Our collective zombie obsession began long before walkers or T-virus victims shuffled onto our screens — although every new iteration certainly helps reanimate the fanbase. Whether the living dead are shambling through a field or doggedly hunting down a pack of capable survivors, the zombie genre is still going strong, with creators bringing new (undead) life to stories on screens big and small. Zombies can serve as metaphors for our broken society or as catalysts for bringing humanity together. Sometimes they’re even kind of funny, in all their bloody, snarling glory. No matter what, zombie stories are always entertaining.
Here, we highlight some zombie TV shows and movies that are worth checking out. These are alternately bleak, hilarious, and thrilling watches, meaning there’s a little something for every kind of zombie fan.
In 2002, Danny Boyle gave us 28 Days Later, a zombie film that has since been credited with reinvigorating the genre. It wasn’t the first to portray fast-moving, rage-fueled zombies, but it certainly popularized this extra-scary version of the mindless killers. It also portrayed zombies that aren’t technically dead, but instead driven by a virus pumping so much adrenaline into them that they have added strength and stamina. Now Boyle and original screenwriter Alex Garland return with this new installment that shows how a small island community has managed to survive in the 28 years since the virus ravaged the world. One boy from this community, Spike (Alfie Williams), defies his father, escaping the island with his sick mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), in search of the eccentric local Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes). Along the way, they face all sorts of peril, including new horrors that have emerged as the virus mutated over the years.
This South Korean horror film focuses on Joon-woo (Yoo Ah-in), a video game streamer who holes up in his family’s apartment and tries to live out the apocalypse by himself as a gruesome virus consumes his city. Just as he begins to lose hope, he makes contact with a neighbor, Yoo-bin (Park Shin-hye), and the two strike up a tentative bond while helping each other fight off invading zombies. #Alive has fun with the creative methods Joon-woo and Yoo-bin use to distract and kill the undead and, as the hashtag in its title suggests, explores the power of social media in times of crisis.
In this South Korean series, classrooms become battlegrounds as high school students are forced to fight for their lives after a sudden zombie virus begins to spread rapidly among their classmates. Over its 12-episode first season, the students form a disparate group, working together and fending for themselves as most of the adults in charge of controlling the situation all but abandon them. All of Us Are Dead is a bloody thriller that effectively turns its central location into a terrifying prison for its group of survivors, all while using the zombie genre to examine topics of corruption, wealth inequality, and the myriad ways in which the older generation has failed young people.
Zack Snyder’s high-stakes heist is set in a version of Las Vegas that has been rendered unrecognizable by a zombie outbreak, a problem that the US military is one day away from eradicating with a nuclear strike. With only hours to spare, a billionaire tasks mercenary-turned-fry-cook Scott Ward (Dave Bautista) with recovering $200 million from an abandoned casino vault. To pull it off, he rounds up a band of thieves, including his friends Cruz (Ana de la Reguera) and Vanderohe (Omari Hardwick), helicopter pilot Marianne (Tig Notaro), safecracker Dieter (Matthias Schweighöfer), and Ward’s own estranged daughter, Kate (Ella Purnell). As they fight their way through hordes of zombies, the group learns that even the end of the world isn’t free of social and political hierarchies.
Set in the aftermath of a zombie plague, this series tells its story in vignettes, focusing on a revolving door of survivors that it repeatedly warns could turn into bloodthirsty zombies at the drop of a hat. Transformations are instant and brutal; here, the walking corpses are lightning fast and doggedly focused on killing their targets, making the many scenes in which the undead pursue humans feel like tense, adrenaline-packed nightmares. (One memorable episode from Season 1 consists almost entirely of a character running from place to place, trying to avoid a relentless zombie.) While some zombie stories are about finding hope and humanity in a broken society, Black Summer is more interested in providing a grisly, gory experience.
It’s a zombie movie with heart. In the wild expanse of Australia, a couple with a young baby navigates a world ravaged by a disease that turns people into mindless, flesh-eating, goo-covered versions of themselves. As things get more and more dire, the father, Andy (Martin Freeman), searches desperately for someone he can depend on to take care of his infant daughter when he is no longer able to. Like the best postapocalyptic or zombie films, the most terrifying parts aren’t necessarily the zombies, but the feral humans willing to do anything to survive. This one will have you jumping and weeping.
Something is off in the rural small town of Centerville — the sun no longer sets at its usual time, cell phones and watches have stopped working, and the animals are acting up. One morning, Hank Thompson (Danny Glover) finds two murdered diner employees, and Officer Ronnie Peterson (Adam Driver) thinks zombies were behind it. While investigating, Officer Peterson and Chief Cliff Robertson (Bill Murray) find that graves have opened up, and they prepare to take on the zombies terrorizing the town. This horror comedy from director Jim Jarmusch (Down by Law) will have you laughing through the jump scares. The Dead Don’t Die also features a starry ensemble cast, including Tilda Swinton, Tom Waits, Chloë Sevigny, Steve Buscemi, Selena Gomez, and Austin Butler.
At first glance, this epic two-season Korean series is a historical political drama depicting the monarchical intrigue of the 17th-century Joseon dynasty. But in fact, it’s a version of this era where Lee Chang (Ju Ji-hoon), the Crown Prince of Joseon, investigates a mysterious illness that seems to have afflicted his father, the King, that quickly spreads throughout the land. People fall ill, die, and, well — you know the drill. What is already a war of succession also becomes a war against the growing zombie population.
This Resident Evil threequel, written by Paul W.S. Anderson and directed by Russell Mulcahy, takes place five years after the lethal T-virus has turned the world into a desolate wasteland. Having fled the decimated Raccoon City, zombie apocalypse survivors Carlos (Oded Fehr) and L.J. (Mike Epps) join a roving band of fighters led by Claire Redfield (Ali Larter). Alice (Milla Jovovich) — the heroic former test subject of the Umbrella Corporation — roams the desert, where she uncovers a reference to Arcadia, a supposedly uninfected locale in Alaska. After saving Claire’s people from a deadly flock of mutated crows, Alice convinces the group to seek out Arcadia together. But Dr. Alexander Isaacs (Iain Glen), the mad scientist who heads the Umbrella Corporation, isn’t finished with Alice and believes her DNA could hold the solution to his horrifying experiments.
The fight against the evil Umbrella Corporation continues in Resident Evil: Afterlife, written and directed by Anderson. As the superhuman Alice (Jovovich) travels the world searching for survivors and battling zombies, she unearths a terrifying truth: The legendary safe haven Arcadia isn’t what she thought. Upon reuniting with her ally Claire Redfield (Larter), the pair travels to Los Angeles, where they meet a capable crew of uninfected people living in a prison. But Alice’s enemies have eyes everywhere, and when the prison is beset by a giant axe-wielding mutant, the whole team will have to work together if they want to make it to safety.
The Umbrella Corporation is more powerful than ever in the fifth installment in Anderson’s Resident Evil franchise. As the T-virus continues to ravage the world’s population and zombies roam free, Alice’s (Jovovich) hunt for the people responsible for the outbreak leads her to vital clues about her mysterious past. She soon finds herself trapped in an underwater facility, having been captured by her brainwashed former ally Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory). But could her prison hold the key to salvation — both for Alice and for the world at large?
The animated horror movie Resident Evil: Damnation, aka Biohazard: Damnation, and its sequels are separate from the live-action films starring Jovovich. This flick follows agent Leon S. Kennedy (voiced by Matthew Mercer), who’s sent to investigate a former Soviet republic to determine whether the government is using illegal Bio-Organic Weapons (BOWs) in an ongoing civil war. When he has a run-in with one of those BOWs, a terrifying mutant called a Licker, he’s ordered to evacuate. But retreat means letting the monsters ravage innocent civilians — and Leon refuses to stand by and let that happen.
In this Damnation sequel, professor Rebecca Chambers (voiced by Erin Cahill) is studying the deadly A-virus — a mutant zombie pathogen that lies dormant in a subject until triggered — when a former CIA agent and current arms dealer, Glenn Arias (John DeMita), steals it for his own twisted revenge. Bioterrorism security officer Chris Redfield (Kevin Dorman) enlists Chambers and Leon Kennedy (Mercer) to take Arias down before he can unleash the virus’s horrors on New York City.
Agent Redfield (Dorman) returns in Resident Evil: Death Island to investigate a potential T-virus bioterrorism event in San Francisco. When he and his team — Leon Kennedy (Mercer), Rebecca Chambers (Cahill), Claire Redfield (Stephanie Panisello), and Jill Valentine (Nicole Tompkins) — discover a trail of clues leading to the infamous prison on Alcatraz Island, they’re forced to face down a new zombie threat with the potential to destroy the world as they know it.
When all the people who died during a two-week period in Wausau, Wisconsin, miraculously rise from their graves, police officer Dana Cypress (Melanie Scrofano) is on the case. But the reanimated townspeople aren’t your average zombies. After Revival Day, they go back to their normal lives — or so it seems, until a few loose human teeth, a dead horse, and a violent murder turn everyone, alive or undead, into a suspect. This zombie series with a true-crime twist is based on writer Tim Seeley and artist Mike Norton’s Image Comics series of the same name.
Of all the horror monsters in existence, few lend themselves as well to comedy as zombies. There’s something about their dim-witted behavior and eating preferences that can be darkly funny when spun the right way. In this three-season series, Joel and Sheila Hammond (Timothy Olyphant and Drew Barrymore) are a suburban couple and real estate duo, selling houses and raising their daughter. One day at an open house, Sheila gets violently ill. Later, she seems to be lacking a heartbeat, is generally less inhibited, and starts craving human flesh. Thus begins the hilarious new life of Joel and Sheila, who try to maintain some sense of normalcy while navigating Sheila’s new situation, while also solving the riddle of how to provide Sheila with the “food” she needs.
Based on Robert Kirkman’s comic book series, The Walking Dead is a pioneering entry in the zombie TV canon. The drama centers around Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), a small-town sheriff who awakens from a coma to find that society has been overtaken by a virus that turns living beings into undead “walkers” who feed on the flesh of humans. Rick becomes the leader of a group of survivors that includes Norman Reedus’ Daryl, Steven Yeun’s Glenn, and Danai Gurira’s Michonne, and together they work to rebuild. Across 11 seasons, they come to discover that walkers aren’t the only dangers out in this decimated version of the world.
Fear the Walking Dead is a spin-off of AMC’s seminal zombie drama The Walking Dead, but it fully stands on its own. Set before the events of the original series, Fear goes back to how it all began, centering around Madison (Kim Dickens) and Travis (Cliff Curtis), two newly married high school teachers who are struggling to blend their families when the apocalypse hits. There’s new ground to cover in the early days of the outbreak, with survivors not quite knowing how to approach those who have been infected and still believing the virus can be contained. While the premise will keep you hooked, the characters are what make the show, from Colman Domingo’s smooth-talking con man Victor Strand to Rubén Blades’ formidable survivalist Daniel Salazar.
One of The Walking Dead’s character-focused spin-offs, Daryl Dixon follows Norman Reedus’ titular hunter after he washes ashore in France with no memory of how he got there. His search for answers and his hope of getting back to America are complicated when he becomes responsible for escorting a mysterious boy to a faraway safe house. The series follows him through many dangers, from the fascist militia group trying to capture the kid to the very different types of French zombies.
Dead City centers on a pair of characters from The Walking Dead’s expansive world — but it’s certainly not a love story. The spin-off follows Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) as they search for her son, Hershel (Logan Kim), who was kidnapped by Negan’s former cult. The two have a complex dynamic — Negan beat Maggie’s husband to death in Season 7 of The Walking Dead — and Dead City takes its time exploring how two people with so much bad blood between them can possibly work together.
Everyone has hopes and dreams — experiences they’d like to have in their lifetime, things they’d like to accomplish. Hopefully, these things happen before the zombie apocalypse. For Akira Tendo (Eiji Akaso), the apocalypse is exactly what inspires a bucket list of 100 things he wants to do before he becomes a zombie himself. In the live-action film based on the manga of the same name (which was also adapted into an anime series), Akira has just started a new job when, one day on his way to work, he sees that zombies have taken over. He quickly realizes that the clock is now ticking on life as he knows it and he doesn’t have much time to complete everything on his bucket list.
How would you fare in a zombie apocalypse? This show puts its participants to the test. In Zombieverse, a group of online celebrities attempt to film a reality dating show called Love Hunter, and they soon realize they’re actually in a survival competition game being hunted by zombies. The unscripted comedy-horror reality series, shot in South Korea, simulates different scenarios that could arise in a zombie apocalypse. As the cast members learn more about the zombies, how long it takes for people to turn, and whether they can trust each other, they’ll have to take greater risks to survive. How many people will make it out alive?
Additional reporting by Ananda Dillon and Caitlin Busch.
