The best zombie movies of all time

The biggest budget zom-buster of them all features Brad Pitt strapping on his undead-ass-kicking boots and heading out on a globe-trotting trip to find the source of a zombie pandemic. It all goes a bit awry in the last third as Brad inexplicably ends up hanging out with a soon-to-be-former Doctor Who in a rural Welsh GP’s surgery, but up to that point this is a gripping grand-scale romp, even if it does skimp on the gore that all but defines the genre in favor of PG-13 spectacle.

A Norwegian black comedy that takes distinct pleasure in splattering snowy landscapes with viscera, Dead Snow never fully realises its potential as either a comedy or a horror film. But in pitting a group of hikers against a risen platoon of Third Reich ghouls, it does make a solid argument that the only thing better than punching Nazis is hacking their reanimated corpses to pieces or – in one particular worth-the-price-of-admission set piece – rappelling down a fjord using their intestines. 

Immediately retconned in the opening title cards of the third film, Spanish director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s sequel to 28 Days Later is a nastier, bleaker, more traditional zombie flick than Danny Boyle’s predecessor, with dodgy CGI, frequently incoherent action sequences and characters who only exist to instigate the plot then get torn to shreds. All that said, it still rocks pretty hard. With the Rage virus seemingly contained, survivors are herded into a US-controlled ‘safe zone’ on the River Thames, until two dumb kids break the rules and everything goes to shit again. Fresnadillo may lack Boyle’s humanist touch, but he makes up for it with some gnarly set pieces, including a cold open that stands up to anything else in the franchise, and a blunt critique of an American military more equipped to destroy things than rebuild them.

If you like a bit of splatter and some dark, edgy humour then this Australian zombie-outbreak comedy – set primarily in a children’s petting zoo and starring Lupita Nyong’o as a ukulele-playing nursery teacher – will suit your tastes. We meet Dave (Alexander English), a broken man who falls for his five-year-old nephew’s teacher (Nyong’o). In pursuit of his crush, he volunteers to help out at a class outing to a petting zoo that, thanks to a mishap at a neighbouring American military base, becomes a fight for survival against hordes of the undead. Amid all the blood and guts, writer-director Abe Forsythe squeezes something surprisingly heartwarming out of the film’s plot, proving that there’s still life in this genre filled with undead lumberers. 

Japan’s answer to the The Blair Witch Project and [REC] (only with a lot more LOLs), this micro-budget horror-comedy did colossal numbers at the box office, despite its cast of unknowns and helter-skelter approach to the genre. Then again, zombie flicks often work best with minimal budgets and just directorial vim to go on, and One Cut of the Dead has that in spades. Director Shinichirou Ueda presides over a gory, hilarious scenario when a film crew making a zombie movie bump into one of the real undead. What’s Japanese for ‘braaaains’?

Wes Craven based this post-Nightmare on Elm Street offering on a book by Canadian ethnobotanist Wade Davis, who investigated Haitian religious rituals and the real-life origins of the zombie mythos. Craven’s film is far from an anthropological study, but it achieves a different kind of fear from the other, completely fantastical movies on this list. Bill Pullman stars as a Wade Davis stand-in, more or less, a Harvard anthropologist who travels to Haiti to research a black-market ‘super anaesthetic’ rumoured to turn users into the living dead. It gets sillier as it goes on, but the scene of a recently poisoned Pullman, stumbling through a village square and pleading, ‘Please don’t bury me, I’m not dead,’ is a true chiller. 

Due to a copyright snafu, George A Romero’s NOTLD entered the public domain immediately upon release. The result has been a rancid pile of unauthorised remakes across the decades. But one stands out as worthy of its name – the Romero-approved 1990 reimagining directed by Tom Savini, the deranged gore-lord who designed Romero’s nastiest kills in Dawn and Day. The beats are basically the same, save for a meatier feminist bent that provides #JusticeForBarbara. More crucially, though, the blood and guts are top tier thanks to Savini’s frighteningly intimate knowledge of human anatomy. 

You’re right to be sceptical. A remake of (spoiler alert) the best zombie movie ever, from the guy who later made the execrable Army of the Dead? That makes the cut? Really, though, Zack Snyder’s only mistake was calling his debut feature Dawn of the Dead: it’s the kind of big-budget gorefest horror fans would go gaga for, if it wasn’t for the heresy of thinking you can ‘improve’ upon George A Romero’s iconic consumerist satire. Sure the screenplay, from future Guardians of the Galaxy helmer James Gunn, strips away all the humour and social commentary of the original, but it allows Snyder to focus on what he does best: staging big, ultra-bloody set pieces – most notably the banger opening scene – which, in terms of pure shock and awe, actually surpass the source material. 

This sing-along zombie apocalypse, one of a mind-boggling seven movies Japanese director Takashi Miike released in 2001, may not have the sticking power of Audition. But any film inspired equally by Night of the Living Dead and The Sound of Music deserves your attention. Yes, the zombies do sing.

This enigmatic British zombie movie starts brilliantly, with a group of apparently placid kids strapped into wheelchairs in a military facility. They are ‘hungries’, infected with the disease that has wiped out almost all of humanity – and at the first whiff of blood they go ravenously insane. The Girl With All the Gifts can't quite sustain its initial promise, but young star Sennia Nanua is ferociously brilliant.

It was only made two years before Night of the Living Dead, but this likeable Hammer Studios effort could’ve come from a different century. In a cosy little nineteenth-century Cornish village, mysterious happenings are afoot. It soon transpires that the local laird has been creating undead slaves to work in his tin mine, which is a novel approach to labour laws if nothing else.

Quite possibly the zaniest zombie movie ever made, this zomcom knows that for all their grotesquery, there’s just something inherently funny about the shambling undead – and, more than that, the idea that still-living humans would attempt to live among them. Zombieland is also something of meta-pisstake on the zombie apocalypse movie in general, with a nerdy shut-in (Jesse Eisenberg) narrating survival tips for the audience and a perfectly cast Woody Harrelson as a hard-nosed survivalist seemingly thriving in dystopia. With a breezy, sometimes wilfully goofy script, kinetic visuals and a few ingenious set-pieces, it’s maybe the only film on this list save Shaun of the Dead that can be accurately described as a ‘romp.’ It also contains an all-time great cameo that shouldn’t be spoiled even years down the line.

Not just the inspiration for a metal band, this eerie oddity is generally considered to be the very first zombie film – and boy, did they do things differently in those days. Forget all that groaning, flesh-eating and actually being dead. This features a Haitian voodoo priest – played, naturally, by Béla Lugosi – who drugs his victims and turns them into zombie slaves.

This witty sci-fi romp is the movie equivalent of a Cyndi Lauper song, following two airhead California girls who manage to survive when a comet destroys most of humanity and turns the rest into crazed zombies. If it sounds dumb, it isn’t; the writers slipped in all kinds of barbed putdowns and wry gags about consumer culture. Romero should have been flattered.

This movie possibly stretches the definition just a little bit. Stuart Gordon’s witty and OTT splat-com, loosely based on an HP Lovecraft tale, stars the mighty Jeffrey Coombs as an oddball scientist who invents a serum that can bring the dead back to life. But this lot are not all chompy and brain-dead; they’re more like Frankenstein creations – so should we have put old bolt-neck himself in here too? It’s a genre quandary, but any excuse to celebrate Re-Animator works for us.

This kid-friendly zombie flick from award-winning Oregon animation house Laika goes light on gore and big on heart and plenty of references to much more adult films. An outcast at school, thanks to his electro-shock hairdo and love of all things horror, young Norman Babcock’s ability to convene with spirits makes him the only hope for saving his hometown from a witch’s curse that causes the dead to rise. It’s a supernatural caper not far removed from an old Scooby-Doo episode, and an excellent gateway into the zombie genre for little horror fiends. 

This gloriously gruesome gorefest from Eurotrash auteur Lucio Fulci is known for precisely two infamous scenes. One is a slow-motion eye-gouge that ranks among the nastiest onscreen kills of all-time. Far sillier is the underwater battle between a hungry shark and an even hungrier zombie – an actual tiger shark, mind you, albeit one that had been shot up with sedatives beforehand. The rest is fairly standard cheapo video nasty fare, but in the severed-arms race of ‘70s exploitation flicks, audacity wins you major points – the distributors even tried to sell the movie in Europe as a sequel to George A Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, despite having no actual connection.   

Also released as Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, this wonderfully odd movie was produced in Italy, directed by a Spaniard and is set largely in the Lake District (sorry Manchester, the title’s a bit of a con). Here the zombies are resurrected by state-of-the-art ultrasonic farming equipment and unleashed to wreak havoc in the Windermere area. It sounds silly, but the earnest performances, beautiful landscape photography and sudden, shocking gore mean the laughs tend to stick in the throat. The opening theme is a belter, too.

Another old-school zombie movie, set on the island of Haiti and featuring voodoo rituals and living death rather than hordes of entrail-munching shufflers. The director is Jacques Tourneur, the French master filmmaker behind Out of the Past and Cat People, so this is an unusually atmospheric and bewitching horror movie – filled with pale-skinned maidens wandering through misty groves in the moonlight.

The last in George A Romero’s original zombie trilogy may suffer in comparison to Night… and Dawn…, but it’s a close-run thing. What Day of the Dead lacks in spiky political satire it more than makes up for in blunt emotional force, as the last survivors of the zombie plague hole up in an underground military compound and begin to tear each other apart. Romero would reboot the franchise with the solid Land of the Dead in 2005, but would never recapture the raw power of his original three.

Twenty-three real-time years after 28 Days Later, Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland reunite to check back in on the UK post-Rage virus and discover that, in the quarantined British Isles, the English way of life has returned… to the 1700s. Similar to the first film, the movie is a tale of two halves, the first being a coming-of-age survival adventure, the second a startlingly emotional meditation on living with death. As before, Boyle grants his characters, including impressive newcomer Alfie Williams and Jodie Comer as his terminally ill mother, uncommon depth and soul, and he extends some of that grace to the infected, now evolved enough to form small communities (based around giant, well-endowed ‘alphas’) and even procreate. After all, zombies are human, too, or used to be. Who says they can’t be again? 

After watching this Spanish found-footage horror (and its delightfully unhinged sequels), you might think twice about your next holiday to Barcelona. Following a group of firemen and a film crew stuck in an apartment building, things quickly descend into bloody chaos. The claustrophobic nature of its single location, as well as the terrifying night-vision sequences and unexpected supernatural elements, will leave you chilled to the core. This is zombie-horror at its most inventive, gripping and scary.

Like Evil Dead on mescaline-spiked custard – don’t forget the side of rotted ear – Peter Jackson’s second exercise in excessive splatter is so over-the-top gory that even those with weak stomachs will eventually acclimate to the ooze and viscera, stop dry-heaving and start laughing deliriously. That’s precisely the intent. Set in a quaint New Zealand suburb, the silly premise begins with a ‘Sumatran rat monkey’ whose bite turns a sweet, shy local bachelor’s mother into a ravenous, flesh-craving monster. It’s a secret the bachelor must keep from the object of his affection, even as damn near the entire village gradually catches the plague. Its balls-out, lawnmower-intensive finale makes even the next-most-disgusting movie on this list look like an episode of Double Dare by comparison.  

At the opposite end of the spectrum from Romero’s gritty, blue-collar zombie trilogy is the loosely linked Gates of Hell sequence by Italian gore maestro Lucio Fulci: City of the Living Dead, The House By the Cemetery and this unforgettable apocalyptic stomach-churner. Shot in the Louisiana bayou, The Beyond feels as much like a fever dream as a film: tarantulas tear off people’s eyelids, women start to bleed for no reason and reanimated corpses drag the innocent down into the depths of the pit. Starkly beautiful but utterly horrifying, this is a singular work of the imagination.

Korean zombies! On a train! This fierce, fast and frenetic splatter flick takes the template established by George A Romero in Night of the Living Dead, in which a group of survivors retreat into an enclosed space to repel zombie attacks, and sets the whole thing in motion. Original it ain’t. Stupendously entertaining it most definitely is. The sequel, Peninsula, couldn't live up to the mayhem of the original. Fingers crosses that the inevitable American remake – helmed, in an inspired choice, by The Night Comes for Us madman Timo Tjahjanto – can deliver the gory goods.

The first outright zom-com, this is a glorious slice of splatter-punk in which a vat of military-grade toxic waste causes the residents of a small town to transform into flesh-hungry crazies; only the local teenage dropouts can stop them. Written and directed by Alien co-creator Dan O’Bannon, it’s hardly high art, but it is bloody entertaining. It's also one of the most influential post-Romero zombie flicks: This is the first film to specify that the undead prefer braaaaains, with one particularly gloopy ghoul explaining (yes, these zombies areloquacious) that they are the only cure for the pain of being dead. 

One of the most essential and influential horror films of all time, George A Romero’s hugely successful first statement on the zombie phenomenon set the template that endures to this day: the dead rise; a group of people take shelter in a remote location; everyone dies horribly. But this isn’t just a near-perfect fright flick. An independent production shot guerrilla-style on handheld cameras, Night opened the door for every ambitious no-budget filmmaker since, and proved that mass audiences could stomach ‘unsatisfying’ endings. The casting of a black actor as the lead was a bold move, but the film is peppered with radical moments – in one scene, a child literally eats her parents. It’s hauntingly beautiful, too.

Edgar Wright’s ‘rom-zom-com’ made a star of Simon Pegg and a cult hero of its director. Playing the Romero trilogy for big, very British laughs, the film manages to balance outright silliness and surprisingly tough gore with just a hint of romance around the edges. All those zombie parades that keep taking over London? It’s Pegg and Wright’s fault.

Fast zombies existed before 28 Days Later, as had the notion of setting a zombie outbreak in the UK (see 1966’s The Plague of the Zombies). Aesthetically, little about Danny Boyle’s first crack at the horror genre is truly groundbreaking, all things considered. And yet, it feels utterly unlike any other film on this list. In fact, there are those who argue it barely counts as a zombie movie at all, Boyle included. (The ‘Z’ word never appears in the script, and the name of the contagion infecting the planet is the ‘Rage virus’.) Fleet-footed corpses and inspired visuals of an abandoned London aside, what really makes 28 Days Later stand out from the undead pack is Boyle’s signature humanism. The characters – including Cillian Murphy as Jim, a bike courier who wakes up from a coma to find society has collapsed around him – aren’t mere political symbols or sentient sacks of meat that exist simply to be disembowelled. They’re actual people, desperately clinging to whatever shreds of humanity still exist in the world. Turns out, in this line of work, that’s enough of a revolutionary concept to make all the difference. 

Night of the Living Dead changed cinema forever – but Romero’s first sequel Dawn of the Dead is the better film, by a severed nose. As the zombie apocalypse gathers pace, four mismatched middle-class survivors hole up in a giant out-of-town shopping mall to wait it out. But the undead adore this place, and they keep coming back. After one of the most grindingly intense opening acts in horror, the film abruptly switches course and becomes an upbeat adventure film, then a character comedy, then a topical satire, then it’s back to splat for the monumental finale. The pacing is perfect, the script crackles, the score (by Italian prog legends Goblin and horror maestro Dario Argento) hums and squeaks and pounds, the performances are bang-on and the satire cuts like a scalpel. .