Zombie movies are one of cinema’s most malleable genres. Though they’re often confined to horror scenarios, the undead have flexed their acting muscles elsewhere. There are of course myriad zombie comedies, zombie action movies, and even zombie heist movies, but what about the zombie musicals (Anna and the Apocalypse), zombie family dramas (Maggie), or zombie political thrillers (Doomsday)?
The genre, pioneered in 1932 with White Zombie and popularized in 1968 by George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, has seen just about every twist and turn imaginable. While we love old-fashioned gut-munchers (and have a special appreciation for the mid-century Euro-zombie craze), some of our favorite installments are the films that give us ideas to chew on — in addition to innards.
Here is Entertainment Weekly’s ranking of the best zombie movies of all time.
30. Maggie (2015)
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Arnold Schwarzenegger and Abigail Breslin play father and daughter in this soulful drama about a young girl slowly turning undead from the effects of a pandemic. More chamber piece than horror picture, Henry Hobson’s understated and somber film deals with a zombie outbreak in realistically grueling terms. Maggie features admirable work from its two leads and Joely Richardson but has struggled for recognition in a genre preoccupied with headshots and sequences of death-defying thrills. It’s not exactly an uplifting experience, but Maggie is one of the more underrated recent additions to the form.
29. Resident Evil (2002)
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Milla Jovovich made her name with this hell-for-leather action franchise. Playing commandos who must break into an underground bunker — “The Hive,” operated by the shadowy Umbrella Corporation — to stanch a zombie apocalypse, Jovovich and Michelle Rodriguez give uncommonly compassionate performances for the genre.
Though the series descends further into its video game roots as it goes on, this first installment (directed by Paul W.S. Anderson) punctuates its gratuitous action with a solid story and a few sequences of genuine suspense. It’s a pleasantly postmodern riff on the zombie mythos that came about at a time when the sub-genre was lacking, to say the least. Anderson satisfies the strictures of a video game adaptation while flirting with some of the bigger ideas he previously played with in Event Horizon (1995).
28. Anna and the Apocalypse (2018)
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As an ill-timed zombie outbreak threatens to ruin Christmas in the sleepy Scottish town of Little Haven, Anna Shepherd (Ella Hunt) bands together her friends to stomp, slash, and sing their way to victory over hordes of the undead. This lovely, whip-smart musical-horror-comedy evokes the spirit of both classic zombie movies and the Hollywood sing-songs it clearly idolizes. It also functions, more often than you’d expect, as a gruesome horror adventure. Highly memorable tunes and some dashing choreography contribute significantly to the film’s unique brand of ethereal fun.
27. Life After Beth (2014)
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Dane DeHaan plays a heartbroken young man whose girlfriend (Aubrey Plaza) miraculously returns from the dead. What begins as a happy twist of fate quickly turns gruesome, as Beth begins to deteriorate and morph into a flesh-craving monster. A subversive and well-honed dark comedy directed by Jeff Baena (Plaza’s now-husband), Life After Beth harks back to the youth-centric horror comedies of the ’80s and ’90s while injecting the proceedings with a welcome dose of pathos.
26. Night of the Creeps (1986)
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In this cult classic horror flick, alien parasites take over the bodies of coeds who turn into grotesque zombie slugs and proceed to terrorize a college campus. Monster Squad director Fred Dekker helmed this gloriously unhinged zombie riff, a movie so quintessentially ’80s that it’s practically wearing shoulder pads. It’s a throwback to nuclear-era creature features like The Blob while also being so rewatchable and jovial that you almost want to dub it “feel-good.”
25. Little Monsters (2019)
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This is a lithe, bizarre little horror-comedy starring Lupita Nyong’o as a kindergarten teacher who joins forces with a washed-up musician (Alexander England) and a children’s TV star (Josh Gad) to save a group of kids from a zombie apocalypse. Nyong’o’s performance is both inexplicable and admirable, but she’s just one member of a wholly committed cast that makes this risky parody sing. Little Monsters owes a debt to every zombie movie that came before it, specifically Shaun of the Dead (2004), and yet there’s a real sense that anything could happen in this ribald, extremely gory thrill ride.
24. It Comes at Night (2017)
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Trey Edward Shults’ grim genre riff stars Joel Edgerton and Carmen Ejogo as a couple hiding out with their son in a post-apocalyptic civilization where an unspecified disease has turned most of mankind into slobbering flesh-cravers. If that wasn’t enough, another couple’s arrival (Christopher Abbott and Riley Keough) throws their carefully cultivated world into a tailspin.
Shults plays with the idea of who (or what) is the ultimate evil in this head-twister, which is ably abetted by a cast who rings every bit of truth from the scenario. Ejogo is quietly commanding (we’re begging for her own action franchise), but it’s Keough who does the most heavy lifting, being alternately heartbreaking and bewildering here.
23. Night of the Comet (1984)
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Another cult classic from a bygone era, Night of the Comet sees teenage Valley Girls (Catherine Mary Stewart and Kelli Maroney) attempt to evade the undead after a comet strike unleashes a zombie apocalypse. Meanwhile, a group of scientists wants to use their nubile bodies to develop an antidote. Thom Eberhardt’s film is an incomparable mash-up of sci-fi and zombie conventions thrown into the blender of ’80s excess and whipped to delight. It comes close to achieving a John Waters level of zaniness, but Eberhardt also finds room for some heady ideas within his genre mélange.
22. Warm Bodies (2013)
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Jonathan Levine’s Warm Bodies is a sweet and salty romance between a zombified youth (Nicholas Hoult) and a human woman (Teresa Palmer) whose father (John Malkovich) happens to be leading the force to eradicate the undead. Perhaps the greatest compliment to this subversive and emotionally resonant dramedy is that, for much of its running time, you’re unsure how it will end. Levine has always been adept at throwing you off the scent of genre convention, and here he keeps audiences on their toes. It’s probably his best film to date (though 50/50 is also a contender), and certainly the one that best showcases how he wrings fresh magic from vintage threads.
21. White Zombie (1932)
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The original zombie movie stars Bela Lugosi as Murder Legendre, Haiti’s zombie master. He’s sought out by Charles Beaumont (Robert Frazer), who wants to kill his scheming wife (Madge Bellamy) and bring her back as a member of the undead contingent.
Not a zombie movie as we’d come to know it, this film nevertheless set the tone and many of the hallmarks for the flesh-eater genre. It’s beautifully designed and shot, owing much of its lush aesthetic and photography to expressionist silent classics like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Cat and the Canary.
20. Pontypool (2009)
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A terrifically smart twist on the zombie genre, this aural chiller stars Stephen McHattie as disc jockey Grant Mazzy, who happens to be on air while the undead rise to power (off-screen) and threaten mankind’s existence. The twist here is that the virus is passed through sound and language, making the protagonist’s profession a particularly unfortunate one.
Expertly unfolding through phone calls from Mazzy’s listeners and snatches of news reports, this always-entertaining thriller presents a distinct, unflinching view of a zombie epidemic. You might worry, as the movie coasts to its conclusion, that it won’t be able to maintain its subtly creepy effect as horror encroaches on the radio station; but rest assured, director Bruce McDonald maintains a sure hand for the entirety of the sleek 95-minute running time.
19. Slither (2006)
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Before he became mired in various superhero universes, James Gunn directed this jolly throwback to ’50s creature features and ’80s body horror flicks. Elizabeth Banks stars as town stunner Starla Grant — inexplicably married to Grant Grant (Michael Rooker) — who must save her small community from an alien invasion with the help of local sheriff Bill Pardy (Nathan Fillion).
Slither more or less defines the term “gleefully gory” with its jocular approach to evisceration. It’s one of the rare horror comedies that precisely gauges both tones and their intersection. Some of the frights are genuinely harrowing, not to mention nauseating, and the humor arises naturally from the characters and their reactions rather than extraneous plotting.
18. Doomsday (2008)
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Neil Marshall’s genre-hopping film begins as a zombie rampage picture before morphing into a medieval riff on George Miller. Rhona Mitra stars as a military commando leading a unit to recover an antidote to the deadly virus, but her team soon learns that the feral survivors are far more dangerous than any zombies.
Well-paced and uniquely structured, Doomsday is a gleefully overloaded, eminently rewatchable genre pastiche. A bevy of rubbery gore effects and some truly eye-popping practical crack-ups give the movie a satisfying heft, while Mitra holds her own against Bob Hoskins and Malcolm McDowell. In the days where mid-budget action-thrillers are disappearing rapidly (or are bludgeoned to death with ropey digital visuals), it’s a thrill to see one accomplished on such a vast scale.
17. Dead Snow (2009)
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Violent Night director Tommy Wirkola honed his signature blend of gore and humor with this stupendous Nazi-zombie epic. Part Evil Dead, part Zombie Lake, and wholly insane, this rollicking yarn follows a group of hard-partying medical students to a mountain retreat where they’re summarily set upon by the corpses of Nazi soldiers once exiled to the woods around them.
This brisk and nasty effort is almost unfairly effective given its small budget and relatively slight ambitions. The list of exploitation movies that feature Nazis is vast, but Dead Snow does so in a terrifically witty manner, making the central villains far more than just window dressing. There are also some nice satirical touches here, which Wirkola smartly drops in without over-egging them.
16. Anthropophagus (1981)
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Joe D’Amato, prince of Euro-sleaze, directed this grimy and hypnotic slasher/zombie entry about a group of pleasure seekers (led by Tisa Farrow, Mia’s sister) who end up on a secluded island with a cannibalistic murderer (George Eastman).
In part a rather serene Greek travelogue and, on the other hand, a tale of gut-munching exploitation, D’Amato’s genre riff slots in comfortably with similar Italian undead pictures of the time while taking enough detours to feel a bit transgressive. The ultimate explanation for the antagonist’s battiness is a highlight of the zombie sub-genre and worth a watch alone.
Its pseudo-sequel, Absurd (1981), is just as good (maybe even a bit better), but you can hardly call it a zombie movie. Eastman returns, ostensibly as the same character, to lay siege to a hospital staff and then a babysitter while pursued by a priest (Edmund Purdom) specializing in the supernatural.
15. World War Z (2013)
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Marc Forster’s unfairly maligned adaptation of Max Brooks’ novel stars Brad Pitt as a U.N. worker who must lead the resistance against a deadly virus. After an immensely troubled production, World War Z grossed over $500 million worldwide and spawned sequel talks for years before those plans were ultimately scuttled.
It’s a shame none of that came to be, because this classically structured blockbuster lends itself to franchise treatment. World War Z has more than its fair share of white-knuckle set pieces, including one on an airplane that unfolds in masterful fashion (too bad all the trailers spoiled it). The final scene, a pared-down (reshot) stalking sequence in a Welsh laboratory, adds an almost certainly unintentional weight and emotion to the entire vehicle.
14. Nightmare City (1980)
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Umberto Lenzi (of the notoriously delirious giallo Eyeball) directed this off-its-rocker tale of airline passengers who, after turning into rabid zombies upon exposure to an airborne toxin, land in Manhattan and lay bloody siege to the city. Hugo Stiglitz stars as the news reporter tasked with ending the bloodshed.
Lenzi’s unhinged feature doesn’t quite convince you that its European soundstage is New York City, but that hardly matters when the package is so delightfully entertaining. This is a trash classic, but to call it only that does the movie a slight disservice; it’s propulsive and often risk-taking within the parameters of the genre. The sequence in which zombies invade a television studio and cause live-on-air mayhem is worth the price of admission, and then some.
13. Zombi 2 (1979)
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Perhaps the greatest of the Dawn of the Dead imitators is Lucio Fulci’s genre classic. Anne Bowles (Tisa Farrow, once again) jets to a mysterious island in order to find out what happened to her researcher father, accompanied by a local reporter and a sexy couple with a convenient boat. The island, they discover, is populated by hungry zombies. That’s the simple setup for a succession of nasty set pieces (zombie vs. shark!) that often bump up against Fulci’s preoccupation with ocular trauma.
Superb gore effects and an efficient pace set this Romero rip-off apart from the proliferation of zombie products pouring out of Italy at the time. Fulci is one of the most perverse maestros of repulsion that cinema has ever seen, and here he delivers a few of the best sequences of his esteemed career.
12. Braindead (1992)
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Before he entered Middle Earth, Peter Jackson was the splatter king of Oceania. Braindead (known as Dead Alive stateside) was Jackson’s third feature, telling the twisted tale of Lionel Cosgrove (Timothy Balme), who’s snooping mother (Elizabeth Moody) is bitten by a Sumatran rat-monkey during a zoo outing. The nip turns her into a bloodthirsty zombie, wreaking gory vengeance that leaves her son caring for their infected neighbors and, eventually, a demented infant.
Jackson’s effervescent homage to Sam Raimi, Looney Tunes, and European gore epics is one of the director’s most exciting and consistently unhinged movies. There’s no pretense to any of the chaos, no gesturing at a higher meaning or moral reason other than pure, giddy thrills. Watching Braindead evokes the feeling you had as a young child catching a glimpse of something you’re not supposed to see on TV late at night. It’s transgressive and dangerous, but it’s also warm and affectionate amidst the many fluids hurled at the screen. (The scene in which a karate-fighting priest fends off a man with his own severed arm before proclaiming, “I kick ass for the Lord!” is worth a watch alone.)
11. Rec (2007)
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One of the best uses of the found footage format, this Spanish chiller follows news reporter Ángela (Manuela Velasco) who accompanies a fire crew to a call in hopes of capturing a slice-of-life segment for her late-night show. What she finds is far more terrifying, as residents of the building fall victim to a virus and the government quarantines the site.
Genuinely unnerving and anxiety-provoking, Rec is a suspenseful film within the confines of POV shaky cams, never using those parameters to cheap out on quality storytelling. There are too many sublime horror sequences to name here, none of which we’d dream of spoiling.
9. The Return of the Living Dead (1985)
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Two small-town stooges (James Karen and Thom Mathews) accidentally unleash a hazardous gas that turns their fellow townsfolk into bloodthirsty zombies. As the boss of the dopes who beget the outbreak, genre stalwart Clu Gulager gives a comic performance that is nothing short of revelatory.
Alien scribe Dan O’Bannon directed this wickedly smart update of the zombie mythos, which arrived just after George Romero had seemingly said all there was to say on the matter. Yet O’Bannon comes out swinging with even more ideas that contribute indelible tropes to the genre at large; this is both the first film in which zombies eat only brains and the first in which a well-placed headshot is powerless to stop them.
8. Re-Animator (1985)
Stuart Gordon’s seminal body horror picture set a new template in its tale of demented Dr. Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) who uses his reanimation antidote to resurrect corpses, cats, and eventually his mentor, Dr. Hill (David Gale).
Gordon established himself as a grue-auteur with this completely off-the-wall take on the well-trod zombie formula. There’s a sense of almost childlike glee in Gordon’s direction as he throws every conceivable gore gag at the screen, with a miraculous number of them sticking. An incredibly game Barbara Crampton aids Combs in his wide-eyed pursuit of looniness.
7. Planet Terror (2007)
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Devised as one half of the somewhat ill-fated Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez Grindhouse double feature, Planet Terror stars Rose McGowan as exotic dancer Cherry Darling, who along with her on-and-off beau Wray (Freddy Rodriguez) must protect their small town from a zombie invasion. Sound familiar?
Rodriguez’s bloody romp is awash in creative gore effects and well-staged action beats, with a cast that perfectly understands the assignment they’ve been handed. In a just world, we’d have about 24 performances of this sort from McGowan. She has both the presence and the cadence of a classic film star, and she grounds this movie with a sly, world-weary charisma. Josh Brolin, just ahead of his No Country for Old Men career resurrection later that same year, also excels at playing a real creep with a devastating skin condition.
Planet Terror is best viewed in the proper Grindhouse format, followed by the fake trailers and Tarantino’s (preferable) 90-minute cut of Death Proof.
6. Shaun of the Dead (2004)
Edgar Wright’s flawless examination of daily drudgery amidst a zombie apocalypse stars Simon Pegg as the titular Shaun and Nick Frost as his slacker friend, Ed. Together with Shaun’s less-than-impressed girlfriend (Kate Ashfield), as well as his mother (Penelope Wilton) and step-dad (Bill Nighy), the hapless pals seek safe ground to wait out the impending end of days.
The first and best of Wright’s so-called Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy, Shaun of the Dead is a glowing example of zombie-comedy. EW’s own Clark Collis wrote a terrific book about the making of the movie entitled You’ve Got Red on You, which features interviews with key creatives as well as the masterminds behind The Walking Dead, who nicked more than you might expect from Wright’s zombie opus to craft their own.
Where to watch Shaun of the Dead: Amazon Prime Video (to rent)
5. One Cut of the Dead (2017)
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This ingenious Japanese horror-comedy tells the tale of an ill-fated film crew who, while shooting a low-budget zombie movie in a decrepit WWII-era setting, are set upon by hordes that are actually undead.
One Cut of the Dead is a multi-faceted love letter to the genre, with a great script and some lovely, understated performances hiding amongst the grue. Even more than a zombie picture, the movie is all about the love of cinema, which for some endures even as revived corpses munch their innards. Shin’ichirō Ueda’s film is surprisingly, cathartically emotional and (if you’ll pardon the pun) brilliantly brainy.
4. Night of the Living Dead (1968)
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Romero’s independently produced phenomenon stars Duane Jones and Judith O’Dea as survivors hiding out from aggressive zombies in a secluded farmhouse. Along with White Zombie, Night of the Living Dead set the parameters for the genre. Romero unknowingly invented an entire cinematic form (not to mention his own career) with this stylish and brutal work.
The director excelled at a documentary-style approach to horror, which sometimes served him less successfully (1973’s The Crazies) than it does here. This, his best film, is utterly transgressive and grimy in the most realistic fashion. There’s no glamor and little glory in its nihilistic but satisfying horror. The finale, well-known for its stark commentary, has only grown more powerful with each passing decade.
3. Dawn of the Dead (1978)
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George Romero’s classic consumer satire about a group of survivors hiding out from a zombie apocalypse in a shopping mall has only grown more potent, more sharp, and more ferocious with age. This, the middle of Romero’s original zombie trilogy, is the most vibrant of his undead works and also the most humorous. It has a peculiar but successful sense of pace, just a beat behind where you think it should be, which keeps the audience off-center and puts them in the position of the human leads, who are biding time waiting for the outbreak to subside.
Zack Snyder remade the film in 2004 under the same name. It doesn’t come close to matching Romero’s original, neither in terror nor satire, but is an above-average addition to the mid-aughts remake boom.
Where to watch Dawn of the Dead: Amazon Prime Video (to rent)
2. Train to Busan (2016)
“A helluva action movie,” as your grandma might say. A ne’er-do-well father (Gong Yoo) and his estranged daughter (Kim Su-an) get trapped on a bullet train with scores of the (very fast) undead intent on gobbling their brains.
At the tail end of the zombie craze, during a time when audiences were a bit fatigued by the subgenre, along came Yeon Sang-ho’s terrifically paced thriller to provide a welcome jolt of adrenaline. He crafted an incomparably exciting blockbuster — filled with outrageous gore and feverishly choreographed action — as well as a rounded, satisfying character study. It’s one of the very few times a horror movie will have you wishing they’d hurry along the set pieces so you can get back to the human drama.
1. 28 Days Later (2003)
Twenty-eight days after the country is ravaged by a “rage virus,” Jim (Cillian Murphy) awakens in an abandoned hospital and stumbles into a post-apocalyptic London. He soon joins up with fellow survivors Selena (Naomie Harris, electric in her film debut) as well as Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and his daughter Hannah (Megan Burns), with whom he prepares to navigate their dangerous new world.
One of the most influential horror movies of the 21st century, 28 Days Later pre-figured the zombie craze kicked off by Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead (2004) remake and The Walking Dead. Danny Boyle’s film is both a nightmarish vision of terror and a humanist drama, evoking the later It Comes at Night in its depiction of a post-zombie landscape in which people are the most dangerous predators. There’s a sweaty, credible tensity to the picture that follows you for hours, perhaps even days, after you’ve watched it.
