects.

WATCHknown

One Cut of the Dead

Sit through the rough first 37 minutes. That instruction is the whole review and it is worth obeying.

WATCHknown

Rabid

Cronenberg's second feature, with an experimental skin graft, a stinger in an armpit, and a plague across Montreal.

WATCHknown

Demons

Lamberto Bava, produced by Argento, and it is a film about a cinema audience being turned into monsters inside the cinema.

WATCHknown

City of the Living Dead

A priest hangs himself and opens a gate. Fulci at his least coherent and most upsetting.

WATCHknown

The Serpent and the Rainbow

Wes Craven in Haiti, adapting a real ethnobotanist's account of the drug behind zombie folklore.

WATCHknown

REC 2

The sequel picks up minutes after the first, sends a SWAT team into the sealed building, and reframes the whole outbreak.

WATCHknown

I Walked with a Zombie

Jane Eyre relocated to a Caribbean sugar plantation, and it is the most beautiful film in this category.

WATCHknown

The Beyond

Almost no coherent plot and that is the argument for it. One of the bleakest endings in the genre.

WATCHknown

The Return of the Living Dead

Makes them fast and talkative. Easily the funniest film in this category, and a bleak ending under the jokes.

WATCHknown

White Zombie

The first zombie film, made independently, with Lugosi controlling the dead on a Haitian sugar plantation.

WATCHknown

Zombie Flesh Eaters

A zombie fights a shark. There is also an eye and a splinter. Fulci's most purely entertaining film.

WATCHknown

Creepshow

Romero and King doing EC Comics, with panel borders, primary lighting and a story about a cake.

WATCHknown

Dead Snow

Nazi zombies in the Norwegian mountains, and it knows exactly how silly it is.

WATCHknown

Pet Sematary

King wrote the novel and thought it too bleak to publish. The film keeps the bleakness.

WATCHcanon

Braindead

The bloodiest film ever made at the time, and it is a comedy about a man and his mother.

WATCHcanon

Day of the Dead

The bleakest of Romero's trilogy, hated on release, and Tom Savini's best work.

WATCHcanon

REC

A Barcelona apartment block, a news crew, and eighty minutes with no let-up.

WATCHcanon

Dawn of the Dead

The best zombie film ever made, set in a shopping mall, and much funnier than people remember.

WATCHcanon

28 Years Later

Boyle and Garland back together, shot largely on iPhones rigged in arrays. Stranger than the sequel anybody expected.

WATCHcanon

28 Days Later

Shot on DV, made them fast, and restarted the whole genre for fifteen years.

WATCHcanon

Night of the Living Dead

Invented the modern zombie, lost its own copyright, and has one of the bleakest endings ever filmed.

WATCHcanon

Train to Busan

The best zombie film since Romero, and the only one that makes you cry.