The zombie drama is the genre that doesn’t die. It is for ever undead. Every time you think it has exhausted ways for the dead to rise up and create mayhem, another film or TV show arrives and is once again the most talked about thing around. This happened most recently with The Last of Us, HBO’s post-apocalyptic nightmare (shown in the UK on Sky), which is now back with a second series (April 14). The first series chimed unsettlingly with a world still readjusting to normality after a pandemic. Can series two do the same? Time will tell.
One thing’s for sure, The Last of Us won’t be the last of our zombie horrors. Here are my ten favourite examples of the dead rising again.
Brad Greenquist and Dale Midkiff in Pet Sematary
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10. Pet Sematary (1989)
Not all zombies are lurching cadavers. Not all are even human. In this hokey Stephen King adaptation a family cat is buried in a mystical pet cemetery after being mown down on a highway. Hey presto! The mog rises from the grave as good as new … apart from the bared fangs, glowing green eyes, bad odour and preference for ripping small animals to pieces over Whiskas. Paramount+
9. The Thriller video (1983)
John Landis and Michael Jackson jettisoned any creeping dread in favour of niftily synchronised undead dance routines, paying musical homage to B-movie horror. The 12-minute video is still great fun, although it is never made clear why the ghouls were climbing from their tombs to try out body-popping moves. Blame it on the boogie? YouTube
Bill Pullman in The Serpent and the Rainbow
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8. The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988)
In Wes Craven’s Haiti, the undead are locals slipped a paralysing drug, buried, dug up and, in their visibly glum, semi-lobotomised state, used as slaves. Guess what happens to meddling scientist Bill Pullman? “Don’t bury me,” he is soon screaming. “I’m not dead!” For his troubles, the poor man also gets a nail in his privates. It is not a great advert for a career in anthropology. Prime Video
7. Re-Animator (1985)
A bona fide cult 1980s video-store rental. Naked corpses run amok after a modern Dr Frankenstein’s experiments down in the morgue. Amid outrageous levels of carnage (out-gored perhaps only by Peter Jackson’s splatter-com Braindead seven years later), bowels creep out of orifices to throttle the unwary and a corpse carries around its own severed head in a bowl … and takes a shine to an unfortunate female patient. Prime Video
Cillian Murphy in 28 Days Later
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6. 28 Days Later (2002)
New century, new zombies. The shambling gait and outstretched arms were rendered obsolete overnight by Danny Boyle’s post-apocalyptic horror. Here the dead were all-sprinting maniacs. The zombie virus was a contagion transmitted to humans by animals (in this case infected chimps) and the sight of Cillian Murphy awaking in St Thomas’ Hospital to an empty London eerily presaged a real pandemic 18 years later. Rent
Kate Ashfield, Simon Pegg and Lucy Davis in Shaun of the Dead
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5. Shaun of the Dead (2004)
By contrast, Shaun of the Dead’s zombies were a throwback to mouldering, slack-jawed shufflers — they looked “like a drunk who’s lost a bet”. Simon Pegg’s slacker tribute to George Romero was also very funny as the absurd mixed with the mundane in suburbia. Take for example the moment in a pub where Pegg’s band of survivors, armed only with pool cues, beat up an elderly corpse to Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now on the jukebox. Prime Video
4. The Returned (2012-15)
The Gallic zombies. This downbeat drama pre-dated The Last of Us as a TV series where the zombies were almost secondary to the sense of dislocated trauma. This one had a Twin Peaks-ish feel, however, as local dead people start to reappear in a small Alpine town. They look ordinary and act normal — even teenage school-bus crash victim Camille — except for their oddly insatiable sex drives. Don’t trust them. Prime Video
Christine Gordon, Frances Dee and Tom Conway in I Walked With A Zombie
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3. I Walked with a Zombie (1943)
The most beautiful zombie was a black-and-white one. A blonde woman might just be a corpse among lost souls in Jacques Tourneur’s classic, which is like Jane Eyre gone voodoo. But is she? As the poster helpfully put it: She’s alive … Yet dead! She’s dead … Yet alive! Accept the vintage feel and this is a tremendously atmospheric slice of exotic noir-horror (not the first Haiti-set one, though — Bela Lugosi in White Zombie was 1932), underpinned by a metaphor about the injustice of slavery. iPlayer
Bella Ramsey and Anna Torv in The Last of Us
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2. The Last of Us (2023-)
The thinking man’s The Walking Dead imagines how a fungus starts affecting humans’ brains in 2003, started by a mutation in the food chain. Suddenly society is decimated by hideous monstrosities — zombies, to all intents and purposes — sprouting tendrils out of their mouths or large, obscenely colourful fungal growths from their heads. They are truly horrifying, whether sprinting at their prey with a blood-chilling scream or by creeping half seen in a dark building making ghastly echolocating noises. Sky/Now
1. Dawn of the Dead (1978)
Zombies have always been metaphorical reflections of society. In George Romero’s sequel to his fantastic 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead — which featured hordes besieging a remote farmhouse, still pretty frightening — the undead now stagger mindlessly around shopping malls. Why? Because here is “a horrible, hauntingly accurate vision of the mindless excesses of a society gone mad”. Apparently, blueish-faced, flesh-hungry cadavers are the “horrible consequences” of our consumerist world. Think of them the next time you go to your local shopping centre. Prime Video
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