Celebrate the Halloween season (and find inspiration to start working out) with the best zombie films.
‘Zombieland’
I briefly considered putting this on my list of recommended horror-comedies, and honestly — like Shaun of the Dead — it’s probably at home on either list.
Still, the story of four survivors trying to make their way across a zombie-infested America leans just a little bit more into zombie fiction tropes, which is why I’m choosing to put it on this list instead.
Unlike many zombie stories — and many of the movies on this list — which deal with the immediate outbreak of the zombie virus, Zombieland instead takes us two months post-outbreak. Remaining survivors have had to learn to toughen up, shedding their sense of compassion and humanity (and extra weight) in order to stay alive.
It’s a genuinely hilarious movie — not a surprise, given the fact that the cast includes Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, and Emma Stone — that also provides plenty of high-octane zombie chases, gruesome and creative zombie deaths, and characters worth rooting for.
It also provides a nice, handy and surprisingly practical list for zombie survival, the first of which — cardio — is similarly applicable for all the films on this list.
‘REC’
I’m usually not a fan of found footage films, but if there was ever a movie worthy of an exception to this rule, it’d be this 2007 Spanish horror film.
In it, we follow reporter Angela and her cameraman Pablo, who start the night by doing a pretty mundane news piece on the local firemen. They end up tagging along with the firemen as they respond to a distress call at a local apartment building. The distress call turns out to be about an old, eccentric woman, trapped in her apartment, screaming and bloody.
The firemen break into her apartment accompanied by two policemen, one of whom gets bitten when the old woman becomes aggressive. When the officers try to call for help, they realize that the whole apartment building has been locked from the outside as a form of quarantine and — well, I’m sure you can guess where it goes from there.
This movie is a fast paced zombie thriller that involves a lot of running around cramped spaces and up and down lots of flights of stairs while being chased by bloody zombies. The camera POV is never so shaky or dark that you can’t see what’s going on, which makes the threat of zombies and the overall sense of unease and panic that much more heightened.
On a final note, you might be tempted to watch the American re-make of this film called Quarantine that came out a year after this movie. My advice? Don’t. Despite being a pretty close shot-for-shot remake, it doesn’t have the same level of dread and heart pounding horror as REC. Do yourself a favor and stick with this fantastic original instead.
‘Dawn of the Dead’
This is one of the rare occurrences where I actually highly recommend both the 1978 George A. Romero original and the 2004 Zack Snyder remake (and for those of you who are less than enamored with Snyder’s directing style, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised with his remake).
For the purposes of this article, though, I’m going to go ahead and recommend the original, since it’s probably one of the best — if not the best — zombie films ever made.
This story of survivors who clear out, then take refuge in an abandoned mall is both a fantastic zombie horror film — which includes a zombie getting his head exploded — and a thoughtful reflection on both our modern consumerist society and the awful reality of what happens during the collapse of civilization.
You can see a lot of the themes and motifs in this film, as well as the biological makeup of the zombie horde within it, in future zombie films.
If you have seen this original, the remake is an incredibly enjoyable zombie film. Perhaps less subtle in its commentary (subtlety is not a skill for which Zack Snyder is particularly well-known for), but the action sequences are dynamic. The first 10 minutes of the movie is one of my favorite zombie film sequences of all time.
’28 Days Later’
I know, I know — the infected are not technically zombies.
Unlike traditional zombies, which lumber along at the speed of a college student perusing the grocery store aisles at 2 a.m., the creatures in this movie run terrifyingly fast and are capable of doing things with superhuman strength.
However, they’re still mindless automatons bent on eating humans and are killed by a nice head shot, so I’m totally okay with describing them as fast zombies.
This 2002 Danny Boyle horror film deals with both the terrifying reality of surviving in a fast zombie-infected Britain and the lengths that people will go when there’s been a complete and utter breakdown of society.
Boyle is a master of all types of horror in this film, able to use an emptied urban landscape to inspire dread in the audience and lone survivor Jim, played by Cillian Murphy, and inspire a choking sense of panic as our plucky survivors attempt to change a tire in a pitch-black tunnel while the sounds of the infected come closer and closer.
Neither of these, though, compare to the sickening horror he exposes toward the end of the film, as Jim, Selena and Hannah learn about the motive and intent of the soldiers who they believed would be the ones to save them.
It’s a terrifying film that artfully highlights one of the best and most interesting ideas in zombie fiction — that it isn’t the dead we should fear the most at the end of the world, but rather those left alive.
‘Train to Busan’
This 2016 South Korean movie is probably one of the best zombie films to come out in the last decade.
It centers on divorced, somewhat neglectful father Seok-woo and his young daughter Soo-an, who board a high speed train to visit Busan.
Unfortunately, while on the train, a full-fledged zombie apocalypse breaks out in South Korea — and on the train itself.
What follows is 100 minutes of heart pounding zombie chases and zombie fights, as the increasingly small band of survivors attempt to fight off hordes of the undead and survive in this post-apocalyptic world. This includes a stop at an overrun station and making their way through infected train car after infected train car.
This movie also features a particularly badass scene — the one I chose to feature above, actually — in which all-around badass Sang-hwa, father Seok-woo and teenage baseball player Yong-guk have to fight their way through an infested train car to rescue their loved ones with nothing more than tape wrapped around their arms and a baseball bat in their hands (or just their bare hands for Sang-hwa — seriously, that dude is the best).
Like all great zombie films, Train to Busan likewise uses its end of the world setting to make social commentary on class and money, with our survivors having to not only deal with the plague of the undead but the influence that power and money still have on the people around them.
As an added bonus, this movie is currently on Netflix, which means it’s available for you to watch right now!