Unconventional Zombie Stories That Breathe New Life Into The Genre

In the 2004 film Shaun of the Dead, Shaun (Simon Pegg) lives with his best friend, Ed (Nick Frost), and flatmate, Pete (Peter Serafinowicz). He's lost his girlfriend, Liz (Kate Ashfield), and doesn't get along with his stepdad, Philip (Bill Nighy). Shaun's routine is always the same: It consists of work, a trip to the local shop, and video games with Ed until he wakes up the next day and starts over again. When a zombie appears in Shaun and Ed's garden, however, they make a plan to save both Liz and Shaun's Mum (Penelope Wilton) and hole up at the Winchester pub. Shaun of the Dead was unique for its time: a romantic comedy with zombies that introduced a new audience to the horror genre. The film is also noteworthy for making an obvious comparison between life's daily tedium and zombies' brainless pursuit of flesh; even within the pack of zombies, there's safety in conformity, allowing Shuan and his friends to travel to the Winchester.

In the 2013 film Warm Bodies, R (Nicholas Holt) is a zombie who can no longer remember his life prior to the apocalypse. He now spends his time eating brains, conversing via grunts with his best friend M (Rob Corddry), and looking for more brains to eat. With each of these brains, the zombies get to relive that person's memories. R falls in love with human Julie (Teresa Palmer) after seeing her scavenge for food with other human survivors. After discreetly eating the brains of Julie's boyfriend and reliving his memories of her, R falls even deeper in love and feels his heartbeat again for the first time. This leads R, and eventually Julie and her friends, on a mission to prove that zombies don't have to be threats to humans, all while R continues to regain his humanity. While there are other zombie-romance movies out there, Warm Bodies stands out because it's all from the zombie's perspective. While these undead are certainly dangerous, they're also capable of hunting in groups, making friends, and hatching elaborate plans when they fall in love. They feel more human than zombies ever have in a movie, with characteristics that follow them from life into death and back to life again. They're fully-formed characters, these zombies.

In the 2019 film Little Monsters, teacher Miss Caroline (Lupita Nyong'o) takes her class on a field trip to a farm. She's joined last minute by Dave (Alexander England), the jaded uncle of student Felix (Diesel La Torraca). At the same time as the class's visit, children's entertainer Teddy McGiggles (Josh Gad) is filming an episode of his TV show on the farm. Unfortunately, zombies escape from a nearby government facility and descend upon the property. The trio of adults must work together to keep all of the children safe and eliminate the zombies. Filmmaker Abe Forsythe revealed the movie is a metaphor for the way he feels about keeping his son, who has life-threatening food allergies, safe in public. The film alludes to this when Dave accidentally serves Felix chips with dairy in them, causing an allergic reaction in his nephew. Forsythe credited his son's preschool teacher with helping him overcome his fear of letting others care for his son.

This Korean film follows a video-game streamer named Oh Joon-woo (Yoo Ah-in) who attempts to survive the zombie apocalypse while trapped alone in his apartment. He's overwhelmed by hopelessness and the weight of losing his family when another survivor, Kim Yoo-bin, signals to him from the apartment building across the street. Joon-woo and Kim Yoo-bin strike up a friendship borne from loneliness and safety as they attempt to help one another survive. The most striking element of this zombie movie is its use of technology. Most films leave the protagonist in the dark about their loved ones' fate, but Joon-woo hears the attack on his family via voicemail. Joon-woo also continues using social media during the outbreak, using “#StayAlive” and enabling the military to eventually track down and rescue survivors.

In the 1992 film Death Becomes Her, Madeline Ashton (Meryl Streep) and Helen Sharp (Goldie Hawn) have been frenemies for as long as they can remember, culminating in the former stealing the latter's fiancé, plastic surgeon Dr. Ernest Menville (Bruce Willis). Years later, Helen invites Madeline and Ernest to her book-release party and introduces her slimmer, younger appearance to the unhappy couple. Both Madeline and Helen keep trying to one-up each other until the film's pivotal reveal: These women are zombies. The twist is hilarious, as is the special effects work as Madeline and Helen go at each other like Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner. Some viewers may miss the theme, namely the extreme lengths to which some women will go in order to win a man's attention. The black comedy, in its own '90s way, takes vanity to task until its final frames.

The Girl with All the Gifts, released in 2016, is a unique zombie movie on a few counts. Humanity is infected by a fungal parasite that turns people into “hungries.” These first-generation infected are mindless and hungry, but their children, humans born infected with the parasitic fungus called neonates, are able to learn. Some of the neonates are housed in a military facility, where they're taught by Helen (Gemma Arterton), and where Dr. Caroline Caldwell (Glenn Close) studies them to create a cure. When hungries overrun the facility, Helen and Caroline take neonate Melanie (Sennia Nanua) with them, as she's the most special child. The rest of the film is a survival story in which the extent of Melanie's talents becomes clear not only to the adults around her, but to the audience. When it comes time for Melanie to choose between a cure and her people, her choice is hardly a surprise. What is surprising, however, is just how Melanie's choice is handled and the notion that humans will one day be knocked from the top of the food chain.

Fort Chicken Elementary School in Fort Chicken, IL, is hit by a tainted batch of chicken nuggets, and 4th grader Shelley Linker (Sunny May Allison) is patient zero in the under-11 zombie apocalypse. After Shelley attacks another student, classmate Dink (Miles Elliot) attempts to remove her from the room but becomes infected. After teacher Doug (Leigh Whannell) performs an autopsy on Dink, he concludes that only those who have yet to undergo puberty are affected by the mutant chicken-nugget virus. Not only is this a horror-comedy, but the infected monsters the teachers must fight off are the children they teach and protect every day. The flick doesn't give children any leeway because of their age, either. Pills, fire, blunt objects - no weapon is off limits in the fight against the undead kiddie crowd, making the film even more shocking for some viewers.

In the 2006 film Fido, America was at some point dosed with massive space radiation, creating an army of raised undead who fought humanity in the Zombie Wars. After humanity emerged victorious, zombies were dispatched permanently through decapitation, cremation, and even forced domesticity. ZomCon Corporation captures and collars zombies to stop their flesh cravings and transfer that murderous energy into menial home tasks. Helen Robinson (Carrie-Anne Moss) decides to purchase a ZomCon zombie (Billy Connolly), whom her son Timmy (K'Sun Ray) names Fido. Her husband, Bill (Dylan Baker), is less than pleased, as he had to dispatch his own father when he turned into a zombie. One day, the collar malfunctions, and Fido accidentally kills a neighbor. Timmy attempts to cover it up, but a small outbreak puts ZomCon on Fido's trail. Much like the real 1950s, the communities of white, affluent suburban bliss are fenced safely away from “wild zones,” where people who care too much about zombies are thrown and left to die. At one point, someone accuses a neighbor of fraternizing with a female zombie instead of a Communist. The fences are made taller after the accident, and the streets - deemed no longer safe - immediately fill with security patrols. The powers that be respond to the community's problem by locking everyone down just to find a single culprit, controlling all aspects of their lives under the guise of security.

In the 2008 film Pontypool, the film's namesake is a small town in Ontario where a shock-jock radio host, Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie), works the early morning radio shift, reading the local news and other mundane announcements. On his way to work one morning, Grant encounters a woman repeatedly muttering the word “blood” before wandering away. Once in the studio with his station manager, Sydney (Lisa Houle), and technical assistant, Laurel-Ann (Georgina Reilly), Grant takes a call from their “man in the sky” traffic reporter Ken Loney. Ken witnesses a violent behavioral outbreak in town that no one can explain. Pontypool takes the notion of words, their meanings, and how they can affect people to the extreme, with the residents of a small Canadian town turning into mindless, violent husks of themselves upon hearing certain trigger words in English. Laurel-Ann begins repeating the word “missing” and whistling like a tea kettle before the virus overtakes her. When she fails to infect Grant, Sydney, and a doctor who made it to the station, she suffers a hemorrhage and dies. When the aforementioned Dr. Mendez realizes he's becoming infected, he switches his language to Armenian and manages to successfully avoid infection. The film is a fascinating take on language and what effects it can have on people's minds, just like any virus.

Jane Austen's 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice follows the Bennett sisters as they navigate the social world of 19th-century England, all while protagonist Elizabeth leans about a person's true worth. In the (loose) 2016 adaptation Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Elizabeth (Lily James) and her sisters are all trained in martial arts and weaponry in order to defend themselves. While they still go out socially and deal with suitors such as Mr. Darcy (Sam Riley) and Mr. Bingley (Douglas Booth), the Bennett sisters also chop off arms and kill the undead. Another twist in this already genre-filled flick is that the zombies can be kept docile if fed pig brains and become bloodthirsty rage monsters when given human brains. This gives the story a fresh way to humanize the so-called monsters.

In the 2012 film Cockneys vs Zombies, Brothers Terry (Rasmus Hardiker) and Andy (Harry Treadaway) plan to rob a bank with a group of friends in order to prevent their grandfather's retirement home from being torn down. After walking into a larger sum of money than they planned, the group of heavily armed robbers prepares to leave the bank, only to see hordes of the undead awaiting them. The twist here is that these cockney robbers are armed to the teeth and not shy about splattering the brains of every zombie that crosses their path. Grandfather Ray (Alan Ford) rescues his fellow retirement home mates with a pure cockney attitude, living up to the promise in the film's title.

Anna and the Apocalypse, released in 2017, starts like most musical Christmas movies, with the titular Anna (Ella Hunt) leaving high school in Scotland for a gap year before she begins university. This film, however, also features infected zombies that pop up as the oblivious Anna and her friends walk to school, singing and decapitating a snowman zombie merrily unawares. Once Anna and her friends realize what's happening, they all start looking for loved ones and figuring out how to survive in their new world. Anna and the Apocalypse is every teenager coming-of-age musical, with love complications and drastic plans to leave town and see the world before committing to adult life. Even with zombies in the mix, the path is the same: father and daughter clash but ultimately realize they love one another so much, nothing can ever break their bond. Then the dad becomes a zombie.

In the 2014 film Life After Beth, the titular Beth (Aubrey Plaza) is enjoying a hike with her boyfriend, Zach (Dane DeHaan), when a venomous snake bite takes her out. Some time later, Beth appears back at the home of her parents, Maury (John C. Reilly) and Geenie (Molly Shannon), where they welcome her in with no questions and attempt to keep her in the dark about her condition. Part of this scheme involves Zach dating Beth again as she begins to deteriorate into a feral zombie with a thirst for blood. Just like the progression of grief following a loss, Life After Beth hits all the stages at its own pace. Maury and Geenie are in denial about their daughter's condition, and Beth's own fits of rage mirror those of someone suffering a loss. In the end, acceptance takes a more violent form for Beth than for most people, but the spirit is there.

The 2019 Belgian film Yummy follows Alison (Maaike Neuville) as she travels to a plastic surgery clinic in Eastern Europe with her husband, Michael (Bart Hollanders), and her mother (who is also getting procedures done) to have breast reduction surgery. While Alison is inside the operating room of the perv-filled hospital, Michael takes a tour and stumbles upon a woman strapped to a bed. Removing the woman's mask reveals she's become a zombie due to the catastrophic failure of an anti-aging treatment. Once well-intentioned Michael releases her, the outbreak is on. In another film on this list, a type of zombie is borne from an obsession with youth that makes them immortal. In this case, the procedure turned patient Zero directly into an undead flesh eater, who quickly spreads the disease to other people - many of whom are assumedly just as obsessed with their own appearance. Unfortunately, the disease also took half the face she so vainly hoped to turn the clock back on.

In the 2011 film Juan of the Dead, the titular Juan (Alexis Diaz de Villegas) is a criminal living day-to-day in Cuba with his equally scammy friend, Lazaro (Jorge Molina), when people begin violently attacking one another for no reason. Juan witnesses a neighbor's corpse become the walking undead and decides to start a business in which he and his friends exterminate zombies for pay. Unfortunately, just as many humans die as zombies, including members of Juan's own group. Eventually, Juan has to concoct a plan to escape the dense city of zombies. The plague in the film is said to be “capitalist dissidents” who want to overthrow Cuba's Communist government and install a democracy. The government ignores the zombies, unlike most movies, in which the armed forces usually show up with tanks once summoned to the scene.

In the 2012 film Gallowwalkers, Aman (Wesley Snipes) is a bounty-hunting gunslinger who not only kills his targets but also rips their brains and spines out of their bodies. In zombie tradition, this is the only way to kill the undead Kansa (Kevin Howarth) and his outlaw gang. Years prior, Kansa's criminals sexually assaulted Aman's partner. Aman took swift vengeance, exterminating the entire gang while they sat in jail. What sets this zombie Western even further apart from the pack is how Kansa and his outlaws returned. Aman died during his escape from the prison, prompting his mother, a nun, to break her covenant with God in order to grant her son new life. This also cursed Aman, causing everyone he kills to become undead. Kansa and his gang rose again, stealing skin from fresh victims as they mount an attack against their foe.

First of all, 2008's Otto; or, Up with Dead People is a Bruce LaBruce film, which means it's not for anyone under 18 - or anyone turned off by sexualized gore. Otto (Jey Crisfar) is a zombie who traveled to Berlin in order to explore the city. Once there, he auditions for a filmmaker named Medea Yarn (Katharina Klewinghaus), who films his life as a zombie while attempting to finish her adult film, Up with Dead People. Notably, the virus that turns people into zombies also turns them gay. This is the focus of Medea's film, bringing a not-so-subtle political parallel between society's treatment of gay men and zombies; however, the film eventually reveals Otto is not, in fact, a zombie, but a young gay man with schizophrenia. In the end, the audience isn't quite sure whether there really was a zombie plague, or even which characters were real or not.