The first odd thing about the new zombie movie Maggie: it stars Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Hollywood icon whose living-dead movie pedigree isnt exactly legend. Although its worth noting that first-time director Henry Hobson does, in fact, have a legitimate living-dead cred: hes the artist responsible for The Walking Deads superb opening credits sequence. Which brings up the second weird thing about Maggie: coming from someone whos involved with AMCs zombie-packed hit show, its curiously light on walkers.
Ultimately, Maggie doesnt play by the standard Z-word rulebook. And thats a huge part of why its one of the best zombie movies of the last few years.
Unrelated and combative characters fending off zombies while locked inside a house or some other kind of enclosed setting? Been there, seen that hundreds of times. Horror-comedies that so desperately want to be Shaun of the Dead, but, alas, arent Shaun of the Dead? Enough is enough already. But a tender, somber, and talky zombie drama about a father and his daughter, and thats really an allegory for dealing with a loved ones terminal illness? Thats something special. Maggie, excuse the pun, breathes life into the recently comatose zombie sub-genre, riding Schwarzenegger and Breslins powerful acting to exhibit how a little narrative innovation can go a long way for budding George A. Romero disciples.
Not that Maggie is an anomaly, though. Ambitious and original movies of its ilk have been giving horror fans hope for decades. And now, thanks to Maggie, theres a new reason to honor them. Here are 15 unusual zombie movies that demand to be seen for their uniqueness alone.
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Matt Barone is a film-obsessed writer and editor of TribecaFilm.com. When he’s not contributing to outlets like The Dissolve and Birth.Movies.Death, he endlessly weighs in on all things horror on Twitter.
Unusual Zombie Movies
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Unusual Zombie Movies #1
Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things (1972, dir. Bob Clark)
Bob Clark is the unofficial king of the Yuletide movie, having directed both the seminal slasher Black Christmas and the annually-TBS-abused family film A Christmas Story, but here’s a largely overlooked fact about the late writer-director: He was also a zombie movie champ. In his awesomely named Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things, a group of obnoxious theater actors convene on an island for some drinking, partying, and let’s-the-raise-the-dead séance action; they dig up a corpse and have fun with it, a la Weekend at Bernie’s, and then, thinking their séance didn’t work, they’re caught with their proverbial pants down by an army of angry flesh-eaters. The film’s genius lies in its third act’s hard left turn—once the living dead show up, Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things drops the laughs and becomes legitimately unsettling.
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Unusual Zombie Movies #2
Deathdream (1974, dir. Bob Clark)
Also known as Dead of Night, Bob Clark’s terrific reimagining of W.W. Jacobs’ classic morality tale “The Monkey’s Paw” is one of the ’70s most unsung horror masterworks. A grieving mother and father mourn the death of their son, who was killed while serving in Vietnam, but then their grown-up and deceased offspring inexplicably shows up at their doorstep. And then random local townsfolk turn up dead and completely drained of their blood. A singular marriage of zombie tropes and vampire lore, Deathdream exists somewhere between Joe Dante’s Homecoming and George Romero’s Martin, which is a wonderful place to be.
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Unusual Zombie Movies #3
The Video Dead (1987, dir. Robert Scott)
Zombie cinema has its answer to The Room, and it is Robert Scott’s The Video Dead—it’s just waiting for the cult it so absolutely deserves. The film’s plot is ridiculous to the point of savant genius: There’s a haunted television set, and whenever people turn it on, it only shows a cheap-o movie titled Zombie Blood Nightmare, and then actual zombies show up. Oh, and, for some reason, there’s also busty blonde who seduces teenage boys through said small-screen. And all of this happens through the magic of bad acting, DIY SFX, and the smarts of, fittingly, a braindead zombie.
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Unusual Zombie Movies #4
The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988, dir. Wes Craven)
Everyone loves to praise Wes Craven for his genre classics like The Last House on the Left, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Scream, and all for good reasons, but many might routinely ignore The Serpent and the Rainbow, one of his best movies. That’s just criminal. An example of Craven at his most cerebral, The Serpent and the Rainbow brings the zombie back to its Haitian roots, when “undead” didn’t mean Romero-esque creatures ripping flesh apart with their teeth, but, rather, an intense form of somnambulism by way of voodoo. Though, it still gets pretty gnarly, as in Bill-Pullman’s-scrotum-nailed-to-a-chair gnarly.
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Unusual Zombie Movies #5
Pet Sematary (1989, dir. Mary Lambert)
That’s right, Stephen King has, in fact, written one of the great zombie novels of all time, and, indeed, Mary Lambert turned it into one of the better King movie adaptations. Even though it’s rarely acknowledged as such, Pet Sematary is undeniably a zombie story—how else to describe little Gage after he’s flattened by that enormous truck? Cleverly, King subverted the zombie formula by giving his protagonist the power to initiate the living dead’s resurrections, turning what George Romero started into a kind of Dr. Frankenstein-like story about the pitfalls of playing God. Hell, even the film’s zombie cat was ultimately a piss-poor idea on Louis Creed’s part.
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Unusual Zombie Movies #6
Fido (2006, dir. Andrew Currie)
What would happen if someone were to fully domesticate Day of the Dead’s Bub, to the point that the trainable zombie basically acted like a family dog? That’s the gist of Fido, a smart and often sweet little zombie comedy—it’s right there in the film’s title, which, one can presume, beat out Spot and Rover as director/co-writer Andrew Currie was finishing it up. Playing the eponymous zombie, Billy Connolly gives one of the better undead performances this side of, well, Sherman Howard’s “Bub” in George Romero’s aforementioned 1985 classic. Fido is the kind of zombie movie that you can watch with budding, adolescent horror fans—it’s a safe gateway into them eventually seeing Bub salute Captain Rhodes as the latter’s ripped in half while gargling out, “Choke on ’em!”
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Unusual Zombie Movies #7
Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (2006, dir. Lloyd Kaufman)
So, Zombeavers isn’t silly enough for you? Okay, how about some, as good ol’ Wikipedia describes them, “chicken-possessed zombie demons”? (Sometimes, a writer just has to concede to Wiki-supplied descriptions of that epic magnitude.) A madcap and riotous film that could only come from the mind of Troma Entertainment’s head maestro, Mr. Lloyd Kaufman, Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead is inarguably the only zombie movie to ever honor Frank Perdue as much as it does George Romero. For that alone, it’s a must-watch, preferably with a chicken-leg-sized reefer stick in hand.
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Unusual Zombie Movies #8
American Zombie (2007, dir. Grace Lee)
So many zombie movies thrive on the idea that zombies can be tamed and domesticated, and there’s always that one character who’s determined to have everyone, living and dead, exist happily ever after. Grace Lee’s nifty mockumentary American Zombie pictures what would happen if those optimistic characters had their way. The undead live as regular people in a fictionalized Los Angeles, and Lee, playing herself, takes a documentary crew into LA to learn more about the city’s heartbeat-deficient residents. Naturally, it doesn’t go well.
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Unusual Zombie Movies #9
Colin (2008, dir. Marc Price)
Can you sympathize with a zombie, even as they eat and terrorize the living? It’s an intriguing question, and one that filmmaker Marc Price asked with Colin, widely credited as the first-ever zombie movie told wholly from a zombie’s point-of-view. Stronger in concept than execution, Colin is worth a view simply for its narrative audacity, although, yeah, let’s be honest here: Wouldn’t it be much more interesting, not to mention excitingly hardcore, if someone were to make a zombie POV movie about one without any humanity? Imagine watching a Friday movie from Jason’s perspective, but in zombie form.
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Unusual Zombie Movies #10
Deadgirl (2008, dir. Marcel Sarmiento, Gadi Harel)
Whenever someone complains to you about how horror’s lacking in originality, just point him or her towards Deadgirl. Its plot is one of those goldmine fresh ideas that genre fans live for: two high school dudes find a female zombie chained up in an abandoned building and gradually turn her—or, rather, “it”—into a pulse-free sex doll of sorts. The problem being, of course, that she’s not some inflatable toy or plastic mannequin—she’s a moving, ready-to-kill ghoul, and Deadgirl’s unexpected impact comes from how its titular creature inadvertently exposes the main characters’ true colors. The film sneaks in thematic weight whilst chewing through multiple taboos.
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Unusual Zombie Movies #11
MAKE-OUT With VIOLENCE (2009, dir. Andy Duensing, Chris Doyle)
If you’ve ever watched Weird Science and thought, “This dynamic needs more zombies,” then MAKE-OUT With VIOLENCE is the movie for you. Two twin high school graduates find their lady friend, who’d recently disappeared, and see that she’s now a reanimated cadaver; they do their best to keep up an appearance of mutual normalcy while trying to revert the zombie girl back into their old friend. Played largely for laughs, MAKE-OUT With VIOLENCE exists somewhere between Romero and John Hughes, which, in theory, is about as likely a cinematic pairing as, well, Romero and John Cleese, but that mash-up worked out pretty damn nicely for Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg, no?
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Unusual Zombie Movies #12
The Battery (2013, dir. Jeremy Gardner)
The Battery is proof that you don’t always need money to buy you happiness (in the form of a completed zombie movie). Made for only $6,000, writer-director Jeremy Gardner’s scrappy little character study uses a zombie apocalypse as an accessible backdrop to tell the intimate story of two guys (played Gardner and Adam Cronheim) whose casual acquaintance reluctantly turns into a two-against-the-world bond once that world goes to crap. The Battery has zombies, sure, but they’re secondary. Gardner’s intelligent script shines with its interpersonal storytelling, which is at its best during the film’s ambitious third act, with the two dudes trapped inside a car as the resurrected corpses try to pound their way in.
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Unusual Zombie Movies #13
Contracted (2013, dir. Eric England)
Contracted’s zombie pedigree sneaks up on you. For the bulk of its duration, writer-director Eric England’s disturbing character piece is pure Cronenbergian nastiness, watching its main character (excellently played by Najarra Townsend) slowly rot away after she’s drugged and raped by a stranger at a party. As the film progresses, she decomposes until she resembles a human-sized expansion of the mold you find on months-old bread, and it’s as difficult to look at as that sounds, but then she also begins killing people, and you’re not sure what the hell she’s turning into. Contracted’s final scene, though, reveals its bottom-line truth: It’s been a zombie origin story all along.
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Unusual Zombie Movies #14
Warm Bodies (2013, dir. Jonathan Levine)
On its surface, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane director Jonathan Levine’s teenybopper-friendly Warm Bodies looks and feels like yet another wannabe Twilight. There’s the attractive girl with a tough exterior, and the pretty-boy outcast who just so happens to be a zombie (and who just wants to be loved, dammit!), but Warm Bodies makes those Robert Pattinson/Kristen Stewart flicks seem ten times worse than they already are. With its lovable charm and playful energy, Levine’s film defies expectations and makes you wish that all YA-targeting cinema could be made with similar panache.
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Unusual Zombie Movies #15
Zombeavers (2014, dir. Jordan Rubin)
It’s the horror-comedy equivalent of naming a porno movie Rampant Sex. The premise of Zombeavers is as on-the-nose as its title: an endless legion of undead beavers prey on a bunch of thinly written yet anatomically impressive co-ed characters—nothing more, nothing less. The Hydrox cookie to Piranha 3D’s Oreo, Zombeavers delivers exactly what you’d expect it to, and when you’ve decided to spend 90 minutes watching a movie about zombie beavers, how can you be mad at that?
