Why zombie movies

As Ben, Barbra and more hide away from the rising corpses in a rural farmhouse, Romero reflects ideas of racism in the USA, the ongoing trauma of the Vietnam War, and the American public facing up to the realisation that their greatest enemy might actually be themselves. Four words: zombies on a train. Korean director Yeon Sang-ho takes that elevator pitch and elevates it into a gripping, action-packed horror movie, using cramped interior space and moments in more wide-open environments to stage breathlessly tense sequences.

Train To Busan's zombies are mesmerising to watch — aggressive and animalistic, their limbs and spines contorting as they rise up to claim more victims. The result is stylishly-shot and pulse-pounding, with a host of memorable characters — particularly Ma Dong-seok's hulking hero Sang-hwa.

For his feature debut proper, Edgar Wright drew from Romero and Richard Curtis for the definitive rom-zom-com. Simon Pegg is the titular Shaun, a slacker entering his 30s who's forced to grow up, commit to his girlfriend Liz Kate Ashfield , sort things out with his step-dad, and relinquish his best friend Ed Nick Frost when a zombie apocalypse unfolds in London.

It doesn't hold back as a zombie film — with lashings of gore, well-executed jump-scares and emotional farewells — but indulges its British humour too, as Shaun attacks the undead with a cricket bat and hatches a plot to hole up at the local pub. Purists will tell you it's not a zombie movie. If they're technically right, they're also totally wrong — Danny Boyle's film about a deadly rage infection reinvented and redefined what a zombie film could be, taking the idea of running infected from Return Of The Living Dead and, er, running with it.

It's a gritty, gripping work with an iconic opening, as Cillian Murphy's hospitalised Londoner Jim awakens to find the capital city eerily deserted — until it becomes all-too-clear what's happened to everyone.

If the rage infection wasn't perilous enough, Alex Garland's screenplay highlights how the surviving humans are just as deadly.

The final part of Romero's landmark original Dead trilogy is a more meditative affair than the previous instalments — but it's a powerful piece, with an angry resonance that continues to reverberate. Set even further into the zombie apocalypse, Day finds the non-infected population dwindling, with surviving scientists and soldiers properly cracking up, and the undead themselves beginning to evolve.

Enter Bub, an actual zombie hero — reliving echoes of his past life, and with a cognitive function that suggests not all of the undead are mindless monsters. Taking place largely in the confines of an underground facility, Day is a claustrophobic and pessimistic affair, wrangling with meaty themes of hope, faith, and the futility of combat, as human in-fighting leads to more carnage with tragic consequences.

If Night Of The Living Dead was the birth of the contemporary zombie flick, Dawn Of The Dead was its coming-of-age — bigger, bolder, more confident, and, this time, in colour. The eerie tone of its predecessor is swapped for a rising tide of chaos and panic as the unfolding apocalypse spreads, and a group of survivors hunker down in the local mall. If it initially seems like an ideal place to wait out the downfall of society, rife with supplies, it proves anything but — the zombies instinctively drawn to the place they were programmed to devote their free time and money to back when they were alive.

It's another piece of potent satire, packed with playful imagery — though that never gets in the way of Romero telling a compelling, nightmarish tale, exploding with visceral effects from Tom Savini, drawing from the horrifying sights he witnessed as a Vietnam War photographer.

Prev Next. George Romero. Lucio Fulci. Danny Boyle. Edgar Wright. The blend of other popular genres into the world of zombie culture increases the appeal and allows for a wider audience.

Over time zombies have infested almost every form of entertainment from movies, television, music, and art. The AMC television series The Walking Dead incited a new milestone for the zombie apocalypse fandom crossing over into primetime television and mainstream media.

The first season alone brought in 6 million viewers and high ratings and continued to climb in the following seasons. The Walking Dead Amid its third season, The Walking Dead became one of the first cable series in television history to have the highest total viewership of any fall season show for adults.

According to the AMC website , after 10 seasons and nearly episodes, The Walking Dead is one of the most-watched television series ever. The popularity of the zombie genre in film and television has had a series of renaissances since the s. Thanks to lingering classics like White Zombie and Night of the Living Dead or the modern success of Zombieland , 28 Days Later , and The Walking Dead-series , the genre continues to sell tickets and populate almost every medium of entertainment imaginable.

Some of the success owes to the low budgets, high returns, and suspenseful action. Information contained on this page is provided by an independent third-party content provider. Frankly and this Site make no warranties or representations in connection therewith. If you are affiliated with this page and would like it removed please contact pressreleases franklymedia. WN Lifestyle Home - Entertainment. Read at your own risk. No matter how many times the genre appears to die, somehow, it always comes back to life.

Tip: See the best zombie movies of all time. In general, the horror genre is arguably one of the most famous cult film genres of all time, and this is especially true for the zombie subgenre. But why are zombie movies in particular so popular?

Read more about the difference between the horror and thriller genres in film. The reason zombie movies are so popular is a combination of low budgets, high returns, and suspenseful action.

Zombie movies ticks of all the boxes when it comes to triggering our guilty human desires to experience our most basic instinctive fears as categorized by Dr. Karl Albrecht of extinction, mutilation, loss of autonomy, separation, and death of the ego. Join the ride if you dare. And remember to bring a baseball bat. The love for these ghoulish, brain-eaters is unrivaled and undying. People love a good scare.

According to Dr. See the best end-of-the-world movies of all time ranked. In fact, the idea of a zombie has roots in the culture of enslaved people in Haiti as far back as the s, writes Mike Mariani for The Atlantic.

The original brains-eating fiend was a slave not to the flesh of others but to his own. The myth evolved slightly and was folded into the Voodoo religion, with Haitians believing zombies were corpses reanimated by shamans and voodoo priests. Sorcerers, known as bokor, used their bewitched undead as free labor or to carry out nefarious tasks.

This was the post-colonialism zombie, the emblem of a nation haunted by the legacy of slavery and ever wary of its reinstitution. It was from this source that filmmakers drew for White Zombie , the first-ever zombie film, in