When moviegoing audiences got used to seeing hordes of slow-moving zombies dawdling across the silver screen, Danny Boyle came along to shake things up. In 28 Days Later, he gave us ravenous zombies that were so hungry for human flesh that they would sprint towards their targets.
Boyle insists that 28 Days Later isn’t a zombie movie, but come on, it’s a zombie movie. It has a plucky group of survivors facing off against legions of the undead. And it’s one of the most visceral thrill-rides the genre has to offer. Here are 10 Intense Zombie-Infested Thrillers To Watch If You Like 28 Days Later.
I Am Legend (2007)
The creatures in I Am Legend could technically be described as vampires, because they can’t come out in sunlight, but they swarm like zombies and they hunt like zombies, so they still have some traits of zombies.
Will Smith stars in this big-budget adaptation of the Richard Matheson post-apocalyptic bestseller as Robert Neville, the last man in New York. He’s a virologist trying to find a cure for the virus that wiped out most of humanity and infected the so-called “Darkseekers.” Smith is the only actor on-screen for most of the movie, and he makes for a very compelling lead.
Overlord (2018)
Initially rumored to be a Cloverfield movie (due to it being a Bad Robot production), Overlord is actually a beast of its own. Set during World War II, it sees a couple of troops caught behind enemy lines before D-Day as they stumble upon a bunch of secret Nazi experiments that have resulted in some truly monstrous creations.
Overlord didn’t make a big splash at the box office last year, but it was one of the most inventive horror films in recent memory. Director Julius Avery did a lot of visually fascinating things with the material, while stars Wyatt Russell and Jovan Adepo anchor the movie in real humanity.
Planet Terror (2007)
Robert Rodriguez helmed his zombie-infested B-movie homage Planet Terror as part of a double feature he was making with Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino contributed the second feature, the Grindhouse thriller Death Proof, while Rodriguez opened the double feature with this tale of survivors clashing with soldiers during a zombie apocalypse.
Rose McGowan stars as Cherry Darling, who replaces one of her legs with an automatic weapon halfway through the movie. Rodriguez played around with the conventions of old B-movies, like having a “missing reel” at the end of the second act to skip over what is usually the most boring part of a movie.
World War Z (2013)
This Brad Pitt-starring blockbuster put a James Bond-esque globetrotting adventure spin on the zombie movie, taking audiences to North Korea, Jerusalem, and, um, Wales. Pitt plays Gerry Lane, a United Nations employee who is recruited to help the world government deal with a global zombie apocalypse.
The Max Brooks novel that the movie was based on is a fictional United Nations report about a zombie uprising, so it didn’t exactly lend itself to a traditional three-act Hollywood blockbuster. But the movie flows cohesively from set piece to set piece, and Pitt’s lead performance keeps the audience hooked as the location keeps shifting.
Day of the Dead (1985)
George A. Romero’s third installment in the Dead franchise wasn’t as masterfully crafted as the first two, but it’s still head and shoulders above most of the schlocky zombie movies that the director’s work has inspired. Whereas the first two chronicled regular people’s response to the zombie outbreak, the third one focuses on a group of scientists who are researching the biology of the zombies to get to the bottom of it and maybe find a cure.
Of course, any scientists studying zombies are asking for their test subjects to escape and eat them, and that’s exactly what happens in this movie.
REC (2007)
This found-footage Spanish-language horror opus begins with an ambitious news reporter and her trusty camera crew documenting the day-to-day activities of firefighters. However, when the firefighters are called out to an apartment building, she takes her camera crew with them to capture the action.
When they get there, the old lady they’ve been called to tend to turns out to be zombified, and the whole building is quarantined. Although it’s a relief that the zombie apocalypse has been contained this early, as the plot thickens, it becomes apparent to the characters in the building that they won’t get to leave.
28 Weeks Later (2007)
The sequel to 28 Days Later, albeit featuring none of the original’s cast members, 28 Weeks Later finds a society that has been dealing with the zombie apocalypse for longer, and is therefore getting used to the very few pros and abundant cons of it.
The opening sequence sees the spot where Don (Robert Carlyle), his wife, and four other survivors have barricaded themselves getting overrun by zombies. Don manages to escape, but he’s the only one. The movie follows his adventures from there. Rather than Danny Boyle, this one was directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, who is currently working on a live-action remake of The Sword in the Stone for Disney+.
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
This is the 1968 black-and-white classic that introduced the moviegoing public to the modern zombie. The idea of the “zombie” has been around for hundreds of years, ever since Haitian slaves created the folklore to imagine a kind of supernatural liberation.
The concept of swarming masses of the undead rising up to feast on the flesh of the living was pioneered by George A. Romero in Night of the Living Dead, which set the template for the zombie movie – a group of survivors band together in a farmhouse to wait out the apocalypse – that is still used to this day.
Train to Busan (2016)
The zombies in Train to Busan to move really fast, and they work in tandem to hunt their prey. A divorced workaholic reluctantly agrees to take his daughter on a train journey to Busan to see her mother. While they’re on the train, thundering across South Korea, a zombie apocalypse suddenly breaks out around the country and they have to fight for survival.
Each character has a real personality – from characters you love and want to see survive to characters you love to hate and want to see torn to shreds – to give a real emotional core to the spectacular proceedings.
Dawn of the Dead (1978)
This is perhaps the greatest zombie movie ever made, and it probably always will be. George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead gives us a rounded view of humanity’s response to the zombie apocalypse in urban environments, having kept viewers confined to the countryside in its predecessor, Night of the Living Dead.
As the characters first come together, they hole up in a shopping mall. Dawn of the Dead is a critique on consumerism; we’re already a horde of zombies flocking mindlessly to the mall to peruse branded products. Every subsequent zombie movie has been a failed attempt to beat this one.