The 25 Most Underrated Zombie Movies

Image via Complex Original

Director: James Gunn

Any modern-day movie that pays direct tribute to Fred Dekker's 1986 classic of campy horror-comedy Night of the Creeps immediately deserves props. So the fact that James Gunn's wacky 2006 flick Slither is actually really damn good is simply the icing on the cake, or, for a much more apt metaphor, the melted skin oozing across the pus-filled bodily sore.

After a meteor crash-lands in the outskirts of a small hunting town, the sheriff (Nathan Fillion) and a ragtag group of other survivors fend off locals who've become gooey zombies, due to ingesting intergalactic creepy-crawlies that exited the aforementioned meteor. With a nice blend of showy horror effects and sly humor, Gunn's tribute to B-movies from the '80s recaptures a time when studios made genre movies that favored throwing everything into metaphorical kitchen sinks rather than solely eyeing box office ticket windows.

Director: Andrea Bianchi

Depending on which horror lover you ask, Andrea Bianchi's cheap, shamelessly exploitative Burial Ground is either a work of profound ineptitude or one of those always wonderful so-bad-it's-good treats; obviously, the latter crowd is present here.

Admittedly, though, Burial Ground is for the most passionate of flesh-eater movie fans only, not for anyone who cares about such things as story, acting, or even makeup effects. The same goes for supporters of originality, since Bianchi's film apes the plot of Night of the Living Dead, revolving around a group of characters trapped inside an unfamiliar location (here, it's a mansion-like estate, not a meager farmhouse) as hordes of walking cadavers rip them apart one by one.

At least Bianchi had a ghastly imagination. Unlike the zombies in most other, better movies, the creatures in Burial Ground strategize in ways that make the moronic human characters expose themselves near (inexplicably) open windows, resulting in one wonderful scene in which a character's head gets slowly cut off by a massive sickle. Also worth mentioning is the image of a woman's breast getting bitten off by her zombified son; the biter is played by Peter Bark, an adult dwarf who you're supposed to believe is a pre-teen kid who still breast-feeds. It's Burial Ground's crowning achievement in ridiculousness.

Bark's astounding weirdness alone makes Burial Ground worth a drunken rental on an otherwise uneventful night.

Director: John Erick Dowdle

What’s the best horror movie of the last decade? By some accounts, the answer will be [REC], the 2007 Spanish found-footage adrenaline rush that’s as much a reinvention of the zombie genre as it an exercise in expert pacing and balls-to-the-wall filmmaking.

On the downside, though, [REC] was also evidence that remakes were out of control at the time, with American move-makers putting a stateside rendition into production before [REC] was even finished.

Fortunately, no one can accuse director John Erick Dowdle and his producers of jumping any guns. Even though it's largely a shot-for-shot twin of Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza’s [REC], Quarantine mostly nails everything that makes the original flick work, albeit in less towering manners. Credit goes to star Jennifer Carpenter (Dexter), whose work as the increasingly shell-shocked reporter goes a long way to relay every jolt.

Director: Alejandro Brugués

Right down to its title, the Spanish-Cuban festival darling Juan of the Dead gives every impression of being a Shaun of the Dead ripoff, and, technically, that's what it is, except that the titular slacker here has a young daughter to protect, instead of a chubby best friend. Thankfully, writer-director Alejandro Brugués is no scrub, and his scrappy little horror-comedy manages to impress in the end, offering a layer of Romero-like social commentary, at Fidel Castro's expense, beneath a surface-level sheen of goofy humor and over-the-top gore gags.

Director: Glenn McQuaid

Proving that minuscule budgets can act as motivators, not deterrents, I Sell the Dead makes a small amount of money look and feel like the impetus for a major Hollywood production. Give ambitious writer-director Glenn McQuaid a lot of credit for telling a decades-spanning period story of an imprisoned grave robber who recounts his crimes and how he's had to kill zombies as a result.

Despite his budgetary constraints, the Irish filmmaker employs authentic-looking costumes, has no shortage of makeup effects work on display, and corralled a gifted cast (including Ron Perlman and Dominic Monaghan) for one of the most slept-on horror-comedies of the new millennium.

Director: Jim Mickle

Sticklers for accuracy might squawk at the inclusion of indie director Jim Mickle's Mulberry Street on this countdown, since the "zombies" in question are actually Manhattanites infected by some kind of mutated rodent virus, which turns them into man-sized rats. But anyone who's ever seen a George A. Romero film can spot an unabashed Romero homage when they see one, and Mulberry Street is most certainly that.

It's also a lean, mean, economically made roller coaster ride that features a formidable antihero (screenwriter-actor Nick Damici), impressive makeup effects, and several sequences of claustrophobic intensity set inside an atmospheric apartment building.

Director: Robert Scott

Picture this: You're watching AMC's The Walking Dead on Sunday night, and during the first commercial break, there's a knock at the front door. You casually go to open the door and see that it's not the booty call you were hoping for, but, rather, the same hideous zombies from the TV screen, somehow birthed by your boob tube.

In a nutshell, that's the gist of The Video Dead, a poorly made but nonetheless charming treasure trove of cheesy effects, idiotic ideas, and awesomely bad entertainment. Basically, the film's walkers emanate from a mysterious television set, and as if that ludicrous premise wasn't agreeable enough, there's also a pointlessly long fantasy sequence during which the young protagonist meets, in the exposed flesh, a hot blonde he was just watching on the tube.

The character's good fortune doesn't last long, though. Eventually, he's lifted into the air by a swing to serve as live bait, in a moment that's as hilarious as it is impractical. So, yes, he's essentially The Walking Dead's Glen (Steven Yeun), circa 1987.

Director: David Morlet

Throughout the late 2000s, France repeatedly reminded horror audiences why its native filmmakers are some of the most exciting directorial minds currently working within the genre. From High Tension to Inside and Martyrs, the films coming out of French borders one-upped Hollywood's scary movie output in every conceivable way.

One French production that's been unfairly lost in the shuffle, though, is David Morlet's quasi-zombie flick Mutants. The antagonists are better described as mutated freaks, not members of the walking dead, but that's just a technicality; at its core, Mutants, is a zombie film with heart. It follows a pregnant woman and her husband, who's slowly succumbing to a virus, as they navigate their way through a wasteland of ravenous killers. In the tradition of the best zombie movies, Mutants charges its way through brutal deaths and jolting shocks and culminates in an exceptionally bleak finale.

Director: Tommy Wirkola

Dead Snow is about Nazi zombies, and has copious amounts of them. What more do you need to know?

See, the thing about Norwegian writer-director Tommy Wirkola's film, which unsubtly winks and nods at Sam Raimi's Evil Dead series, is that the filmmaker so obviously wants viewers to enjoy it for that Nazi zombie angle, so ignoring the characters and plot isn't a criminal act in any way. Besides, Dead Snow's still-breathing participants only seem to exist to brandish high-powered chainsaws and slice their ways through the SS ghouls, whenever they're not dying awful deaths or trying to have premarital sex inside a frosty, snowy cabin.

If a movie's characters have one-track minds, why can't audience members?

Director: Robert Rodriguez

To this day, it's still infuriating to think that Grindhouse, the incredibly far-reaching double bill of throwback exploitation flicks from Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, was a box office disappointment back in April 2007. Blame it on the poor marketing, which failed to sell the project properly, or simply point at close-minded moviegoers who couldn't convince themselves to sit in a theater for over three hours to experience a marathon of zombies, homicidal stuntmen, and fake movie trailers.

Five years later, Grindhouse has earned its rightful place in the cult movie pantheon, and Rodriguez's opening movie, the zany Planet Terror, is a major factor. Complete with synth-heavy music straight out of old John Carpenter movies, Planet Terror winks at old Lucio Fulci zombie flicks while also maintaining its wicked sense of humor.

The monsters, townsfolk infected with a deadly biochemical agent, are covered in sores, pus, and rotting flesh, and the heroes, namely the sexy Rose McGowan and her machine gun leg, are all walking, talking, knowingly written clichés. Planet Terror is nearly 90 minutes' worth of excessive fanboy satiation, which, when done by a talent as singular as Rodriguez's, can be a great thing indeed.

Director: Bruce McDonald

It's a ballsy concept: Make a zombie movie without showing many actual zombies. In other words, create something that will make anyone who hated on the first half of The Walking Dead's second season feel bad about ever crapping on AMC's slow-building horror series.

When a director has a lead performance as engaging and rich as Stephen McHattie's in Pontypool, however, a mostly walker-free 90-minute exercise can be a fruitful one, and that's definitely the case here. McHattie plays a shock radio jock who gradually covers an undead apocalypse from the comfort of his recording booth. To deliver the expected scenes of nightmarish tension, filmmaker Bruce McDonald relies on the actor's facial reactions to sell moments in which field reporters calling into the station get attacked.

The results, though largely devoid of Z-men and women, are more than effectively suspenseful.

Director: Wes Craven

What's a credible zombie movie list without some good old-fashioned voodoo? Rather than follow the George A. Romero template of once-buried corpses rising from their graves to munch on flesh, Wes Craven's sadly overlooked 1988 creeper The Serpent and the Rainbow takes the idea of the walking dead back to its island roots.

Bill Pullman stars as a Harvard researcher who travels to Haiti on assignment, tasked with investigating the validity of voodoo resurrecting the dead and its possible connection to an important medical drug. Of course, once he's there, Pullman's character's hopes of enjoying a nice, intellectually stimulating visit are quickly dashed, giving way to a series of trippy hallucinogenic sequences and some of Craven's best moments of behind-the-camera work.

Director: Andrew Currie

Many positive things have been said about the 2004 cult favorite Shaun of the Dead, and all the praise is well deserved. Unfortunately, the widespread fawning over Edgar Wright's breakthrough horror-comedy has made it virtually impossible for Canadian director Andrew Currie's like-minded 2006 flick Fido to earn even half of Shaun's good will. And that's disheartening for anyone who's seen Fido.

With clever subversions of the genre, likable characters, and well-handled emotions, Fido does a great deal with a quite silly premise that up-ends the old "boy and his dog" motif. Here, the story follows a little kid whose mother, against the father's wishes, buys him a zombie pet, which he names, yes, "Fido."

The standard coming-of-age narrative elements are all in place in Currie's movie, from the disreputable bullies to the overbearingly strict dad, and all are manipulated in ways that satisfy both comedic expectations and hopes for some playful gruesomeness.

Director: Lucio Fulci

Lucio Fulci had a thing for characters opening the gates to Hell. Like in his superior 1981 flick The Beyond, the nonetheless commendable City of the Living Dead centers on reluctant heroes trying to close the portals to Lucifer's playpen, since, in this case, a priest's churchyard suicide has unleashed packs of murderous corpses upon a town named after the fictional setting of author H.P. Lovecraft's tale "The Dunwich Horror."

What gives City of the Living Dead its sharp edge is the story's race-against-the-clock conceit: If the protagonists, a New York reporter and a psychic medium, don't figure out a way to close the aforementioned, figurative gate, the world is basically over. Being that this is a Fulci movie, don't expect that to actually happen; instead, expect puke to drown a person's intestines, a drill press to pierce through a dude's skull, a rainstorm of maggots, and numerous brains ripped out of people's heads.

Admit it, you'd prefer all of that to a happy ending, anyway.

Directors: Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza

Clearly, [REC] filmmakers Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza have a deep appreciation for James Cameron's Aliens, the 1986 sequel to Ridley Scott's 1979 sci-fi/horror masterpiece Alien. Like Aliens, [REC] 2 takes the premise of its predecessor and pushes the insanity level to 11, upgrading the action immensely and expanding the original's already creepy "infection spreads" ideas into the unruly terrain of "zombie mayhem by way demonic possession and exorcists."

Picking up immediately after the final seconds of [REC], the 2009 follow-up skips the first movie's nearly hour-long build-up to the craziness. In [REC] 2, the shit hits the proverbial fan within the first 10 minutes, and, thanks to clever uses of such left-field directing approaches like helmet-cameras, the first-person, almost Doom-like attack sequences roar with an extreme sense of urgency.

Director: Michele Soavi

One thing zombie movies are rarely ever called: brilliant character studies. Yet that's precisely what Italian director Michele Soavi's painfully underrated mash-up Cemetery Man is, one that's good enough to be evaluated as an amazing piece of pure cinema, regardless of its genre trappings.

Excellently portrayed by Rupert Everett, the film's main character, Francesco Dellamorte, tends to a graveyard where corpses resurrect every seven days and must be put back down by Dellamorte. It's a job that has heavily bearing tolls on the man's psyche, which doesn't help the fact that he's also looking for romantic love in all the wrong places.

Deftly balancing genuine scares, artsy visual flourishes, and a personal story that's equally heartfelt and tragic, Cemetery Man stands out amongst the pack of zombie flicks for several reasons, not the least of which is its ability to credibly exist outside the realms of horror without forsaking the genre.

Director: Lucio Fulci

Technically, Lucio Fulci's The House by the Cemetery is more of a haunted house film than a zombie picture. When the spirit marauding around a house is a long-deceased mad doctor who thrives off of human flesh and blood to keep his grotesque physical appearance intact, though, you're definitely in a walking dead movie.

Besides, the best hauntings require a bit of restraint and subtlety, two words that most certainly weren't in Mr. Fulci's vocabulary. Even though there's only one actual zombie in The House by the Cemetery, the film is sadistic, and, of course, revolting, enough to get by on its scant undead presence.

Director: Tom Savini

In the conversation of horror remakes, makeup effects wizard turned director Tom Savini's Night of the Living Dead has one of the more unique backstories. Rather than see any real artistic merit in the endeavor, original Night maker George A. Romero, who produced Savini's version, has readily admitted that the sole reason for making the 1990 modernization was to recoup some of the money lost when he and his 1968 collaborators failed to secure a title copyright, thus leaving the hugely successful original vulnerable to unauthorized distribution.

Knowing that, it's even more impressive watching Savini's film and applauding its all-around greatness—even though it was literally made for monetary purposes, Night of the Living Dead '90 showcases a plethora of ingenuity. Considering that Savini is one of horror's all-time best makeup artists, the film's first-rate zombie touch-ups shouldn't come as a surprise, but what's truly remarkable is how Romero, who also wrote the script, intelligently modifies his '68 screenplay.

Instead of the original's poignant social commentary, this Night of the Living Dead focuses more on the shattering psyches of its characters, all of whom have, once again, secluded themselves in a random farmhouse. Which makes the inevitable collapses of morals and plummeting pulses all the more impactful.

Director: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo

28 Weeks Later shouldn't have been a great movie, at least not by the laws of genre movie sequels. For one, its predecessor, Danny Boyle's masterful 2002 hit 28 Days Later…, won over critics worldwide on its way to ranking as one of the best zombie movies ever made. Thus, a follow-up, on the surface, seemed like a frustrating cash grab—if not for the fact that Boyle and his original screenwriter Alex Garland were on hand as producers.

Knowing a thing or two about filmmaking, Boyle and Garland hired director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo to helm 28 Weeks Later, loving what they'd seen in the Spaniard's 2001 thriller Intacto. Imagine horror fans' overwhelming surprise once they'd seen 28 Weeks Later and realized that Fresnadillo had absolutely crushed it. In fact, believe it or not, he actually managed to one-up Boyle's film in certain aspects, namely the breathtaking violence.

Showing the hell on Earth that's erupted after the first film's harrowing events, 28 Weeks Later matches two kids with a couple of Army specialists (Jeremy Renner and Rose Byrne), all of whom hope to exit London before the entire city is eradicated as a way to quell the outbreak of infection. On their way to a variety of cruel fates, the protagonists take part in an escalating series of show-stopping set-pieces, including the spreading of the disease within a dark, locked parking garage and the decimation of multiple ghouls by a helicopter's spinning blades.

If only all sequels to surprise genre smashes were this good. Yes, we're looking at you, makers of Taken 2.

Director: Fred Dekker

Back in October 2009, folks who know a superlative ’80s horror flick when they see one all breathed a huge sigh of relief when writer-director Fred Dekker’s Night of the Creeps finally arrived on DVD and Blu-ray; before then, the only home video option was the dated VHS from 1986.

And why were fans so tired of waiting? Because Night of the Creeps is a B-movie mash-up of the best kind, cramming together zombie movie tropes, old drive-in-cinema styled science fiction, and dashes of slasher flick butchery into a snappy horror-comedy concoction.

Set around a college campus, Dekker’s nutty gem shows what happens when slug-like alien parasites start turning frat guys and Summa Cum Laude geeks into killer, slow-moving cadavers. As for the humor, look no further than ’80s genre staple Tom Atkins, whose angry cop character, Detective Cameron, alerts a sorority house full of excited chicks prepping for their dress-up formal via an immortal exchange with one of the girls:

Cameron: “I got good news and bad news, girl. The good news is, your dates are here.”
Sorority girl: “What’s the bad news?”
Cameron: “They’re dead.”

Director: Bob Clark

The legacy of the late Bob Clark is a bizarre one. To many, he'll forever be remembered as the director behind the 1982's raunchfest Porky' s and for giving the world those immortals words of "You'll shoot your eye out, kid," in his 1983 holiday classic A Christmas Story. Yet, before he stepped into the comedy world, Clark was breaking ground within the horror genre, most notably with 1974's Black Christmas (one of the most influential slasher movies hardly anyone ever credits).

Even though it didn't change the game in any way, Clark's first horror effort, the $70,000 zombie horror-comedy Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things holds up to this day as that rare breed of funny/scary movie: When it's trying to make you laugh, it actually does so, and when it's time to get down to the business of creeping you out, it's surprisingly unnerving. The sneaky terror surfaces in the film's climax, in which the characters realize that their playful summoning of the undead has been successful, and the once-sleeping corpses are entirely humorless.

Director: Lucio Fulci

As any admirer of Italian horror stalwart Lucio Fulci will tell you, the filmmaker's best undead movie is Zombie, his answer to George A. Romero's stateside hit Dawn of the Dead that's notorious for its unrelenting gore and the on-screen, underwater duel between a zombie and a shark. But those who appreciate cinema that's hypnotically incoherent and strangely unsettling will cite Fulci's 1981 oddity The Beyond as the man's greatest movie. And, honestly, you won't hear any arguments around these parts.

In the way of plot, you've got a hot chick who inherits a beat-down hotel in Louisiana, and when she starts poking around the premises, she unwittingly opens up one of the seven doors to Hell. From there, The Beyond explodes into an endless procession of blood, guts, eye-gougings, acid-burnings, and one of the sickest and biggest bullet-hole entry wounds in movie history.

Director: Jorge Grau

Gorehounds who prefer their zombie movies covered in gooey intestines bow to the altar of Italian filmmaker Lucio Fulci, but, if they're on top of their undead knowledge, those fans should also have an affinity for Spanish director Jorge Grau's intensely disturbing 1974 gem Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (also widely known as The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue).

The tally of actual zombies in Grau's film is reasonably low, at least compared to the other movies on this list; when the undead do show up, though, they make one hell of an impact. Slow, hideous, and prone to ripping out screaming humans' innards, Grau's zombies are a messy, scary lot, and the director knows his way around a drawn-out sequence of airtight suspense. In the film's best scene, two characters find themselves fleeing for their lives inside a lavish crypt, and, later, the knockout climax, set inside a hospital, depicts one nurse's horrible death via the tearing off her breasts and another character's offing by an ax to the head.

Zombie movies don't get much more hardcore, and, frankly, much better, than Let Sleeping Corpses Lie. Seek this one out immediately.

Director: Dan O'Bannon

Within the horror genre’s storied history, Dan O’Bannon is largely overlooked, and that’s a crying shame. An old college pal of acclaimed director John Carpenter (Halloween, The Fog), the eccentric O’Bannon was a man of many excellent ideas, one of which turned out to be Ridley Scott’s seminal sci-fi/horror masterwork Alien, co-written by O’Bannon, though his contributions to that 1979 outerspace nightmare generator are rarely heralded.

When the mid-1980s came around, O’Bannon must’ve gotten fed up with being slept-on, so he decided to direct his own feature film. The magic that derived from his do-it-myself attitude is The Return of the Living Dead, a clever and rapidly paced zombie flick in which the ghouls run faster than Carl Lewis, chow down on human brains, and lure the fuzz to their place-of-slaughter over police car walkie-talkies by drolly requesting, “Send more cops.”

Going all out with the film’s inside joke, O’Bannon posited The Return of the Living Dead as “based on true events,” and had his characters directly reference 1968’s Night of the Living Dead only to have them subsequently abandon all of George A. Romero’s ideals. Simply off this triumph, O’Bannon should’ve gone on to have the career of someone like Wes Craven; unfortunately, he was never able to match the prolific nature of onetime buddy Carpenter before his death in 2009.

Director: George A. Romero

Fact: Anyone who makes a zombie movie, or even a TV show like The Walking Dead, nowadays owes a massive debt to Mr. George A. Romero, and most, if not all, of the filmmakers will gladly admit to that. The grandaddy of the undead motion picture, the now-72-year-old genre icon first achieved immortality in 1968, when his no-budget (i.e., a reported $114,000) feature film debut Night of the Living Dead first premiered and quickly changed the game. Then, in 1978, Romero somehow bested Night with the epic Dawn of the Dead, which includes makeup effects by Tom Savini that have yet to be outdone.

Due to all of the rightful love sent toward Night and Dawn, though, the third installment in Romero's original Dead trilogy, Day of the Dead (1985), is quite often overlooked, or, even worse, frowned upon by critics. One frequent complaint is that the script, about nihilistic Army men and idealistic scientists living in an underground bunker to avoid becoming zombie food, is too preachy, spending too much time on back-and-forth monologues. Others attack the actors' unevenness in performance quality.

But here's the thing: The people who make voice those qualms are buffoons. Or, more delicately put, they need to revisit Day of the Dead and see for themselves why, in some respects, it's Romero's greatest zombie movie. Granted, Night and Dawn have better scripts, and even better acting, but Day by far has the best makeup work of them all. As seen in the image above, Savini, Greg Nicotero (who now produces The Walking Dead, as well as handle the AMC hit's makeup effects), and their team went all out when it came to Day's gore; the film's climax, in which the zombies gain access into the bunker and get to finger-ripping, eye-gouging work, is a thing of visceral, and viscera-packed, beauty.