Flesh for Fantasy: Zombie Movies To Die For!

In honor of George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead being released this week, we go back to the grave to dig up five of our favorite zombie flicks.

Director: George A.Romero

Story: The classic first in Romero‘s Dead (or rather, undead) trilogy, Night features seven strangers hiding out in a deserted country farmhouse while a host of dead guys rages outside, ready to eat their intestines.

Kill Method: Take out their heads, their headzzz…a bullet or fire, either way works.

Line to remember: “They’re coming to get you, Barbara.”

Best Scene: The one in which a newly resurrected child zombie eviscerates and cannibalizes her own mother.

Trivia: A butcher who invested in the film provided much of the gory “props” (entrails, etc.). Romero originally intended to make the film in color, but that proved too expensive so it was made in the indubitably more atmospheric black and white.

Released: 1968
Budget: $114,000

Worldwide gross (out): $12 million

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Director: George A. Romero

Story: In a sort of bizarre statement about American consumerism at the dawning of the Mall age, four people are on the run to Canada to escape the ongoing zombification of the U.S. that began in Romero‘s first in the series, Night of the Living Dead. On the way, they stop to rest at a shopping mall (the Monroeville Mall in Pennsylvania) that has, like, the coolest clothes, an ice skating rink, and Orange Julius, and stuff. Sucked in by the lure of endless shopping, the four hang out for a while–only to find themselves battling zombies, biker looters, even each other. Lucky for them, the Monroeville Mall of 1977 had a gun and rifle shop.

Kill Method: A bullet to the head.

Lines to remember: Observing the zombies approaching the mall, says one human, “What are they doing? Why do they come here?” To which another replies, “Some kind of instinct…This was an important place in their lives.”

Best Scene: The final standoff in the mall between the people camping out inside and the biker gang of looters trying to get in, who let in a gazillion zombies.

Trivia: Rumors abound about whether there was an alternate ending filmed, in which the two characters left commit suicide. Some of the principles involved have hinted that some footage was shot, but Romero has gone on to deny it and to date, no one has found the scene actually exists.

Released: 1978
Budget: $1.5 million

Worldwide gross (out): $40 million

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Director: Sam Raimi (of Spider-Man fame)

Story: That Jim Carrey of horror, Bruce Campbell, returns in this movie that is more a remake of Evil Dead than its sequel as Ash, a young man who discovers a tape-recorded recitation from the Book of the Dead in a cabin where he’s vacationing with his girlfriend. Upon playing the taped spell girlfriend Linda turns into a zombie, and Ash has to survive a night in the cabin on his own.

Kill Method: Chainshaws, knives, whatever you can get your hands–er, hand–on.

Lines to remember: “Who’s laughing nowwwww?!” Ash screams maniacally as he chainsaws off his possessed right hand, blood spattering on his face. (After cutting off his hand, he stashes it under a trashcan appropriately weighted down by Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms).

Best Scene: Watching through the eyes of the invisible evil in the woods as it goes roaring and whooshing through the trees, knocking over and crushing everything in its path as it tries to run Ash down, in one long and unbroken, almost Hitchcockian shot that’s way more complex than you’d expect from a B horror flick.

Trivia: The Finns can only see a black market version of the film–it’s banned in their country. Also, Evil Dead 2 was filmed on the set of The Color Purple (the original cabin from the first movie had burned down).

Released: 1987
Budget: $3 million

Domestic gross (out): $6 million

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Director: Danny Boyle (of Trainspotting fame)

Story: Bike messenger Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up in a London hospital after 28 days of laying in a coma in caused by a car accident. A lot has happened in a mere month–a mysterious, incurable virus that has swept through London and other major cities and threatens the entire world population. Once infected, it takes 20 seconds for the virus’s victim to be turned into a pathological, rage-filled zombie bent on one thing: destroying the uninfected.

Kill Method: Guns, guns, more guns.

Lines to remember: “Do you want us to find a cure and save the world, or just fall in love and f**k?”

Best Scene: When Jim enters a church and sees dead people-who aren’t, although the opening when the caged monkeys go nuts is pretty freaky too.

Trivia: In an alternate ending, Jim dies.

Released: 2003
Budget: $8 million

Domestic gross (out): $45 million

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Director: Peter Jackson (of Lord of the Rings trilogy fame)

Story: Though now an Oscar winner, Jackson was also behind a little-known cult classic that has been called the goriest movie ever made. (Before The Passion of the Christ, that is.) Sort of a Willard Meets the Zombies, Lionel (Timothy Balme) is a mama’s boy whose nasty mother is bitten by the evil Sumatran rat monkey at a zoo, after which she smashes it with her shoe. The virus she catches from it turns her, and soon all around her, into one of the undead, and Lionel must keep Mum and friends locked in the basement all het up with elephant tranquilizer. Make a note: Once dismembered, a zombie’s parts may be just as deadly as the whole.

Kill Method: A lawnmower proves pretty handy for cutting more than just grass.

Line to remember: “I kick arse for the Lord!” says Father McGruder after ripping off arms and kicking off heads.

Best Scene: After two zombie have sex resulting in a baby zombie, poor old sap Lionel finds himself walking it in the park–and trying to keep it from killing people. A close runner-up is the splatterfest finale of epic proportions: After Lionel’s uncle has a rowdy party, the zombies get out, and all hell breaks loose.

Trivia: Fran Walsh, one of the film’s writers and whose name you may recognize for co-writing the LOTR trilogy, makes a cameo as one of the mothers in the park. So does Jackson‘s mother, who says “oohhh” in the background as the monkey rat is stepped on. The uncut version, called Braindead, features uncut scenes such as one in the basement where a baby zombie attempts to go for Lionel’s throat, but is stopped when its umbilical cord gets caught on a nail.

Released: 1993
Budget: $3 million

Domestic gross (out): $242,623