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The best zombie movies epitomize a horror subgenre that will not die. The cannibalistic living dead kicked off the American horror renaissance in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead, a movie subsequently Xeroxed and mutated endlessly across the world. And in the years since 2002’s 28 Days Later revived the genre again, zombies have never really gone away, infecting every aspect of mainstream pop culture—novels, video games, comic books, award-winning television shows based on those comic books and video games, and even weird charity “zombie walks” where people cosplay as zombies. Night of the Living Dead director George A. Romero gave minimalist horror filmmaking a new set of tools and tropes, but he was also the one to tell us something we would be told over and over by zombie entertainment: The zombies are us. They’re a way to discuss society, intentionally or unintentionally; how we view the faceless hordes at the door says everything about who we are. So there have been zombie romcoms and westerns and heist films. There have been classic punk, emo and indie songs about zombies. Gorillaz—our era's Accelerationist Archies, cartoon characters singing about environmental catastrophe—endlessly reference Dawn and Day of the Dead on each album. They have served as a metaphor for war, disease, capitalism, heartbreak, misogyny, and so on. The dead don't stop coming. This week marks the release of 28 Years Later, a third sequel with the original creative team; early reports suggest it might live up to its excellent trailer, which uses a World War I-era recording of Rudyard Kipling's "Boots" to disturbing ends. But if the ‘00s zombie explosion started as a way for us to collectively come to terms with a mass re-understanding of our mortality after witnessing 9/11 on live TV—and later, to process war and economic crisis—what happens to the genre when it's barely a metaphor anymore? We've all lived through a pandemic, we all saw empty cities in real life, we've watched people become more tired and cruel and distrustful. It may be the right moment for 28 Years, a zombie movie that shows us an irrevocably changed society rather than the collapse of one. We've certainly been prepped for it. Here are the 20-ish greatest Zombie movies of all time. 20. I Walked With A Zombie (1947), dir. Jacques Tourneur Val Lewton was a producer and uncredited screenwriter on low-budget horror films for RKO. He was most successful when paired with director Jacques Tourneur. Lewton is often credited with inventing the “jump scare.” His movies try to graft a psychological edge to supernatural premises. Sometimes this adds dread and weight, and sometimes it means they show you nothing and avoid payoff. I Walked With a Zombie, the second in the three films Lewton and Tourneur made together, is all menace. A restaging of Jane Eyre on a fictional Caribbean island named after Saint Sebastian, the film tries (for 1948) to play Haitian voodoo as straight as possible while shooting for literary and Biblical allusions. A nurse is called in to take care of Jessica, the wife of a sugar plantation owner, who is permanently in a dissociative state, and learns that the barrier between local medical practice and the active voodoo rites is permeable; the implication that Jessica has been dead the entire time is never resolved. The film has many haunting images but feels stickily racist, particularly its juxtaposition of a wide-eyed silent zombie named Carrefour and the blonde white lady in the center of these rituals. The origin of the living dead on film likely starts with the Bela Lugosi vehicle White Zombie; decades later Wes Craven would adapt Wade Davis' nonfiction tour of Haiti's voodoo practices and their possible medical uses, The Serpent and the Rainbow, and turn it into a cornier version of a very similar story. When it comes to depictions of a non-white foreign culture, there's not all that much difference between 1942 and 1988, even from someone as lefty and sensitive as Craven. The "zombie drug,” scopolamine—which priests use to knock people into a deathlike state then "resurrect" them and convince the drugged person that they're dead—actually exists; Craven makes a meal of the scene where Bill Pullman is taken through the process of making the drug from dead bodies. 19. The Dead Don't Die (2019), dir. Jim Jarmusch Indie stalwart Jim Jarmusch had a run of mordant genre deconstructions—from Dead Man to Only Lovers Left Alive—that all felt deeply personal despite their narrative tropes. The Dead Don't Die is an exhausted groan of a movie from a director who feels abandoned or let down by his heroes (the MAGA asshole character is named “Frank Miller.”) The cast is massive and game (Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Chloe Sevigny, Tilda Swinton, Selena Gomez, Austin Butler, Steve Buscemi, Danny Glover—it keeps going.) The film treats its horror-film nerd character as a quaint and harmless nuisance; no other Gen X director would be this ambivalent about cinephilia (or for that matter violence, horror, and America in general.) Jarmusch ends up trying to make a kind of left-handed cover of Night of the Living Dead with Dawn of the Dead's anticapitalist sensibility: America is basically done for, and three adolescents slink away as everyone else gets consumed by the innate rot. Zombies throughout the film wake up to re-enact some mundanity that defined their lives (Carol Kane's zombie mutters "Chardonnay.") The end result—complete with UFOs, rock stars, meta jokes (when asked how he knew this was going to end poorly, Driver tells Murray, "I read the script") and samurai swords—lands a lot closer to 1999 Japanese oddity Wild Zero than Romero. 18. Pontypool (2008), dir. Bruce McDonald An extremely low-budget magic trick. Almost nothing happens in Pontypool. The geographic isolation that saves horror budgets and structures is taken to an extreme. There are only 5 real characters in the entire film, one who only appears via phone call. Grant Mazzy, a talk-radio DJ reminiscent of Don Imus, is stuck at a nowhere station in rural Ontario as a zombie apocalypse happens conveniently offscreen. The majority of the piece consists of discussions between Mazzy and his producer Sidney. What makes McDonald's film so interesting is that it takes William S. Burrough's dictum that "Language is a virus from outer space" and plays it straight. The zombie plague lives inside the English language and latches onto words of affection; its victims repeat phrases until they're spouting gibberish and vomiting blood. There is an unspoken agitation at the ubiquity and predatory nature of the Anglophone world; French Canadians seem to be immune to the thought virus. 17. Messiah of Evil (1974), dir. Willard Hyuck & Gloria Katz An eerie, unpleasant California nightmare from a husband-and-wife team best known for writing scripts (of wildly varying quality) for George Lucas, Messiah of Evil exists on the borderline between zombie movies and cosmic horror. It always seems to be night, the streets always seem to be empty. Every location except one is an isolated Beckettian spot-lit set on a black stage. There's such good and strange writing here it's almost surprising that the same people mostly failed to write dialogue for a talking duck. What's most striking is the main location, a painter's home, now abandoned. Every wall is a mural of slightly distorted people who seem to be staring in at the characters, foreshadowing the zombie swarm later to appear at every window and skylight. Two moments that stand tall in the pantheon take place in two of the most innocuous locations possible. The scene in a supermarket at night that becomes a swarming chase has been stolen from again and again. And the sequence where a young girl goes to a movie theater alone is an anxiety neutron bomb, as an entire town slowly fills in the seats behind her during a loud and crappy film, until she turns around and realizes they won't let her leave… 16. Shivers (1975), dir. David Cronenberg/Rabid (1977), dir. David Cronenberg David Cronenberg now feels like a singular voice in Western film. He has a distinct body of work that springs fully from one man's aesthetic. More literary than cinematic, queasy and distant, forever fascinated with the body, every character’s rebirth mirrored by self-immolation and a suicidal death drive. Early on though, he tried very hard to be Romero. 1975’s Shivers is about a small parasite developed by a mad scientist, which when let loose travels through a state-of-the-art apartment block like a sexually transmitted disease (through sex or kissing), turning everyone it touches into a sex zombies. The premise allows Cronenberg the writer-director space to depict the sexual revolution as a nightmare of difficulty, with every taboo of the era broken either explicitly (lesbian sex being the major one) or silently implied (one crowd scene has small children being walked around on leashes.) This is what your megachurch relative thinks is happening during your Saturday at Basement. Cronenberg seems ambivalent about the entire thing, much like his reticent cis-het doctor lead. His nurse, played by Lynn Lowry—the only actor to star in two films on this list, I believe—delivers a career-spanning statement of purpose in a monologue: "All flesh is erotic flesh." Watching a broken society be consumed by its most venal impulses is disturbing—and was, for the outraged Canadian press, when they found out the film was financed with government grants. Shivers and 1977’s Rabid were both produced by Ivan Reitman, who brought the exploitation edge to Cronenberg's intellectual/grossout sensibility. Rabid stars porn legend Marilyn Chambers in a rare mainstream performance (Reitman's suggestion.) After surviving a brutal motorcycle accident, she recieves an experimental stem cell treatment and wakes up with a bloodthirsty (and phallic) new organ in her armpit. We get twin movies here—one where Chambers transgressively acts as predator to men who all treat her as a sexual object, and another, more disturbing film that’s a zombie movie, as Chambers’ victims pass a rabies-like plague through Montreal. Every victim is gleeful in the moments where they attack—surgeons slicing off fingers, old ladies ripping out random's necks on the subway. A recent anthrax outbreak gives the movie a lived-in frisson, especially now that enforced army quarantines, garbage trucks full of corpses, and amorphous gender dynamics just register as news, not hypotheticals. Romero was a wounded humanist who saw us destroying ourselves; Cronenberg just sits and watches us destroy ourselves, eager to see what changes in the aftermath. 15. The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue aka Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (1974), dir. Jorge Grau The first color zombies anyone saw were here, in this nihilistic and immaculately composed Spanish-Italian co-production set in England. Grau used the zombie as a response to environmental pollution. A high-frequency sound is blasted across an isolated farming town to take care of an insect problem. The idea is put forth that the simplified nervous systems of insects resemble a dead body (or later, an infant). It's not quite Red Desert, but it's got some of Antonioni's ambivalence at the modern world as a whole, his interest in natural landscapes marred by giant ugly industrial machines. Grau was tasked by his producers with making a version of Night of the Living Dead in color, and his decisions are often lush and poetic. The reveal of the first zombie is dreamlike. It's gorgeous and wet and we feel that actress Christine Galbo is watching herself from outside her body until she's finally in danger. There really isn't much substance here beyond vibes and images—on paper this is just another zombie movie made significant by its place in history—but it feels so different. You can't place yourself in time and the rules of the zombies are neither biological nor supernatural, so you don't have any place to grab to stop the vertiginous freefall. 14. Nightmare City aka City of the Walking Dead (1980), dir. Umberto Lenzi Umberto Lenzi's Nightmare City is ugly. The zombies in it are meant to be covered in radiation burns but just look like they have brown gunk all over their faces. The ending is unsatisfying, the acting is barely serviceable even for an ‘80s Italian film. It's not very smart. What Nightmare City has is a perfect sense of pacing. It never stops, absorbing Romero's geometric editing style on Martin and Dawn of the Dead like it’s popping a week's adderall. Swarms of faces that are not only angry and violent but also crafty, malicious and monstrous never stop barrelling at the characters. The final setpiece, with Hugo Stiglitz standing atop a rollercoaster track trying to board a helicopter while the zombie come at him one after another, never allowing him to rest, doesn't feel like a movie—it feels like a stage from a video game, and a cheap one at that. To compare movies this fast, you have to start talking about Crank and Fury Road. It’s “rampage mode” made flesh. 13. Re-Animator (1985), dir. Stuart Gordon It's very hard to argue that any other movie on this list is more fun than Re-Animator. Director Stuart Gordon and producer Brian Yuzna started in experimental Chicago theater and ended up making splatter movies for video stores. The first of the pair's many H.P. Lovecraft adaptations, it stars Jeffrey Combs as Herbert West, a medical student who's developed a serum to bring corpses back to life. West's re-agent, injected directly into the brain, can bring the dead back to life. It also makes them psychotic, violent and sometimes explosive. The first thing a zombie always does in this movie is scream. It's more than enough of an engine to power a movie, but Gordon takes Lovecraft's sexless and sociopathic tendencies and drops them into a timeless movie dynamic, a love triangle between med students (Bruce Abbott, Barbara Crampton) and their teacher Dr. Hill (David Gale.) If you take the neon goo and prehensile intestines out, it would still work as a drama. Instead Combs plays the character as an annoyed and disgusted incel constantly forced to deal with two men fighting over a woman like she's an object, when all he cares about is corpses and how fresh their brainstem is after death. West only commits one murder in the movie but he says "plagiarist" with so much venom (as he beheads his teacher with a shovel) that you kind of love him for it. This is technically "body horror", but it's a comedy at heart. Four decades later, Gordon's film is now most famous for a scene where a severed head tries to go down on a naked Barbara Crampton. Many, many exploitation scenes like this age horribly—they often do what they’re trying to criticize, turning sexual violence a selling point to drooling audiences—but this one still feels transgressive and destabilizing. Re-Animator ends on a suddenly-dramatic note, with Dan trying and failing to revive his girlfriend with CPR until he realizes he has no other choice and injects her with the re-agent. One of the beloved tropes of the zombie movie is watching an infected, usually innocent, person turn; Gordon leaves us hanging, knowing this can only be the wrong decision. 12. Train to Busan (2017), dir. Yeon Sang-ho While there are amazing zombie details, this Korean blockbuster lives and dies on its cast, mainly the two dads who step up in a moment of crisis: Gong Yoo as a middle-management type who can't connect with his kid, Don Lee as an arrogant bruiser and expectant dad. If you can make it through this movie without falling in love with Don Lee, you aren't human. He steals every scene, wrapping his arms with belts and tape so he can fight without his arms getting cut up. The plot—the military has created a safe haven in Busan, where the cast hopes to take the train, and nearly everyone dies in the process—highlights the way modern society has devalued human connection, emphasizing selfishness as a virtue. 11. The Crazies (1974), dir. George Romero The Crazies opens on a child waking in the middle of the night to see his father setting fire to his house, and never backs down from that level of provocation. Children are always in danger, families are always fracturing. The "fast zombies" trope starts here. Nearly all the Romero classics have been remade or rebooted; this is likely the only one where the remake has eclipsed it completely. A biological weapon spill in a small Pennsylvania town causes people to lose their minds. The city is swarmed with soldiers in white hazmat suits. Unlike a lot of Romero's projects it follows the institutional perspective alongside that of regular people. A group led by two firefighters evades capture and tries to break through the quarantine zone, thinking they are immune until everyone slowly starts to say insane shit. Lynn Lowry gives an excellent performance, using her childlike physicality to emphasize how violent her emotions are beneath the sweet voice. Her death scene, in which she’s gunned down in a field of sheep, is the most beautiful thing Romero ever filmed. Romero's project—critiquing American power— becomes formalized here. Instead of brainless newsmen, useless politicians and somewhat terrifying cracker sheriffs, we have American flags hanging over families brutalizing one another and the military occupying a small town. Rednecks with guns, sterile labs covered in blood and the military floundering are an omnipresent threat that he returns to again and again. (The remake, which stars Timothy Olyphant, is kind of just a delivery system for one really good knife scene. You can find it on YouTube and save yourself the 2 hours. Life is too short.) 10. Shaun of the Dead (2004), dir. Edgar Wright Co-writers Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright are structure people, obsessed with tiny little setups and payoffs. This is a team in love with screenwriting on their first big movie, and it's precise to a degree that feels more than the sum of its biggest influences: the ubiquitous George Romero, American Werewolf in London, and Richard Curtis rom-coms. The voice is very strong here. Horror is taken seriously, as is the visual language; nothing else is. There is a playful running gag that the reason for the zombie outbreak is never explained (including a mildly nasty dig at how stupid the inciting incident of 28 Days Later is.) The zombies here represent the titular character’s inability to move on from early adulthood—he’s scared to invest in his relationship, to ask his fuck-up best friend (Nick Frost) to move out, to get a better job, to go somewhere else than the same bar every night. It turns out that two idiot roommates who spend all day playing shooters are actually good in a zombie-apocalypse situation, but Shaun’s newfound sense of purpose solves none of his problems and he’s forced to deal with everything he's been avoiding at high speed. Wright's movies have been more and more about emotionally immature manchildren with excellent music taste. The best of those is probably Scott Pilgrim vs the World, but Shaun is probably the only one of Wright’s films that approached that type of guy with skepticism if not outright resentment. It’s a disaster movie where the zombie apocalypse is a shitty weekend for a guy who’s a little too old to be still working at Best Buy, not a mask-off moment for society. Shaun did for horror comedy what 28 Days Later did for zombie movies: it made them something a studio would finance. Warm Bodies, Burying the Ex and Zombieland, —the only good one—followed. 09. Cemetery Man aka Dellamorte Dellamore (1994), dir. Michele Soavi Michele Soavi was an actor-director who showed up late to the Italian horror boom, arguably making the category’s only masterpiece of the ‘90s. Cemetery Man is based on a novel by Tiziano Sclavi, author of italian comic Dylan Dog, a character patterned after actor Rupert Everett. In a true casting coup, Soavi convinced Everett to star in this one as Francesco Dellamorte, a cemetery caretaker who's taken on the task of killing the dead once they resurrect. Dellamorte is lonely, and he's starting to lose it. He meets a young widow and seduces her; she dies poetically almost immediately. This pushes him over the edge. In a surrealist stroke, Anna Falchi plays every woman Dellamorte meets and falls in love with after the first one dies—possibly at his hand, although he’s unsure if she was dead or not. She is too beautiful to be real, too nuanced to be a series of hallucinations. Actors of Everett’s caliber rarely deign to work on this kind of material, but this one is wittier than it has any business being, with English-language dialogue recalling both Morrissey and Oscar Wilde. It's full of highly stylized characters, including another severed head (this one wants to get married) and a hallucination of the Grim Reaper entreating Dellamorte to "Stop killing the dead—kill the living." The end result is strangely romantic and amoral. It's also the rare Italian zombie film with a hospital shooting spree that features no zombies. 08. [ rec ] (2007), dir. Juame Balaguero & Paco Plaza The found-footage horror subgenre is often where creativity goes to die. We all knew George Romero was done when he made Diary of the Dead, a found-footage movie bereft of any sort of resentment or rage. Even the exhausted Land of the Dead (the Escape from L.A. of the franchise) still felt like it had something to say about America—where we were at, and where we were headed. (Dennis Hopper plays a Trump-like president who tries to run away from a zombie incursion with a limo full of money. This was 20 years ago!) Diary of the Dead, released two years later, felt like Romero completely giving up, surrendering to commercial demands. The only reason Romero could get movies financed was because the world had taken his ideas and mass-produced them, in a mockery of Dawn's anticapitalist politics. Zombies were big business. It took a Spanish film with a miniscule budget to prove that found-footage zombie movies could be as exciting and formally daring as the greats. A TV news reporter (Manuela Velasco) and her cameraman (Pablo Rosso) are filming an overnight shift at a Barcelona fire station when the crew gets called to an emergency in an apartment block. When they arrive, two cops accompany them to an elderly woman's apartment as she appears to have a psychotic break. She bites one of the cops; the situation quickly devolves into a zombie outbreak. The building is cordoned off and sealed by the military, people start dropping, and soon it's just Velasco and ROsso alone with all those things in the dark. The movie never plays fast and loose with the idea that someone is pointing a camera at everything we see, the worst aspect of lazy found-footage horror, and classic tropes play out with elan—a sick little girl is revealed to be infected after being on camera for 20 mins, the apartment the superintendent says is empty turns out to be where the movie’s headed, the zombies are revealed to be the result of clandestine church experiments on a possessed child. But sometimes you just want a new way to look at the old standards. 07. Dead Alive (1993), dir. Peter Jackson Before he was a respected blockbuster fantasist, Peter Jackson made splatter comedies. This is not a horror-comedy, where the scary parts are scary and the comedy parts are funny. No one on earth thinks Dead Alive is a scary movie. Everything is funny, and when it's not funny it's disgusting. Everything is sticky, everyone is a leering cartoon character; each effects shot plays like a joke. The movie starts when a bizarre stop-motion monkey-rat whose bite is deadly and infectious is shipped to the Wellington Zoo. It bites the main character Lionel's mother, and she quickly becomes a vile, pus-spewing corpse and eventually grows to the size of a house, trying to swallow her callow son whole. Jackson plays up the droll suburban dynamics of the character's lives, with scenes of Lionel trying to feed a table full of the undead without them attacking him. The zombie are all unchecked lizard-brain. They want to eat and fuck, nothing else. A raging party at Lionel's house, thrown by his scummy uncle, is a hotbed for zombie proliferation, and an endless source of gags—a zombie baby, bodies fed piecemeal into a blender, a head without a jaw trying to bite people. Like Re-Animator, this movie is at its best when something hilarious and fucked up happens that your teenage self would need to show to people. Lionel taking a lawnmower to 40 zombies in his foyer, spraying every surface in the room with blood? You would show that to everyone. 06. Return of the Living Dead (1985), dir. Dan O'Bannon Return began its life as a sequel to Night of the Living Dead by John Russo and Russ Streiner, who worked on the original but had very little impact on the final movie. Hemdale bought the script for the title alone and hired Alien screenwriter Dan O'Bannon to write and eventually direct it. It's a wonderful screenplay. A young punk gets a job at a medical supply warehouse and accidentally gets exposed to a toxin that brings the dead back to life. The series of problem- solving decisions the characters take are exactly how you as an audience member would react Destroy the brain! Well, that didn't work. Chop it up and burn it! It's still moving, and the ashes create acid rain that brings back hundreds more. There’s no solution that doesn't make things worse. These zombies are smart, they can work together and plan. At one point a woman—or half of the body of a woman, technically—explains that brains are the only thing that stop the pain of death for a zombie, and it's all they think about. The real worries here are nuclear armageddon, radiation, chemical waste. The nihilism is a little too stark, the glee in the violence a little too desperate. You need to be a certain kind of angry to click with this movie. There aren't many 80s movies that aren't directed by Penelope Spheeris, Alex Cox or Sogo Ishii that could truly be called “punk” without qualifying it. This isn't teenage rebellion in leather-jacket-and-mohawk drag; this is a movie that low-key hates you for watching it. The punks in the movie feel like actual punks (including Linnea Quigley, who yearns to be torn apart and devoured.) They're resentful and kind of dumb and some of them are clearly just dressed up because they really want friends, or to get laid. And everyone dies. Horribly. Senselessly. Return (along with a Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episode, maybe) is the reason that everyone thinks zombies eat brains. It's something that leaked into pop culture and is now common knowledge. All these movies present their own variation on what a zombie is; only Night of the Living Dead, Return of the Living Dead and 28 Days Later really redefined what mainstream culture thinks zombies are. 05. Zombie aka Zombi 2 (1979), dir. Lucio Fulci Released in Italy as a direct sequel to Dawn of the Dead, Lucio Fulci's Zombie is invested in gore over everything. It's famously the movie where a zombie bites a shark—and that's the least interesting thing about it. Fulci began building his reputation as a restrained director of thrillers and westerns before earning his maximalist "godfather of gore" reputation at midcareer. That started with the release of Zombie and the Gates of Hell trilogy that followed, two of which were also zombie movies. One of the director's pet obsessions was injuries to the eye. Maybe it’s just because that’s something everyone alive is terrified of, but he returned to closeups of eye injuries again and again—it's such an expressive part of his grammar. Fulci mines tension for all it's worth, as in the way he shows a woman's head pulled through a shattered door excruciatingly slowly, until her eye is fully impaled, without ever cutting away, as she’s screaming in agony, for minutes. This is the cinema of cruelty. Fulci said he was contracted to make a sequel to Dawn of the Dead, but spiritually felt like he was making a sequel to I Walked With A Zombie. This film owes a lot to both -- a graveyard full of European conquerors begins to rise with the only explanation being an unseen voodoo enchantment. The tension between science and magic is implied rather than explored, with a doctor experimenting with transfusions of zombie blood and killing each of his patients that turn. Interesting is that Fulci never personifies the magic, so it feels like the island itself is rejecting science and "civilization" like a bad organ transplant. The idea that the endless spread of zombies across the world begins with an unspoken violation of sacred land has so much weight to it. 04. Day of the Dead (1985), dir. George Romero Of the three classic Romero films, Day of the Dead is the least beloved and least hopeful. In a salt mine in the Florida Keys, a detachment of scientists and soldiers are experimenting on zombies, long after the undead have overtaken the country; the film is set at the moment the situation finally passes the point where anyone can fool themselves into thinking they're doing anything but delaying the inevitable. Everyone is overtired. Everyone is screaming, a stubborn cartoon character clinging to whatever identity they had before everything went away. Joe Pilato barks all his dialog at a local-playhouse 9, Richard Liberty is playing a cop show's idea of a mad scientist, and Lori Cardille gives a minimalist performance where the lighting makes a lot of choices for her. The only person doing a great job is Sherman Howard, as a domesticated zombie test subject named "Bub.” This was the height of special-makeup-effects gore, so much so that the movie had to be released unrated. Things go a little too far. We see people torn apart—a soldier's vocal cords shriek in higher and higher tones as his head is torn off—and an entire torso’s worth of organs pours out of a zombie's chest, slathered in red paint. Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead each start with their female lead awaking from a nightmare, but it’s Day that feels like a nightmare. Dawn was a bleak script that was lightened up as the movie was being shot; the opposite happened here. When I was at my lowest point in life and wanted to watch a movie with no hope and no sense of humor about it, I watched Day of the Dead every single day, for weeks. 3. Night of the Living Dead (1968), dir. George Romero The Big Bang of the zombie movie, and the beginning a renaissance for the American horror film. A group of Pittsburgh television and commercial production people—writer/director George A. Romero had made short films for Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, including “Mr. Rogers Gets a Tonsillectomy”—made their first feature, working in an idealized collective manner. They wanted to depict a truly revolutionary society that attempts to take over the existing one, then show it being put down by the powers that be. Night of the Living Dead was shot in black and white because the news was still in black and white. The biggest influence on Night was Richard Matheson's 1954 novella I Am Legend, a post-apocalyptic, post-outbreak story of a world overrun by vampires and a single man who stalks them by day. Matheson was a defining voice in science fiction and horror, not to mention the best writer on the original Twilight Zone. I Am Legend was a psychological take on horror tropes, applying realism to all the rules of vampires and in turns, explaining and inverting them until the hero becomes the monster the new society needs to deal with. Matheson's novel has been adapted for the screen three times, beginning with The Last Man on Earth, starring Vincent Price, with a script from Matheson. It's not a masterpiece, or even very good, but features a lot of visual signifiers we now see as Romero innovations. There are other Night foreshocks in alien invasion classic The Earth Died Screaming and Herk Harvey's proto-Lynchian anxiety attack Carnival of Souls. None of these movies are Night of the Living Dead, though. None of them synthesized so many elements that would become essential to the zombie film: cannibalism, zombie lore, UFO jargon, geographic isolation, the white grease paint, the limited cast, the news reports, the sick little girl who turns, the slow burn opening, the hysterical heroine, the graveyard, the isolated farm house, the basement. It's shocking how much of this movie is just DNA now, including the failed mission to get gasoline and escape that ends in disaster, a beat that’s in every single one of these movies. The daring choice that Romero and Russo made was to cast the best actor they knew in the lead, which is how local theater actor Duane Jones became one of the first Black performers to star in a horror film. Romero later regretted that he didn't modify the script to address the fact that the character was Black, and felt it was hippie hubris that made him think not rewriting it was the more radical choice. Jones' Ben is the only character who trusts himself and his own intuition, and won't allow others to bowl him over. It was a radical choice to make him the hero in ‘68, but it renders the ending that much more stomach-churning; Jones’ character has survived the zombie apocalypse (and the idiots it’s saddled him with) but to the rural Pennsylvania police he’s still less than human. It's stomach turning. The day that the final cut of the film was finalized and the prints were being driven to New York for the premiere, Romero got in the car and heard on the radio that Martin Luther King Jr had been assassinated. Night, like It's a Wonderful Life, was accidentally allowed to slip into public domain; for decades local TV stations ran it on Halloween night because it was free. In the process it became part of the lingua franca of American culture, and nothing would ever be the same. 2. 28 Days Later (2003), dir. Danny Boyle Director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland kickstarted the second zombie boom with their revision of zombie tropes for a post-9/11 world. There just isn't a better opening 20 minutes of a zombie movie. Every choice is perfect—to shoot on grainy digital handheld, to shave half of Cillian Murphy's head, to have him carry a plastic bag full of sodas around an empty and destroyed London, to play Godspeed You Black Emperor's "East Hastings," to have the first zombie that appears be a priest vomiting blood, to set several people on fire before explaining a single thing. Immaculate decisions. It doesn't matter that it kind of falls apart once the military guys show up (likely because these Englishmen don't have the sheer hatred for the military that someone like Romero did; they don't feel like the guns are pointed at them.) The Godspeed song had been used a few years earlier in the 2000 documentary American Nightmare, which explored the radical politics of the 60s and how they presented in the horror boom; it’s something Alex Garland almost certainly watched. Garland collaborated with Boyle again on Sunshine and has since worked a writer-director, but nothing has been as good as 28 Days Later, which made Garland's reputation as the high minded genre dabbler with modern sensibilities (the best of which is Ex Machina.) 28 Days Later recontextualized the zombie as a temperature gauge for modern anxieties, from the dissolution of interpersonal relations in the face of disaster to misogyny rising in male spaces. Children of Men may have been a better movie about a more realistic apocalypse but it only exists on the back of every choice made here; the pilot episode of The Walking Dead is an almost beat for beat remake. Before the year was out, Brian Eno's "Deep Blue Day" was in half a dozen horror trailers; the world had changed. 1. Dawn of the Dead, dir. George A Romero The best of the best. Endlessly imitated, never duplicated, Dawn of the Dead feels eternal. Its sense of time and place—with hundreds of extras in a sprawling single location, a newly-designed Monroeville shopping center—is unparalleled. Its zombies feel the most like definitional zombies; there is no remix or “take” on the form happening here. These are zombies. In a way, Dawn invents modern cinema, via an editing style Romero called "cubist", chopping up a lot of shots into rhythmic choices, using the location’s overhead lighting to shoot every scene run-and-gun. Vietnam veteran photographer turned special effects artist Tom Savini is a third authorial voice in the film; when he was part way through writing the script, Romero called him and asked him to think up ways to kill people. Savini's work was a lot less sophisticated than that of his contemporaries, but it feels more real. He had seen the real effects of violence, and thought blowing a dummy's head off with a shotgun was fun. There is so much in Dawn beyond the critique of capitalism, which is right on the surface—people keep coming to the mall, even after they're dead. The four characters—Peter, Fran, Flyboy and Roger—get consumed by the things around them leading them to decadence. The entire 70s happens to these people; consumerism is driving them mad, because they have everything they could ever want at their fingertips, but can't ignore the walking hell clawing at the glass doors all the time. The rot is there, physicalized. When bikers finally show up to take the place from them, they’re already packing and trying to leave. Romero understood how to film Pennsylvania unlike any other filmmaker. He’s the only one who captured the state’s sunsets, its juxtaposition of Northern cosmopolitan and working class shitkicker. (Dawn’s depiction of the worst version of Americans, armed to the teeth and day-drinking while they pick off their undead neighbors in a field? You can still find those people an hour outside of Philadelphia or Pittsburgh or Scranton.) A couple of TV news crew members and a pair of SWAT officers ditch their responsibilities in a stolen helicopter and try to flee the zombie apocalypse, without much of a plan. SWAT was another recent development in the American machine that had arrived in the decade since the first film; the idea that even the agents of the country's apparatus of control are eyeing the door is a final capper to this movie’s very ‘70s ambivalence. All these characters seem to be wondering, What the fuck is any of this for? Who am I helping? Why don't I feel better when I have all this shit? Those questions never went away, and have come to define us as a country more than any of our supposed ideals. As a writer, Romero was closest to Rod Serling. You can watch his films and see us poison our own well, over and over again. But it's also fun watching four normal people armed to the teeth and mowing down randoms, solving problems and building a life for themselves in a commercial space; it’s the stuff decades of video games are made of. It's a wonderful fantasy as well as a condemnation. A lot of zombie movies reach for an emotional center where you realize the zombies are us, but none of them come as close as the moment Gaylen Ross finds herself sitting behind a glass door, face to face with some random zombie in a gas station uniform. There's no difference. There was never any difference.
