Thursday Movie Picks Meme: Zombie Movies

Wanderer's Thursday Movie Picks Meme is taking a dark turn into the realm of horror for the month of October. Each week has a different horror-related topic for use to explore. This week, we're going to be looking at movies about malevolent reanimated corpses, which is conveniently something I wrote a whole piece on a few weeks ago. Now there's several I need to see and a few I have watched. I'll start by putting down three that I have watched and add two more as a bonus.

Young Frankenstein (1974)

Here's an interesting irony for you. By this point there must have been at least a couple thousand Frankenstein movies created by Hollywood, and so far this is the only one I've actually seen in full even though I've actually read the original book (well, okay... it was an abridged version, but still...). We all know the story, a mad scientist creates a monster that wreaks havoc on the world as the result of the fear and paranoia of everyone it encounters...

Except that's all in the past now. Victor Frankenstein is long gone and quite a bit of time has passed. Enter Dr. Frederick Frankenstein Fronkinsteen, who inherits his grandfather's old castle (yes, he has one of those now) and finds the secrets to his experiments. Naturally he decides to reanimate a corpse of his own but his assistant Igor accidentally drops the brain they were to use and instead decides to use one belonging to a "Abby Normal" (Abnormal). The newly-reanimated corpse goes out into the world and freaks everyone out despite having no real hostile intentions, which leads to a variety of hilarious situations.

Shaun of the Dead (2004)

Edgar Wright's spoof of zombie films might not have as many explosions as the later films in the Cornetto Trilogy (Hot Fuzz and The World's End), but it has a lot of great little gags. It makes fun of all the zombie movie conventions you can name, right down to poking fun at the absurdity of how zombie movies try to avoid actually calling their antagonists "zombies". Of course, it's not all fun and games, and the dramatic moments are quite emotional, but it's hard not to laugh at seeing several people trying to take out an old man zombie while another guy accidentally starts playing Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now".

Dawn of the Dead (2004)

I still have yet to see the original George A. Romero film, but the remake was still pretty good. Sarah Polley led a large but nicely diverse cast with lots of tension and suspense throughout. It's a very good movie with some good scares and atmosphere. Really, though, it's a story about survival and the inevitability of death (which is itself a theme in a lot of zombie movies). Definitely worth checking out.

Bonus- The Night of the Living Dead (1968)

The ORIGINAL zombie movie. Okay, maybe not technically the first one but it was the film that got the whole zombie craze moving. The plot was more or less what the title described: it took place over the course of a night, and there were living human cadavers. I've had this one on DVD for some time and I have been meaning to see it in full. I've been told it is a very disturbing movie and it should be interesting to see just how this whole zombie craze got started.

Bonus- ReAnimator (1985)

I'm afraid I'm going to have to make a confession in saying that I have not actually seen this movie, though being a Lovecraft fan I have a strange feeling I really should. I'd like to do it this year if possible but given how hectic my schedule is it might have to wait until next Halloween (might be a good blindspot for that month). The story is quite simply a retelling of Frankenstein, in which a mad scientist named Herbert West who develops a reanimation fluid that he tests on as many cadavers as he can find, with horrifying results. To help get into the spirit of things, here is a song about it: