The 5 Zombie Movies You Should See Before You Start Craving Brains

How do you get a zombie movie out of Jane Eyre? How do you get a 70-minute horror movie out of Jane Eyre, even? Producer Val Lewton, who oversaw nine classic chillers for the studio RKO in the 1940s, knew. The basic tale of a very beset governess is transplanted from the British countryside to a Caribbean island and the plight of the brooding landowner is spiced up with voodoo. Critics have long commended Lewton’s horror pictures, which also include Cat People and The Seventh Victim, for their subtlety —which sometimes convinces average joes that they might be boring. They’re not. But Zombie, directed by Jacques Tourneur, is one that leans heaver on mood and atmosphere than jump scares.

Tom Conway, George Sanders’ brother, is convincingly morbid as the Rochester figure. On a boat with Frances Dee’s Betsy, seeing her awed by the beauty of the water, he says, “that luminous water, it takes its gleam from millions of tiny dead bodies. The glitter of putrescence.” Funsy guy. The narrative is gratifyingly knotty, with a mortifying payoff. And in its treatment of Black Caribbean culture and diasporic religious practices is not only surprisingly not condescending for a Hollywood film, it’s practically anti-racist, with zombieism sometimes serving as a powerful metaphor on slavery and colonialism.

Where to stream I Walked With A Zombie

Another Lewton production, one that feels a little too direct in our current pandemic times. Inspired by the famed Bocklin painting of the same name, it draws on Greek superstitions of the undead. Boris Karloff plays a merciless military general in the Balkan Wars in 1912 who decamps to an island cemetery just as a plague is descending on the land. The contagion and the general’s own fears — irrational or reality-based, we never quite know — ramp up the anxiety during a daily march of death. By the end, the general, who found his dead wife’s grave violated when he arrived on the island, is utterly off the rails. This movie has no confirmed supernatural element but instead is about fear making people so crazy that the supernatural might as well exist.

Where to stream Isle Of The Dead

Romero’s sequel to Night of the Living Dead took a decade to realize, and it remains a definitive classic that can’t be desecrated by opportunistic, simplistic reboots or remakes. It’s a movie that yields new riches with every viewing. I can swear to this, as I watched three different cuts of the film over the course of three days when I got a new 4K restoration on disc a while back. And yes, while the two alternate cuts are terrific in their ways, the U.S. theatrical version will do you right if you don’t have access to the variant.

One thing that became clearer to me in my deep dive: Yes, the zombies at the shopping mall conceit is a satire on U.S. consumerism — but the movie resonates much deeper in its treatment of human loneliness, and the need for connection. The disconnected escapees who form an ad hoc family are very moving in their way. And, yeah, the suspense is almost unbearable at times, and the zombie/undead flesh eating is extra gnarly in color (not for nothing had Romero studied vivid Powell/Pressburger films such as Tales of Hoffmann).

Where to stream Dawn Of The Dead (1978)

In this Spanish production, set in England but only partially shot on Jolly Old, grand metaphors take a far back seat to high-level shock and gore. Post-counterculture cynicism and disdain for authority are in full effect though. Ray Lovelock’s hippie antique dealer forms an alliance with uptight Christina Gailbo on a road trip that turns up a lot of befuddled but vicious flesh eaters.

Hollywood stalwart Arthur Kennedy, giving one of his more pronounced “what the hell am I doing here” late-life performances, tries out a mild Irish (I think it’s Irish) brogue) as an obnoxious cop who thinks the couple are responsible for the deaths they’re reporting.

Jorge Grau directs with brio, there’s an actually credible psych-rock score from Giuliano Sorgini, and the gore effects are extra grisly, very “we just got the freshest cuts from the butcher’s offal pile” if you will. It has the most bitter end since Romero’s Night, hinged on the very unpleasant idea that these undead remember their prior existences. For higher social commentary, the zombie-making mechanism turns out to be an agricultural insect killing machine that emanates a radiation summoning the dead to life. Because of course it is.

Where to stream The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue

Sure you’ve heard of it, but have you seen it? This multi-titled knockoff —on its Italian release it was called Zombi 2, suggesting a sequel to Romero’s Dawn, which was titled Zombi in the cut released by Dario Argento (the film’s co-producer) — has become, for better or worse, a classic of extreme shock cinema. Director Lucio Fulci, shooting in New York and Santo Domingo, crafted a kind of grindhouse theme park ride. Cardboard characters and gross nihilism credibly frame sensory assaults that keep on coming in the forms of relentless and sometimes ridiculous set pieces (undead vs. shark, a scene apparently shot without Fulci’s participation), and ultra-contrived and in your face gross-outs (wood sliver, eyeball). Then there are the genuinely eerie final shots of the undead invasion crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. As meretricious as the cinema Fulci represents is, we have to give it up to him here: these are more elementally fear inducing images than anything The Walking Dead could ever offer.

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Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the acclaimed 2020 book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, published by Hanover Square Press.

Where to stream Zombie