The Survivor and Others by H.P. Lovecraft

They’re actual people, desperately clinging to whatever shreds of humanity still exist in the world. The characters – including Cillian Murphy as Jim, a bike courier who wakes up from a coma to find society has collapsed around him – aren’t mere political symbols or sentient sacks of meat that exist simply to be disembowelled. (The ‘Z’ word never appears in the script, and the name of the contagion infecting the planet is the ‘Rage virus’.) Fleet-footed corpses and inspired visuals of an abandoned London aside, what really makes 28 Days Later stand out from the undead pack is Boyle’s signature humanism. In fact, there are those who argue it barely counts as a zombie movie at all, Boyle included.

And yet, it feels utterly unlike any other film on this list. Aesthetically, little about Danny Boyle’s first crack at the horror genre is truly groundbreaking, all things considered. 🔪 The 31 best serial killer movies of all-timeįast zombies existed before 28 Days Later, as had the notion of setting a zombie outbreak in the UK (see 1966’s The Plague of the Zombies ). 😱 The 100 best horror movies of all-time From classics to cult favourites, zom-coms to willpower-testing gross-outs, these are the best of the undead best.

So we decided to sort the sharp from the shambling and come up with a list of the greatest zombie flicks ever made. Of course, they’ve also produced a mass grave of schlock. Whatever the reason for its enduring popularity, zombies have exerted a powerful pull on movies for decades now. The concept is malleable enough to serve as allegories for real-world issues from racism to consumerism, and also naturally gory enough that if you simply want to make (or watch) a disgusting splatterfest, well, there’s no better genre. (Okay, it’s technically about a ‘fungal apocalypse’ that turns people into murderous mushrooms, but c’mon: it’s a zombie show at heart.) Ever since 1968’s Night of the Living Dead established the modern template for the zombie movie, the undead have continued to walk among us, with HBO’s The Last of Us being only the most recent example. Perhaps that bit of shared lineage – the knowledge that, no matter how rotted, feral and brain-hungry they become, they’re still humans at heart – explains why zombie mythology persists in popular culture.

In fact, they literally are us, just, y’know, a bit slower, in both senses of the term.

The Survivor and Others by H.P. Lovecraft