When zombies were originally introduced in cinema, notably through the Bela Lugosi film White Zombie in 1932, they were a great deal different from how they are generally viewed today. From George A Romero to Danny Boyle, all the way to The Walking Dead, the public perception of what defines a zombie has changed a great deal through the years.
There are many more zombie films than other movie monsters, such as Frankenstein or werewolves, have managed over the years. Zombies are more popular than ever today, having seen surges and resurgences over the past twenty years since the idea of the fast-moving zombie was first brought to the big screen.
6 Night Of The Living Dead (1968)
The original modern incarnation of a zombie comes from Haitian legends which were the inspiration for Western writers to start including them in works. From there and the 30s and 40s film versions of zombies, the first George A Romero zombie film is something that violently shook up the status quo for what a zombie was known as at the time.
Night of the Living Dead was the first film to introduce the concept of a zombie being completely devoid of almost any thought. It was the first film to introduce the idea that they can only be stopped by destroying the brain, and the film also introduced the idea that zombies eat human brains. This wasn’t a part of the zombie myth until this point. No film or piece of media has changed zombies as much as Night of the Living Dead, and probably never will.
5 28 Days Later (2002)
After the George A Romero films, zombies declined in popularity throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and it wasn’t until Danny Boyle gave them a reinvention that business truly began to pick back up for the genre. 28 Days Later presented an apocalyptic disease event that turned most of the population of the UK into zombies, but with one major difference. They could run.
Romero’s zombies were slow, and eventually, this made it too difficult for filmmakers to turn them into a big threat to face off against. The more gruesome appearances of modernized zombies which were popularized by 28 Days Later helped bring the genre back to life as audiences got excited and terrified all over again by the idea of zombies.
4 Shaun Of The Dead (2004)
It hadn’t occurred, or at least not in such ingenious ways, to filmmakers that zombies could also be a source of comedy, until Shaun of the Dead. Peter Jackson and his early film Braindead made some inroads, but it was this film that fully launched the “zom-com” into a sub-genre of its own which has become nearly as popular today as zombie horror films.
Shaun and his friends who innocuously wander into an apocalypse, almost without noticing, were part of one of the funniest films of this century. Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and Edgar Wright worked together as a team to create a trilogy of great comedies, of which this was only the first, but it was the most defining and changed the direction of the zombie genre violently going forwards.
3 Dead Snow (2009)
It was surprising to see a Norwegian film try to tackle two of cinema’s greatest adversaries through time at once. Nazis and zombies blended together to make a unique, comedic, and truly exciting experience that spawned an equally fun sequel later. Dead Snow managed to change something about the zombie genre that hadn’t been changed in a long time, almost without realizing it.
While the zombies were happy to kill and eat people through Dead Snow, they also wanted to retrieve the gold which had been stolen by the people staying at the cabin. This gold was what the Nazis stole from the townspeople before being chased into the mountains to die, and in their undead form, they were protecting it, acting as more than just flesh-eaters.
2 Train To Busan (2016)
The Korean zombie instant classic produced one of the most heart-pounding thrillers in the entire history of the zombie genre. Train To Busan was a pinnacle for the zombie genre. It was truly excellent execution, providing the template by which modern zombie projects, including other Korean ones, would begin to define the modern zombie genre.
Train To Busan was about a father and daughter who get caught on a train with a horde of zombies as a plague spreads across the country. The horrifying appearance and mannerisms of these lightning-quick zombies were similar to other more recent projects like World War Z, but it feels perfectly built as the new modern zombie in this film.
1 The Girl With All The Gifts (2016)
A rare case that has crept up more recently is the quieter, less destructive zombie film which begins to try and humanize the creatures. This is a common theme with other movie monsters like vampires or Frankenstein, who have been humanized in various projects in the past. On this occasion, a fungal plague infected much of the world with a virus creating zombies or hungries as they are known in this film.
The film is about a young girl, who was born with the virus and manages to learn and feel as well as crave flesh. She and her teacher trying to understand the virus and attempting to figure out what the new hierarchy of the world will look like. Educated and feeling zombies is a new phenomenon that has become popular more recently, and has produced a more thoughtful, drama-filled kind of zombie film.