The latest entry is a horror comedy called "Zombieland," which opens Friday. Jesse Eisenberg stars as a nerd who escapes becoming a zombie appetizer because he religiously follows his 47 rules for survival that include "always look in the back seat of a car" and "beware of bathrooms." Eisenberg's fellow survivors include Woody Harrelson, Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin.
Zombies have been climbing out of their graves for decades in Hollywood. Zombies were first introduced as movie villains in 1932's "White Zombie." For the next 70 years or so, zombies were reanimated corpses that shuffled along and while vicious were easy enough to avoid. You could also destroy them by cutting off their heads or shooting them in the head.
Perhaps the greatest zombie movie of this era was George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead." Romero's zombies were reanimated by some kind of radiation and were running amok outside of Pittsburgh. By movie's end, gangs of armed men were traipsing about the countryside gunning down the undead and a few survivors who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Romero also introduced the idea of an
apocalypse with zombies munching on the living and spreading the condition through a bite, cut or blood.
Modern zombies still like to eat the living but they are increasingly fast and sometimes even have the ability to learn. Zombies in Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later" are remarkably fast on their feet and once infected with the Rage virus turn into zombies within moments. Zombies in the "Resident Evil" series have embraced this change and its zombies evolved from shufflers in the first entry in 2002 to being able to nimbly climb towers and chase down the living in 2007's "Resident Evil: Extinction."
American zombie movies have ranged from sheer horror as in "Night of the Living Dead" to teen comedy such as "My Boyfriend's Back" to satire including "Return of the Living Dead" with its punk zombies with pink hair. Nazi zombies that can walk across the ocean floor menace a group of people on a Pacific island in "Shock Waves." Motorcycle mamas take on a swarm of the undead in "Chopper Chicks in Zombietown." And a scientist probably wishes he hadn't brought the dead back to life in "Re-Animator."
American filmmakers have no monopoly on zombie films. Flesh-eaters are featured in movies from around the world. New Zealand moviemaker Peter Jackson tried his hand at the genre in 1992 with "Braindead." Italian zombie movies such as "Zombi 2" are infamous for their excessive gore. Even the French have zombie movies such as "The Grapes of Death" in which poisoned wine turns the populace of a small town into killer zombies.
Zombie movies have their own United Nations with titles produced in a host of countries including Scotland, Egypt, Thailand, Mexico, Columbia, Germany, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Argentina, Brazil, Japan, South Korea and the Philippines.
Here are six films available on video and DVD for zombie lovers interested in hosting their own international zombie film festival.
"Shaun of the Dead" (2004) -- Simon Pegg stars as a store manager whose life takes an unexpected turn when zombies descend on London in this horror comedy. There's some gore but plenty of laughs as Pegg decides to lead a band of survivors to the safest place he knows, his favorite pub. Other stars include Kate Ashfield, Nick Frost and Lucy Davis.
"Dead Meat" (2004) -- Some kind of zombie infection is being spread from slaughtered animals to people in this Irish horror flick with a cast of unknowns and that was shot on a limted budget. Stars include Marian Araujo and David Ryan.
"[REC]" (2007) -- A television reporter and her cameraman spending the night at a Madrid fire station soon find themselves trapped in a building infested with zombies in this Spanish film that was remade last year as "Quarantine." Stars include Manuela Velasco, Ferran Terraza, Jorge Serrano and Pablo Rosso.
"Undead" (2003) -- An Australian fishing village is hit by a swarm of meteorites that turn most of the residents into killer zombies in this horror film from Down Under. As usual, a small band of survivors try to escape without being eaten alive. Stars include Felicity Mason, Mungo McKay, Rob Jenkins and Lisa Cunningham.
"Zombie Lake" (2001) -- Nazi soldiers drowned in a pond by resistance fighters during World War II eat skinny-dipping girls and pester the townsfolk in a small village in this quirky zombie movie from France. Turns out, one of the women in town was fathered by one of the Nazis stuck in the lake. Leave it to the French to make a zombie father-daughter love story. Stars include Howard Vernon, Anouchka and Pierre-Marie Escourrou.
"Cemetery Man" (1994) -- Rupert Everett stars as the caretaker of an Italian cemetery who is quite accepting of the fact bodies buried in his cemetery always come back to life a week later and he has to kill them a second time to keep them from escaping. Other stars include Francois Hadji-Lazaro as his assistant caretaker, Mickey Knox and Fabiana Formica.
Cemetery Man is a good call. What about Night of the Living Bread?
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