Sam Raimi financed his friend J. R. Bookwalter's directorial debut, The Dead Next Door, using a portion of the profits from Evil Dead II. The film is a low-budget zombie action-drama shot entirely on SUPER 8 and features a mix of cringe-inducing amateur acting performances and touches of unexpected professionalism.
A party of tourists investigates the remnants of a sinister Templar abbey, waking the blind dead who can find you by listening to your heart. Sword-wielding zombie Templar warriors on zombie horses chase them through a field.
Zeder is an offbeat horror-drama that puts a new spin on the typical zombie flick by following a young author as he tries to solve the mystery of the K-Zones.
Teenage boys argue over who gets to attack the zombie female in Deadgirl. The film made the list for providing an application for zombies that hadn't been explored in 40 years.
The plot of Warm Bodies revolves on two zombies who track out their biological father. A standout aspect of the movie is its comical connection.
A group of students camps out in a remote cabin in Norway. By taking the Nazis' gold, they accidentally bring back a group of zombie Nazi soldiers. The movie is a pretty standard horror comedy, but the special effects and action are great.
Jeff Barnaby's Blood Quantum is a zombie thriller with a satirical, political bent that delves deeply into the prosaic sorrows of colonialism.
James Gunn's debut film, Slither, was a tribute to B-movie zombie and extraterrestrial films. It lacks a little of originality due to similarities to another film on our list, Night of the Creeps (1986), but it's still a great picture in its own right.
Juan of the Dead, by Alejandro Brugués, is Cuba's first zombie movie.
The film Juan of the Dead adds political verve to zombie cinema, with Juan trying to profit off the panic and confusion by starting a small business that eventually spins out of control.
A comet hurtles toward Earth, threatening to obliterate life as we know it. This is one of the zombie flicks with the least focus on the undead, yet it still turns people into zombies if they are just exposed to the virus partially.
Planet Terror is a funny zombie movie that was directed by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. The film is about violent zombie/mutants who were developed by a biological weapon to destroy the countryside of the southwestern United States. It is a pretty wonderful example of that sort of movie, and it certainly deserved to earn a far larger sum of money at the box office.
For zombie/horror genre fans, 28 Weeks Later is an often intriguing, terrifying, dramatic, and infuriating picture, but it breaks one of the unwritten laws of zombie filmmaking by having a'main zombie' who escapes, robbing the other infected of their status as serious threats.
Tom Savini's 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead is an accurate adaptation. If not for the title, it would be a classic.
Lucio Fulci's film The Beyond blends a haunted home aesthetic with demonic possession, the living dead, and eerie apparitions.
The first Paranormal Activity and Romero's own Diary of the Dead came out in 2007, which was a big year for found-footage horror. Still, REC, a Spanish film that mixes traditional zombie stories with religious mysticism, is probably the best of all the found-footage zombie movies.
If there was a zombie outbreak, digital phones would get it. This movie illustrates it beautifully.
Pontypool is an intellectual and ethereal reimagining of what the term zombie may entail. It's a film that I admire for taking the difficult path, and it's a critique of 21st-century humanity's incapacity to actually connect and debate relevant, truly vital matters.
Demons is a zombie movie set in a movie theater full of strange people, like rich kids, couples who are fighting, a pimp with his prostitutes, and even a blind man.
Romero's picture defined the zombie genre's rules, and every zombie film afterwards has been inspired by it. It's the horror version of Tolkien's effect on high fantasy "races," and you can't talk about zombies without mentioning Romero's picture.
Evil Dead 2, a remake of the first Evil Dead film, is one of the greatest, most tightly paced horror comedy ever made. It's also symptomatic of the film industry's evolving stance about zombies, as shown in this film.
In 2002, with the release of 28 Days Later, zombies were once again taken seriously as a danger. It was the inspiration for today's zombie movies.
One of the best zombie movies ever made is John Russo's (Updated) follow-up to Night of the Living Dead.
Dawn of the Dead is a breakthrough in presentation, professionalism, thematic intricacy, and visual effects. It takes set in a garish mall invaded by zombies and has classic visuals.