28 Days Later & 9 Other Unconventional Zombie Movies | ScreenRant
George A. Romero didn’t come up with the concept of the undead or even coin the term “zombie,” but he did define the zombie film with 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, one of the greatest horror movies ever made. Romero’s movie was so effective that, like John Carpenter’s Halloween a decade later, horror filmmakers would continue to shamelessly rip it off for decades. The zombie and slasher genres are essentially the result of widespread plagiarism. But zombie movies have always been more beholden to Romero’s narrative framework than slasher movies were to Carpenter’s.
Almost all zombie movies feature a band of survivors holed up in a single location, riding out the apocalypse, dying off one by one. The genre risked losing its ability to scare audiences, but thankfully, a handful of directors came along with a unique enough vision of the undead to stand out from the crowd, and there’s still hope for zombie movies, while other genres like westerns and noirs have mostly faded into obscurity.
10 28 Days Later
Even if nobody else minds calling 28 Days Later a zombie movie, director Danny Boyle has always been hesitant to label it as such. Technically, Alex Garland’s script isn’t about the dead rising from their graves to eat the living; it’s about a virus that causes people to suddenly acquire a taste for the living. But ultimately, they’re basically the same thing – except these zombies, unlike Romero’s dawdling undead, can run.
The real innovation in 28 Days Later is its gritty, semi-realistic tone and its narrative framework. Instead of following the beginning of a zombie apocalypse, 28 Days Later follows Cillian Murphy’s Jim as he awakens from a coma a month after the zombies arrived. He’s baffled to find the streets of London empty and has a rude awakening when he learns what happened to everybody.
9 Overlord
Julius Avery’s Overlord sets itself up as a pulpy World War II actioner in its first act, as some American troops parachute out of a crashing plane and seek refuge from Nazi officers patrolling the streets.
But by its third act, it’s a full-on B-movie gore-fest with superpowered S.S. zombies flinging the protagonists around a secret underground Nazi lab full of reanimated soldiers.
8 Life After Beth
Instead of opening with the zombie apocalypse in full swing, Life After Beth takes the time to tell the story of patient zero in the mold of a quirky romantic comedy. Zach (Dane DeHaan) is shocked to discover that his recently deceased girlfriend Beth (Aubrey Plaza) has returned from the dead and her parents (John C. Reilly and Molly Shannon) are keeping her locked in the house.
Zach breaks her out, only to find that zombies don’t exactly make the ideal romantic partners. The beauty of Life After Beth is that it applies the zombie narrative to a completely different genre. It’s usually a given that zombie movies are horror movies, but Life After Beth made it work as a rom-com.
7 Train To Busan
The action-packed South Korean gem Train to Busan sees a self-centered businessman taking his estranged daughter on a cross-country rail journey to stay with her mother and contending with the rapid spread of a zombie plague that he unwittingly helped to create.
Yeon Sang-ho reinvented the zombie in this movie with ravenous, sprinting hordes of the undead flocking toward living flesh en masse, and it was the first time zombies had been genuinely scary in years. As the icing on the cake, the story’s train setting – much like in Bong Joon-ho’s similarly train-bound genre piece Snowpiercer – becomes a powerful metaphor for class warfare.
6 The Dead Don’t Die
Jim Jarmusch brought his signature deadpan humor to the zombie genre with The Dead Don’t Die, an ensemble piece whose loosely structured script takes place across a peaceful town named Centerville as it faces a zombie uprising.
The star-studded cast features such beloved actors as Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Tilda Swinton, Steve Buscemi, Danny Glover, and Carol Kane. Plus, musicians like RZA, Iggy Pop, and Tom Waits make delightfully meta cameo appearances.
5 Slither
Before helming big-budget blockbusters for both Marvel and DC, James Gunn was known for directing quirky little horror movies filled with dark humor. Slither is a prime example. It’s set in a small town whose residents are being turned into zombies by alien slugs.
There are a lot of similarities between Slither and Fred Dekker’s Night of the Creeps (which is also worth checking out for fans of tongue-in-cheek horror movies), but both movies borrow so shamelessly from so many famous horror movies that the accusations of plagiarism that flooded internet message boards felt a lot like splitting hairs.
4 Warm Bodies
One of the preconceptions of the zombie genre is that its stories are told through the eyes of the living as they desperately try to survive. But Warm Bodies is told from the perspective of one of the undead.
Nicholas Hoult plays a zombie who falls in love with an uninfected human, played by Teresa Palmer. Warm Bodies isn’t just an unconventional zombie movie; it’s an unconventional love story, too.
3 Cooties
Co-written by Saw’s Leigh Whannell, Cooties is a pitch-black comedy about the staff of an elementary school as they fend off their zombified students after a mutant virus arrived in the cafeteria via a defective batch of chicken nuggets.
The cast is full of fan-favorite B-listers: Elijah Wood, The Office’s Rainn Wilson, Alison Pill, Lost’s Jorge Garcia, SNL’s Nasim Pedrad, and Jack McBrayer.
2 The Serpent And The Rainbow
In order to subvert the conventions created by Romero, Wes Craven went back even further in the history of zombie stories than Night of the Living Dead to influence his underrated 1988 movie The Serpent and the Rainbow. The idea of the zombie originated with Haitian slaves, and the earliest zombie movies were about voodoo rituals.
Craven combined these two influences in The Serpent and the Rainbow, which stars Bill Pullman as an anthropologist studying voodoo drugs used in religious ceremonies in a politically divided Haiti to create living zombies.
1 Shaun Of The Dead
In their airtight script for Shaun of the Dead, Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg essentially took the basic structure of a Romero zombie movie and translated it to a British romantic comedy. The result is a horror-comedy that works effectively as a horror movie and effectively as a comedy (which is surprisingly rare).
Shaun and Ed wake up with a bad hangover, find that the world has been overrun with the undead, and plan to round up their loved ones and take them to the pub to ride out the end of the world.
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