8 Zombies Movies That Define The Genre

[DrStrangelove]

8 Zombies Movies That Define The Genre

Zombies may be on their way out, but before they disappear take a look at what defined the zombie genre and how they've evolved.

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[Bindal]

"Sean of the Dead"? Okay, unless that gets fixed within the next hour, I call the list worthless as that movie is called "SHAUN of the Dead"

 

[Greg Tito]

"Sean of the Dead"? Okay, unless that gets fixed within the next hour, I call the list worthless as that movie is called "SHAUN of the Dead"

Fixed! I think Schuyler was sending us up. We were talking in the office the other day how many different ways you can spell Shaun in the English language. I'm pretty sure there's some Shaun spelling it "Zqeuannn".

Greg

 

[Scarim Coral]

Ok I never heard of Fido until now and now I want to watch it (I had just watched the trailer)!

 

[12th_milkshake]

eerrr Dawn of the Dead? 28 days later? ZombieLand - icon concepts in all these.

 

[Orbot_Vectorman]

I think your missing "Outpost" on your list there.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Ok I never heard of Fido until now and now I want to watch it (I had just watched the trailer)!

It's really fun. It's like a '50s alternate reality where zombies are domesticated into servants, playthings, pets and (once) sex slaves through the use of a mass-produced collar that keeps them in check. And the titular Fido is basically zombie Lassie.

/OP I would've unchecked Army of Darkness and put 28 Days Later in there somewhere. Come on, it's the movie that gave us fast zombies and contagion paranoia. Ooh and the Spanish REC films (first one anyway) because of the shakycam / night vision thing.

 

[djl3485]

Ok I never heard of Fido until now and now I want to watch it (I had just watched the trailer)!

It's really fun. It's like a '50s alternate reality where zombies are domesticated into servants, playthings, pets and (once) sex slaves through the use of a mass-produced collar that keeps them in check. And the titular Fido is basically zombie Lassie.

/OP I would've unchecked Army of Darkness and put 28 Days Later in there somewhere. Come on, it's the movie that gave us fast zombies and contagion paranoia. Ooh and the Spanish REC films (first one anyway) because of the shakycam / night vision thing.

Same. I also would have taken out White Zombie and Dr. Blood's Coffin and replaced it with REC and Zombieland.

To me just because it's an old movie doesn't mean it's good or defined something. The genre basically started with Night of the Living Dead, from there on you had the rest of the movies on the list build upon that, reinvent and give it new flavor.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Ok I never heard of Fido until now and now I want to watch it (I had just watched the trailer)!

It's really fun. It's like a '50s alternate reality where zombies are domesticated into servants, playthings, pets and (once) sex slaves through the use of a mass-produced collar that keeps them in check. And the titular Fido is basically zombie Lassie.

/OP I would've unchecked Army of Darkness and put 28 Days Later in there somewhere. Come on, it's the movie that gave us fast zombies and contagion paranoia. Ooh and the Spanish REC films (first one anyway) because of the shakycam / night vision thing.

Same. I also would have taken out White Zombie and Dr. Blood's Coffin and replaced it with REC and Zombieland.

To me just because it's an old movie doesn't mean it's good or defined something. The genre basically started with Night of the Living Dead, from there on you had the rest of the movies on the list build upon that, reinvent and give it new flavor.

Yeah, everything we know/think we know about zombies comes from Romero and Night/Dawn of the Dead. Everything afterwards is a variation of the same thing - they're faster, they're stronger, they're more infectious, whatever. Movies like White Zombie and the like used the voodoo definition of the word, which ranged all the way from a hypnotized servant to an undead servant (servitude being the key word here). Things like outbreaks, infections, massive hordes, contagion, "turning cycles", conspiracies, siege situations, headshots, wound treatment and (mostly) lack thereof... that's all Romero.

 

[Superior Mind]

Six words:

"I kick arse for the lord!"

 

[Bob_F_It]

eerrr Dawn of the Dead? 28 days later? ZombieLand - icon concepts in all these.

I would have to second 28 Days for being the first to speed up zombies.

 

[Thedutchjelle]

I know maybe two of those films by name and I've seen none.
Really expected 28DL like some people pointed out.

 

[Kmadden2004]

Well, if we're going to get technical here, the Evil Dead films didn't actually feature zombies, they featured deadites.

I know, you could say "they're reanimated dead people, so they're still zombies", but really it's like the difference between an elephant and an elephant seal.

 

[Daverson]

No mention of "The last man on earth"? For sea... er... shame!

(So, yeah, technically they're "slow vampires", but, well, just watch it, it's a zombie movie, and it did everything that the movies that are supposedly "challenging the genre" today did back before zombies movies were even a thing!)

 

[KungFuJazzHands]

Where dafug are Dawn of the Dead and Return of the Living Dead? What about Zombi 2? I have a feeling the author is taking the piss.

Hell, you could have thrown The Ghost Breakers onto this list and I couldn't have taken it any less seriously.

 

[Ignatz_Zwakh]

Fido? Really? And though these flicks have been name-dropped by people I gotta give shout-outs to Dead Alive and the 1979 Dawn of the Dead.

And what about "Let Sleeping Corpses Lie" and "Zombie"?!?!

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

I have a feeling the author is taking the piss.

Honestly, I think the author of this is doing that with EVERY "8 list" released on here. Putting differences of opinions aside, many times the choices are just plain weak, if not wrong.

White Zombie does nothing to define the genre, as it did little more than play off Voodoo practices. It's "zombies" in the very loosest of terms nowadays.
Just because a movie has a segment in it, doth not mean it made any differences to the overall genre. "People thought it was rad!" is hardly a reason, much less any defining reason.
Evil Dead 1 (technically 2 as well) get's a bit of a pass here, but even then they hardly define the genre. Deadites were Deadites, not zombies seeing as they could be both living and dead, and in the case of living be 'cured' so to speak. 3 though? Hardly. If anything, all it defined was both Sam Raimi's career and part of the reason why people love Bruce Campbell.

The list shows little of how they evolved or were defined, and even less so explains. Night of the Dead is so painfully an obvious inclusion of the lists that it shouldn't be listed in the first place, seeing as Romero's take on zombies has quite literally been the single film to really define the modern zombie. Everything else is just a play on it.


Of course, often times articles rely on "hits", and what better way to gain some cheap easy hits than to make lists people will nag and hate on?

Army of Darkness really should have been taken out. If we're gonna have two movies from the same series here, it should probably be Night of the Living Dead and the original Dawn of the Dead, since it was really Dawn moreso than Night of that defined the modern zombie. NotLD was just different enough from both future zombie movies in general and the other Romero movies in particular that it's still kind of its own thing. Dawn of the Dead, on the other hand, was a more polished version of the formula. Plus you're right, the deadites were never really Zombies, they're demon possessed humans that are almost impossible to destroy and are really dangerous individually. The whole thing about zombies is that they're not so hard to handle in small numbers, but in large crowds they're horrifying. Deadites are horrifying when it's just one or two, and if they outnumber any humans that don't have Ashley J. Williams helping them, forget it.


Not really sure I'd include much of anything else that was on this list, to be honest. This series, like you said, really seems to be cheap clickbait, with intentional mistakes thrown in to get people arguing. They had a list of "early" Pokemon art recently that wasn't early at all, it was just the current official art for some of the Gen 1 Pokemon. It seems to be something that keeps the interns busy and gets some mild discussion going from people complaining, thereby getting more page hits.

 

[Chuppi]

White Zombi was rather one of the first takes at the classic vodoo-concept of the zombie that didn´t have so much influence on the modern zombie-genre.Dr.Coffin and the sequence from "Heavy Metal" are interesting oddities but definitely not genre-defining.
Fido was a great movie but I would rather include "Dead Alive/Braindead" as a much earlier take on the zombie-commedy.

At the end of the list, I would include "The Walking Dead", even though it is not a movie, cause with a TV-Serial about a Zombie-Apocalypse, the undead have finaly arrived in mainstream-entertainment.If you told me, that something like this would happen 20 years ago, I would have thought you were nuts.Downside of the medal is the incredible number of shitty zombie movies and games that flooded the shelves of video and game shops, after the success of the Dawn of the Dead Remake.

 

[sirjeffofshort]

Well, if we're going to get technical here, the Evil Dead films didn't actually feature zombies, they featured deadites.

I know, you could say "they're reanimated dead people, so they're still zombies", but really it's like the difference between an elephant and an elephant seal.

I was actually debating whether or not it would be a jerk move to nit pick the same detail.

Even though they're re-animated corpses, they're technically corpses possessed by Candarian demons, so I'd never personally considered them zombies. Perhaps that's just me though haha.