How zombie flicks mirror our culture

It's difficult to reconcile the Zack Snyder who directed "Dawn of the Dead" with the Zack Snyder who brought us the #SnyderCut "Justice League," the far-too-faithful "Watchmen" adaptation, and the style-over-substance combo of "300" and "Sucker Punch."

The 2004 remake, directed by Zack Snyder and based on George Romero's 1978 original, is not without its charm. The first twelve minutes are a career-launching onslaught, featuring one of the genre's best opening title sequences. Many people find parallels between "Dawn of the Dead" and Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later" because of the presence of speedy zombies in both films. This prologue is an excellent dynamic counterpart to that image.

Dawn of the Dead never quite matches its opening minutes, but James Gunn's writing keeps things fascinating. By avoiding Romero's societal message, Snyder was able to carve out his own part of the cinematic zombie realm.

It's a corner of the genre where he wants to go back with "Army of the Dead" on Netflix in 2021.

The plot takes place in a dystopian future in which the unusual street drug "Natas" has transformed the people into zombies. We follow one man as he hunts down Flesh Eaters for joy and atonement, as well as to escape his own past, as the tale continues.

After falling across a small group of survivors, he helps them. The Hunter's talents are tested as the Flesh Eaters strike unexpectedly.

The trailer for Zombie Hunter seems to be the kind of gruesome B-movie fun that everyone would enjoy. We're interested to see how filmmaker K. King manages to pay respect to the grindhouse aesthetic of films like Machete and Planet Terror. The marketing team did an outstanding job with the eye-catching poster.



Lupita Nyong'o, who is renowned for her dark roles, portrays a more cheerful character in Little Monsters. She may be teaching a kindergarten class on a field trip when a zombie epidemic occurs, but she looks to be having a great time. The actress's second horror film of the year (the first being Jordan Peele's more well-known "Us") was released in 2019.

But she can do it without any problems at all. The film is "dedicated to all of the kindergarten teachers who encourage children to study, fill them with confidence, and rescue them from being devoured by zombies," as stated in the official press notes. Yes, I think that covers every base. In "Little Monsters," Alexander England portrays an effete, has-been musician who is accompanying his nephew on a field trip and who happens to be in love (or maybe lust) with Lupita Nyong'o, while Josh Gad plays an obnoxious, renowned kid performer. Nyong'o appears alongside both of these characters. The year 2014 saw the publication of "Little Monsters."

What you get is an interesting blend of horror and romantic comedy, which gives new life to both genres.

Since then, zombies haven't stopped. (Some can run.) In cinema, zombies have appeared in discovered footage ([REC]), rom-coms (Warm Bodies), and grindhouse throwbacks (Planet Terror).

At the same time, a whole subgenre was born out of Romero's works, and it quickly spread all over the world.

Legendary Italian horror filmmaker Lucio Fulci went with the concept, first in his sequel Zombi (also known as Zombi) and later in his experimental and radically bizarre "Gates of Hell" trilogy.

Fans of Romero's work who built upon his foundation to further explore and broaden what a zombie movie might be came along and messed with the genre constructions. Filmmakers like as Dan O'Bannon, Fred Dekker, and Stuart Gordon were among others who came along and did this. After that, the zombie trend fizzled out almost as rapidly as it had gained popularity.

The creature had become an important part of the horror genre, but outside of ongoing horror sequels (like Return of the Living Dead and Zombie) and the occasional genre oddity (like My Boyfriend's Back, Cemetery Man, and Dead Alive), the dead no longer walked the earth.

Where else could we begin? White Zombie was the first full-length "zombie" horror film and the first to popularize the notion of Haitian voodoo zombies in Hollywood, decades before the current George Romero ghoul.

White Zombie is easily accessible now due to the fact that it is in the public domain and is included in almost every low-cost collection of zombie films ever put together. If you like, you may watch the whole 67-minute length of the film on YouTube. As a witch doctor, Bela Lugosi, who was only a year removed from his role as Dracula and basking in his celebrity as one of Universal's go-to horror performers, plays a character whose name is literally "Murder." This is due to the fact that the studio was still a few years away at this point from discovering the art of subtlety.

Lugosi, playing the role of Svengali, utilizes a variety of potions and powders to transform a young woman into a zombie before her wedding. It's fairly dry and wooden stuff, but he's trying to break her will so that a terrible plantation owner can have his way with her. As was to be anticipated, Lugosi stands out as the only bright spot; nonetheless, every great story had a humble beginning. Since "White Zombie" was so successful, Hollywood has made several more voodoo zombie movies, the vast majority of which are now available to the public without any restrictions.

Of course, the movie also influenced Rob Zombie's musical endeavor. Some "greatest zombie movie" lists include it prominently, but let's be honest: in 2016, this isn't a film that most viewers would like. It is nearly entirely due to its historical relevance that this item ranks fifty on the list.

Planet Terror is the better half of Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse double-bill with Quentin Tarantino, which tells the tale of a go-go dancer, a bioweapon gone wrong, and Texan peasants transformed into shuffling, pustulous creatures. Planet Terror has its exploding tongue firmly entrenched in its rotten cheek, leaning heavily towards its B-movie heritage with missing reels, rough editing, and hammy overdubbed dialogue.

Its over-the-top gore and oozing effects are repulsive, and it builds to a wildly hilarious ending in which Rose McGowan's heroine has her leg replaced by a machine gun. I'll devour your brains for information.

Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead promises a few Troma mainstays. (published here) It'll be completely tacky. It will be bloody. It will have no limits and no sense of taste. The true question, like with every Troma production, is "Is it boring?" In this case, the answer is "absolutely not."

In its social satire of consumer society, this "zom-com musical" is even a little bit clever—you know, in an obvious kind of way. But is that really why you're seeing a movie about zombie chickens at a KFC-style restaurant constructed on an old Native American burial ground? I did not believe so. To enjoy a Troma film, one must embrace the violence, scatological comedy, and cheap production qualities, as well as appreciate thoughtless narrative.

This is why the running time of the disgusting, gory, raunchy Poultrygeist is just 103 minutes.

While zombie films have been around for almost 80 years (White Zombie was produced in 1932, and I Walked With a Zombie was published in 1943), it's widely acknowledged that the subgenre as we know it today didn't emerge until 1968, when George A. Romero released Night of the Living Dead.

Night, a low-budget independent film, attracted audiences with its dark tale, horrible violence, progressive casting, social commentary, and, of course, its legendary hordes of gaunt, voracious zombies. Romero, the acknowledged maestro of the zombie genre, went on to make five more films in the Dead series, the best of which are discussed here.

It took some time for Night of the Living Dead to gestate and gain cache in the cultural consciousness before a huge wave of significant American zombie movies bloomed in the late 1970s and especially in the 1980s. This is despite the fact that Night of the Living Dead was a significant cultural influence. Shock Waves, which was released not long before Dawn of the Dead drastically enhanced the appeal of zombies as horror villains, is said to be the first of all the "Nazi zombie" films. It came out just before Dawn of the Dead.

Throughout the most of its duration, it's a dismal, slow-paced thriller about a group of lost boaters who wind themselves on a mystery island where a submerged SS submarine has abandoned its crew of zombies, a Nazi experiment. The same year he sneered at Princess Leia in Star Wars: Episode III, Hammer Horror icon Peter Cushing appears as a poorly miscast and addled-looking SS Commander. It's difficult to comprehend that there is a New Hope!

There have been at least 16 Nazi zombie movies since this point—certainly more than one may realize—making this one noteworthy, if only for combining the portmanteau of great cinematic villains first.

The Dead Snow movies have Shock Waves to thank for their success.

The Girl With All The Gifts, directed by Colm McCarthy and based on a novel by Mike Carey, succeeds in presenting a fresh twist on the zombie film while still delivering genre thrills.

Similar to the sickness that wiped out mankind in The Last of Us, a fungal infection is responsible for this epidemic of zombieism. The narrative revolves on Melanie, a young girl educated in an unconventional manner by Gemma Arterton's character, Helen, in a very guarded facility.

Melanie is a "second-generation" hungry. She still wants to eat human flesh, but she can also think and feel, and the fact that she is alive could be the key to the future.

This splatter-fest takes the traditional zombie and gives it a Nordic twist by adding parts of the Draugr, an undead creature from Scandinavian folklore that fiercely guards its treasure horde. In Dead Snow, the draugr are former SS soldiers who terrorized a Norwegian town and stole their things before being killed or chased into the freezing mountains by the townspeople.

Dead Snow is unique. It's humorous, gruesome, and violent, with Evil Dead and "teen sex/slasher" aspects. If you enjoy it, Dead Snow: Red versus Dead has more.

There are times when the backstory behind a picture is more intriguing than the film itself, and such is the case with The Dead Next Door. Sam Raimi funded its production out of the profits he received from Evil Dead II so that his buddy J. R. Bookwalter could realize his vision of a low-budget zombie epic. The whole picture seems to have been redubbed in post-production, and for some reason Raimi is listed as an executive producer under the moniker "The Master Cylinder," while Evil Dead's Bruce Campbell does double duty as the voiceover for not one but two characters. The Dead Next Door has an aura of dreamlike surrealism because of this, and that's before we even get to the fact that it was shot entirely on Super 8 and not 32 mm film.

So, The Dead Next Door offers something that has never been seen before in this genre: a grainy, low-budget zombie action-drama with cringe-worthy amateur acting and surprising signs of polish.

The premise concerns a "elite squad" of zombie exterminators who stumble onto a zombie-worshipping cult, but you're not watching this for the plot; you're watching for the gore. The Dead Next Door sometimes seems like a backyard effort to mimic the deranged bloodletting seen in Peter Jackson's Dead Alive, but with parallels to the horror genre that are so obvious that they are laughable. "Dr. Savini"? "Officer Raimi"? "Commander Carpenter"?

They're all in a zombie picture that seems like it was made for the director's family. Shoddy closeness has a weird appeal.

The public acceptance of zombie films followed a curious route. For decades, the monsters had no existence or definition outside of Voodoo legend, radioactive humanoids, and the iconic artwork of E.C. comic books. When zombies were deployed, they were a far cry from the cannibalistic, flesh-eating, undead monsters we know and love today.

Cemetery Man, directed by Dario Argento protégé Michele Soavi, depicts the living dead as a nuisance rather than a danger. Cemetery Man is based on the comic strip Dylan Dog and stars Everett as a misanthropic gravedigger. Why not? Living scum propagate accusations he's impotent.

But there is a catch: the deceased won't remain buried in his cemetery. Dellamorte falls in love with a beautiful widow (Falchi) he meets at her husband's funeral. After courting her in the gloomy hallways of his ossuary, they end up steaming it up on her husband's grave. It gets stranger from here on out.