The Best Zombie Movies Of All Time: Empire's Top 10

The zombie film is one of cinema's most flexible genres: the same monster can be used for social satire, pure comedy, and pure horror. Empire has compiled a list of 25, ranging from Night Of The Living Dead to 28 Years Later. Here are the top 10 films from that list.

10. Re-Animator (1985) — Stuart Gordon

Adapted from an H.P. Lovecraft story, the film looks at the dead from a completely different angle: Jeffrey Combs' mad professor Herbert West invents a lime-green fluid that reanimates dead tissue, and soon begins applying it to corpses. A pulp-level mix of horror and comedy; even by the gory standards of the 80s, it's excessively bloody, with a tight script that makes it nauseatingly entertaining.

9. 28 Years Later (2025) — Danny Boyle

Boyle and Alex Garland's return to the pandemic they started is not the expected nostalgia trip: it's a story of violence, faith, and grief through the eyes of a child growing up on a quarantined island. With its visual audacity and final move, it's the most debated installment in the series.

8. [REC] (2007) — Jaume Balagueró, Paco Plaza

The most prolific example of found-footage horror: a quarantined apartment building in Barcelona, a single camera, and increasingly narrowing corridors. The attic sequence at the end is one of the most copied horror moments in the genre.

7. Braindead (1992) — Peter Jackson

Peter Jackson before Middle-earth: one of the goriest films in cinema history, with a lawnmower to boot. A happy madness that pushes splatter comedy to the limits of absurdity.

6. Night Of The Living Dead (1968) — George A. Romero

The film that invented the genre. Black-and-white, low-budget, and still brutal; it turns a besieged farmhouse into a laboratory for the racial and authority tensions of 60s America. Its ending is one of cinema's coldest final scenes.

5. Train To Busan (2016) — Yeon Sang-ho

A perfectly crafted thriller as a pandemic film set on a high-speed train; but its real power lies in the time it spends on its characters. A modern classic that brings class criticism and fatherhood melodrama into the same carriage, leaving the audience devastated at the end.

4. Shaun Of The Dead (2004) — Edgar Wright

The benchmark for zombie comedy: a sharp British provincial satire as much as a love letter to Romero. Wright's editing rhythm, the record-throwing scene, and the "let's meet at the Winchester when all this blows over" idea permanently changed the genre.

3. 28 Days Later (2002) — Danny Boyle

Opening with empty London scenes, the film, which turned the grit of digital video into an aesthetic, brought running zombies into the mainstream. But the real horror comes not from the pandemic, but from the survivors — especially the people at the military base.

2. Day Of The Dead (1985) — George A. Romero

Romero's most pessimistic and radical film: in an underground bunker, science and the military devour each other, while a zombie named Bub becomes the most human character in the film. Tom Savini's makeup work is still legendary.

1. Dawn Of The Dead (1978) — George A. Romero

At the top is the tombstone of consumer society: survivors taking refuge in a shopping mall discover that the place they thought was heaven is their own trap. Both genre cinema and sharp satire; the film that turned the zombie movie into a metaphor machine.

Source: Empire — "The 25 Best Zombie Movies Of All Time".