28 Years Later
Boyle and Garland back together, shot largely on iPhones rigged in arrays. Stranger than the sequel anybody expected.
1968 onward · 34 films
Slow, numerous, and always about the survivors. Romero built the whole thing in 1968.
The modern zombie is one man's invention. Before 1968 a zombie was a Haitian folkloric figure, a person under another's control, as in White Zombie (1932) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943). Romero replaced it with a reanimated corpse that eats people, never used the word in the first film, and did not copyright the result.
Shot for around 114,000 dollars outside Pittsburgh, in black and white because that was affordable. A distributor's error left it without a valid copyright notice, so it fell into the public domain immediately, which cost Romero a fortune and is why it played on television constantly and became universally known.
The lead is Black, which in 1968 was almost unheard of in a film that does not comment on it, and the ending is unbearable in a way the film does not soften.
The 1978 sequel is set in a shopping mall and is the best zombie film ever made. It is also very funny, which people forget. Savini's effects are crude on Blu-ray and were extraordinary at the time. The Italian cut, supervised by Dario Argento with a Goblin score, is a genuinely different film from the American one; both are worth watching.
Fulci's Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979) was sold in Italy as Zombi 2, a fake sequel to Romero's film. It contains a zombie fighting a shark, which was shot with a real shark and a stuntman, and an eye-splinter scene that put it on the DPP list.
The Return of the Living Dead (1985) makes them fast and talkative and is the funniest film in this category. 28 Days Later (2002) makes them fast and furious and restarted the whole genre, which then ate itself over the following fifteen years.
Open a chatbot with a question about this already typed out. Useful for a second opinion, a plot detail, or working out which cut you are holding.
Boyle and Garland back together, shot largely on iPhones rigged in arrays. Stranger than the sequel anybody expected.
The bloodiest film ever made at the time, and it is a comedy about a man and his mother.
Vietnam veterans come home with a bite that spreads. A better idea than the film delivers.
The last great Italian horror film, and it is a romantic comedy about a man who shoots the dead for a living.
A priest hangs himself and opens a gate. Fulci at his least coherent and most upsetting.
Romero and King doing EC Comics, with panel borders, primary lighting and a story about a cake.
The bleakest of Romero's trilogy, hated on release, and Tom Savini's best work.
Eerie, well made, and completely undeserving of the list. Stan Winston's effects.
Nazi zombies in the Norwegian mountains, and it knows exactly how silly it is.
Lamberto Bava, produced by Argento, and it is a film about a cinema audience being turned into monsters inside the cinema.
Marijuana growers, a herbicide and some very slow zombies. On the list by accident of title.
Jane Eyre relocated to a Caribbean sugar plantation, and it is the most beautiful film in this category.
A California coastal town waiting for a blood moon, made by the writers of American Graffiti, and it looks like nothing else.
A comet turns most of Los Angeles to dust, and two Valley girls inherit the city.
Sit through the rough first 37 minutes. That instruction is the whole review and it is worth obeying.
King wrote the novel and thought it too bleak to publish. The film keeps the bleakness.
The infection is carried by the English language, and the whole film happens in a radio booth.
Cronenberg's second feature, with an experimental skin graft, a stinger in an armpit, and a plague across Montreal.
A Barcelona apartment block, a news crew, and eighty minutes with no let-up.
The sequel picks up minutes after the first, sends a SWAT team into the sealed building, and reframes the whole outbreak.
Amicus adapting the EC Comics, with Joan Collins menaced by a killer Santa and Peter Cushing as a wronged dustman.
Almost no coherent plot and that is the argument for it. One of the bleakest endings in the genre.
Zombies caused by an agricultural radiation device, shot in the Lake District. Much better than it sounds.
Hammer's only zombie film, set in a Cornish village, and it beat Romero to the mass grave by two years.
Taiwanese, and among the most extreme things released this decade. Go in warned.
Wes Craven in Haiti, adapting a real ethnobotanist's account of the drug behind zombie folklore.
The best zombie film since Romero, and the only one that makes you cry.
The first zombie film, made independently, with Lugosi controlling the dead on a Haitian sugar plantation.
Bruno Mattei splicing stock documentary footage into a zombie film and hoping nobody notices.