Though certainly appropriate for the Monster and Sci-Fi sub-genres, Zombie films deserve their own category. There’s something undeniable about hordes of the walking dead shambling around in the single-minded pursuit of human flesh.

The zombie genre will forever be associated with the name George Romero, the writer/director who helmed 1968’s Night of the Living Dead and a host of sequels. Those movies popularized the zombie as a metaphorical threat and worked as both scary horror flicks and effective social commentary.

Night of the Living Dead is a black and white indie that finds a group of strangers holed up in a farm house trying to escape the slow-moving but persistent fiends. Its grim nihilism was viewed as a response to both the Vietnam War and the civil rights movements. In the shocking finale, the film’s protagonist, a Black man, survives the onslaught only to be shot by hillbilly cops who mistake him for a zombie.

Ten years later, Romero delivered Dawn of the Dead, in which the zombie menace has gone national and a band of survivors is forced to hole up in a mall. When scores of dead-eyed zombies stumble through shopping displays while Muzak (as well as today’s SOTD) plays, the commentary on American commercialism is hard to miss. This is my favorite of the bunch.

Day of the Dead came out in 1985, and this time the action takes place in a military compound, where the sadistic commanding officer is a bigger threat than the zombies. The practical effects in this film are amazing — they maintain a “how did they do that” mystique nearly 40 years later.

Romero directed three more movies in this series in the 2000s: Land of the Dead (2005), Diary of the Dead (2007), and Survival of the Dead (2009). They are not as well regarded as the original trilogy and I haven’t seen them. He was working on a seventh film, Twilight of the Dead, when he died in 2017. It will reportedly start production under a different director once the SAG-AFTRA strike ends.

My favorite non-Romero zombie film is Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, which stars a young Cillian Murphy (2002) as a man who emerges from a coma to find much of the world’s population taken over by a “rage virus.” Unlike Romero’s shambling monsters, the zombies here are fast, a conceit also utilized in Marc Forster’s 2013 World War Z.

Finally, I could hold off on mentioning these films until I get to Horror Comedies, but this feels like the right place to shout out the following irreverent zombie flicks: Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004); Ruben Fleischer’s Zombieland (2009), as well as it’s 2019 sequel, Zombieland: Double Tap; and Dan O’Bannon’s The Return of the Living Dead (1985).

While played for big laughs, all of those movies have clear affection and admiration for the classic zombie films that inspired them.

Next up: Slashers