It is difficult to reconcile the Zack Snyder who directed "Dawn of the Dead" with the Zack Snyder who brought us the "Justice League" #SnyderCut, the too accurate "Watchmen" adaptation, and the style-over-substance duo "300" and "Sucker Punch."

Which is not to argue that Zack Snyder's 2004 adaptation of George Romero's 1978 picture with the same title has any sense of aesthetic. The first twelve minutes of the film act as an opening salvo for his career and include one of the most impressive opening title sequences in the annals of the genre's history. This introduction provides a fantastic dynamic counterpoint to the movie that "Dawn of the Dead" is sometimes linked to: Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later," mostly because to the involvement of zombies that are referred to as "quick."

Although the remainder of "Dawn of the Dead" never quite lives up to the promise shown in these opening scenes, the screenplay written by James Gunn, who would go on to helm "Guardians of the Galaxy," manages to keep things fascinating all the way through. It is important to point out that remaking a masterpiece is a recipe for disaster ("disaster" being something that Snyder would again court when tackling the work of Alan Moore and the entire DC universe), but by avoiding Romero's social commentary, Snyder was able to carve out his own space in the cinematic zombie universe.

And in 2021, with Netflix's "Army of the Dead," he'll be back in that corner again.

Set in a post-apocalyptic Zombie apocalypse brought on by the enigmatic street narcotic "Natas." We follow one guy as he hunts down Flesh Eaters for fun and atonement while simultaneously trying to escape his past.

He chooses to help after colliding with a small group of survivors who are running short on supplies. However, a sudden onslaught by the Flesh Eaters compels them to flee, putting the Hunter's talents to the test.

The trailer for Zombie Hunter makes it seem like the kind of bloody B-movie fun that everyone would love seeing. We're curious to see how director K. King pulls off an homage to the grindhouse style of films like Machete and Planet Terror. With the eye-catching poster, the marketing team has done an excellent job.
 

Little Monsters is an unexpected movie from Lupita Nyong'o, who is best known for her dramatic roles. But it looks like she's having a lot of fun as a kindergarten teacher whose class is on a field trip when a zombie outbreak happens. The 2019 movie was the actress's second horror movie, but it wasn't as well known as Jordan Peele's "Us," which came out the same year.

But she is up to the challenge. According to the official press materials, the video is "dedicated to all the kindergarten instructors who inspire children to study, instill confidence in them, and prevent them from being eaten by zombies." Indeed, that pretty well wraps it up. Also starring in "Little Monsters" are Josh Gad, who portrays an annoying, renowned kid performer, and Alexander England, who plays an effete, washed-up musician who accompanies his nephew on a field trip and is in love (or maybe lust) with Lupita Nyong'o.

Thus, the result is an uncommon horror-romantic comedy fusion that energizes both genres.

The zombie apocalypse has continued uninterrupted since then. (A select handful have even perfected the art of running.) Television's The Walking Dead is the most well-known example, although zombies have also featured in discovered footage ([REC]), romantic comedies ([REC]), and grindhouse homages (Warm Bodies) (Planet Terror).

At the same time, a new genre was established thanks to Romero's writings and swiftly went global.

The master of Italian horror, Lucio Fulci, took the idea and ran with it in his own way, first with Zombi 2 (also known as Zombie), and then with his far more weird and experimental "Gates of Hell" trilogy. Fulci is credited with popularizing the zombie subgenre.

Fans of Romero's work, like directors Dan O'Bannon, Fred Dekker, and Stuart Gordon, built on what he had started. They messed with the genre's rules and tried out new ideas for what a zombie movie could be. After that, zombies lost popularity very quickly.

The undead had become a fixture of horror films, although they now mainly featured in sequels (such as Return of the Living Dead and Zombie) and low-budget B-movies such as My Boyfriend's Back, Cemetery Man, and Dead Alive.

Exists any alternative starting point? White Zombie popularized the Hollywood concept of Haitian voodoo undead decades before the original George Romero zombie.

White Zombie is currently accessible for watching on YouTube, and it can also be found in practically any budget zombie film collection. Due to the studio's lack of subtlety at the time, Bela Lugosi plays a witch doctor who is actually nicknamed "Murder." After his portrayal in Dracula, Lugosi was just a year away from his status as one of Universal's most popular horror performers.

Lugosi, who looks like Svengali, uses his different potions and powders to turn a young woman who is about to get married into a zombie so that she will do what a cruel plantation owner wants her to do, and... well, it's pretty dry and wooden stuff. Lugosi is the only bright spot, as expected, but you had to start somewhere. After White Zombie, there were a few voodoo zombie movies made in Hollywood every so often for many years. Most of them are now in the public domain.

A particular musical project that Rob Zombie was working on was, of course, also influenced by the film. You'll see it included heavily on some lists of the "greatest zombie movies," but let's face it: in 2016, the vast majority of viewers aren't going to get much out of viewing a movie like this one. It is virtually entirely due to its historical relevance that this item has been given the distinction of being ranked number 50.

Planet Terror is the better half of the Grindhouse double-bill that Robert Rodriguez concocted with Quentin Tarantino. Planet Terror tells the story of a go-go dancer, a bioweapon gone awry, and Texan townsfolk turned into shuffling, pustulous monsters. Planet Terror was directed by Robert Rodriguez. Planet Terror has its exploding tongue firmly entrenched in its rotten cheek, leaning strongly upon its B-movie heritage, with missing reels, rough cuts, and hammy overdubbed dialogue.

The film's conclusion, in which Rose McGowan's character, Cherry Darling, has her severed leg replaced with a machine gun, is both disgusting and hysterically funny. I need to eat some of your brains to soak up some of your knowledge.

Night of the Chicken Dead seems to have some of the things that are usually in a Troma movie. It will be a bunch of trash. It'll get quite bloody. There will be no limits or care for how things look. Like every other Troma movie, the real question is whether you find it boring or not. In this case, the right answer is "absolutely not."

It's even a little bit sophisticated in its social criticism of consumer culture—in an obvious kind of way—despite being billed as a "zom-com musical." Is that, however, the actual reason you're seeing a zombie chicken movie set in a KFC-style restaurant constructed on an old Native American burial ground? No, I don't believe so. Watching a Troma film entails accepting the gore, scatological comedy, and low-budget production standards, as well as just enjoying some thoughtless narrative.

So, Poultrygeist is just 103 minutes of filthy, rude, and raunchy madness.

While zombie films have been around for more than 80 years (White Zombie was released in 1932, and I Walked With a Zombie was released in 1943), it is generally acknowledged that the subgenre as we know it today did not emerge until 1968, when George A. Romero released Night of the Living Dead.

Night, a low-budget indie picture with a cryptic narrative, stunning gore, progressive casting and social criticism, and, of course, the memorable hordes of the gaunt, ravenous undead, fascinated spectators. Romero was dubbed the "Godfather of Zombies" and went on to make five additional Dead films, including Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead, which are among the greatest in our book.

Despite the influence of Night of the Living Dead, it was not until the late 1970s and early 1980s that a number of famous American zombie films were produced. Shock Waves may have been the first "Nazi zombie" film, released soon before Dawn of the Dead boosted the popularity of zombies as terrifying foes.

A gang of wayward boaters find themselves on a remote island where a wrecked SS submarine has discharged its undead crew, a Nazi experiment. Peter Cushing plays a miscast and addled SS Commander the same year he sneered at Princess Leia in Star Wars: A New Hope?

There have been at least 16 Nazi zombie movies made since this point, which is certainly more than one might be aware of, which makes this one fairly significant at least for combining the portmanteau of great film villains for the first time. There have also been many more Nazi zombie movies made since this point than one might be aware of.

Films such as the Dead Snow trilogy owe everything to Shock Waves.

It's not easy to give a zombie movie a new spin, but Colm McCarthy's The Girl With All the Gifts, which is based on a book by Mike Carey, does it. It also has some good genre thrills.

In this case, the zombies are caused by a fungal pathogen like the one in The Last of Us that has turned most of the people into "hungries." But that is mostly in the background of the story, which is mostly about Melanie, a young girl whose teacher, Helen, played by Gemma Arterton, gives her an unusual education in a heavily armed facility.

Melanie, a'second-generation' hungry, still craves human flesh but is capable of thinking and feeling – and her very existence may hold the key to the future.

This gore-fest takes the standard zombie and gives it a Scandinavian twist by including the Draugr, a legendary undead monster from Scandinavian mythology known for its ferocious devotion to protecting its hoard of gold. In Dead Snow, these draugr are really ex-SS troopers who harassed a Norwegian hamlet and stole from its citizens before being killed or driven into the snowy mountains.

I must give Dead Snow credit for originality here. It includes elements of Evil Dead and "teen sex/slasher" films, it is funny, violent, and satisfyingly brutal. Furthermore, Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead is the sequel, so fans can anticipate more of the same.

The history of a film might be more fascinating than the film itself, and this is the case with The Dead Next Door. Sam Raimi used the money from Evil Dead II to bankroll its development, allowing his friend J. R. Bookwalter to achieve his concept of a low-budget zombie epic. The whole film seems to have been redubbed in post-production, and for some reason, Raimi is credited as an executive producer under the alias "The Master Cylinder," while Evil Dead's Bruce Campbell serves as the voiceover for not one, but two characters. Because of this, The Dead Next Door exudes a dreamy surrealism, and that's before we even get to the fact that it was filmed completely on Super 8 rather than 32 mm film.

The Dead Next Door, then, is a one-of-a-kind experience, even in this genre: A grainy, low-budget zombie action film with cringe-inducing amateur acting performances and surprising professionalism thrown in for good measure.

Forget about the plot; you're just here for the blood and guts. You're not watching this for the narrative, which involves a "elite team" of zombie exterminators who stumble into a cult that worships zombies. At points, The Dead Next Door resembles a low-budget effort to recreate Peter Jackson's Dead Alive, complete with the film's trademark deranged bloodletting and laughably obvious genre allusions. The movie seems like it was produced so the cast and crew could get some experience with actual blood effects and beheadings. Those names "Dr. Savini" and "Officer Raimi" come to mind. What's up, "Commander Carpenter"?

They're all here in a zombie film that looks and feels like it was produced just for the director's family. Still, there's something alluring about that type of messy proximity.

The meteoric surge in popularity of zombie movies has been fascinating to see. Voodoo myth, radioactive humans, and the classic monster imagery of E.C. comics were the primary ways in which the public learned about the creatures for a long time. They were either underrepresented or underdescribed in other sources. Rare sightings of zombies seldom resembled the modern stereotype of the brain-eating, flesh-craving zombie.

Cemetery Man (also called Dellamorte Dellamore), which was directed by Dario Argento's assistant Michele Soavi, is a weird, psychedelic head trip in which the undead are shown to be more of a nuisance than a dangerous (first post) threat. In Cemetery Man, a movie based on the comic book series Dylan Dog, Everett plays Francesco Dellamorte, a grumpy gravedigger who would rather be with the dead than with people who are still alive. Why wouldn't he? That's the question. People who are still alive are jerks for spreading the false idea that he can't have children.

There is one catch, however: the deceased will not remain buried in his cemetery. When he meets a beautiful widow (Falchi) at her husband's burial, Dellamorte falls head over heels for her, romances her in the gloomy corridors of his ossuary, and before they know it, they're naked and steaming it up on top of her husband's grave. That's only the beginning of the strangeness.