To prepare for the upcoming Halloween celebrations, EMToast has done extensive market research and delved deep into EMToast personal memory banks to bring you the top 10 Zombie sightings of all time.

1. Night of the Living Dead (1968 Film)

NOTLD

This movie is best watched on a worn out 1980’s VHS video tape purchased from a Jamesway bargain bin.  Make sure to get the one that includes the movie Reefer Madness.

This film is the origin of all modern zombie movies.  If you claim to be a zombie lover and you haven’t seen this film, don’t tell anyone you just lost all your zombie street cred.

This movie set the rules for all real zombie movies.  Zombies rise from the dead.  They eat flesh.  They move SLOW. If they bite you, you get infected, die and come back.  The only way to kill a zombie is to destroy the brain.

Gives a true sense of what it would be liked to be trapped in a Pennsylvania farmhouse with hoardes of zombies trying to get in to cannibalize you.  So well crafted, this horror masterpiece will still bring chills to even the most jaded horror fans.

2. Walking Dead (2003-Present Comic Book)

The Walking Dead

Billed as a Romero movie that never ends, this engrossing black and white comic has plenty of action, character development, horror, and most importantly zombies.  It’s the tale of one man and the small group of survivors who live and die along side him during his travels across the zombie wasteland.

Robert Kirkman, also writer of the Marvel Zombies series, does a much better job here than he was able to do in the limited issues he had with Marvel.  He delves deep into characters, dialogue, and plotlines to create a rich and rewarding zombie experience. The issues take forever to come out, but they’re worth the wait.  The series so far is available in trade paperback format.

3. Resident Evil (1996 Video Game)

Resident evil

Heavily influenced by Night of the Living Dead, this early Playstation title is the first “Survival Horror” game.

Capcom’s Resident Evil taught gamers everywhere to value the shotgun, ration their typewriter ribbons and avoid windows – zombie dogs can’t resist jumping through.  Unlike more recent sequels of the game, the first was heavy on the slow moving Romero style zombies. Game controls are said to be intentionally bad on this game to make it feel scarier.

4. Dawn of the Dead (1978 Film)

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The next best Romero zombie film after Night of the Living Dead takes place in a mall rather than a farmhouse. It’s basically NOTLD on a larger scale.  Not quite as scary as it’s predecessor due to the movie being shot in color, which reveals a bizarre blue zombie makeup effect. The silliness of the biker gang breaking into the mall and throwing pies in zombie faces doesn’t help either.

Still it’s a classic, must watch zombie flick. Romero introduces the concept of a thinking zombie here, but sticks basically to the zombie rules set in NOTLD. This means “no running in the halls zombies”.

Interesting fact: The theme music from Robot Chicken is taken from the closing credits of Dawn of the Dead.

5. Zombie Survival Guide (2003 Book)

Zombiesurvivalguide

Max Brooks, son of filmmaker Mel Brooks, began writing what was meant to be a parody survival guide.  What he actually created was your best hope for surviving a zombie outbreak.

The book is now the zombie bible for many filmmakers and writers. With the exception of Solanum the invented virus cause of zombie outbreaks, this tome follows all Romero’s rules, expands on them and gives many real world examples useful not only for the real world, but also for creating a fictional one.

6. Dead Alive (1992 Film)

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Peter Jackson, director of Lord of the Rings & King Kong made an extremely bloody zombie film early in his career.  It is reputed to be one of the goriest movies of all time. It’s more comedy than horror, but still this movie delivers the goods. With scenes like mowing through crowds of zombies with a raised lawn mower, it’s no surprise.

Dead Alive deviates slightly from the Romero established formula.  Major offenses are the fact that the zombie infection is started by the bite of a sumatran rat monkey and that the original mother zombie infectee grows to enormous size.

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Interesting fact:  The sumatran rat monkey from this movie was captured on the fictional Skull Island.  King Kong originates from the very same island. If you look closely, in the first scene of Jackson’s 2005 Kong film, you can see a cage with a sign that reads Sumatran Rat Monkey.

7. Dead Rising (2006 Video Game)

dead rising

Ten years after Resident Evil, Capcom recreates the atmosphere of another Romero film DOTD, this time for the Xbox 360. Greatly influenced by Dawn of the Dead, Dead Rising also takes place in a shopping mall. The game has more accessible controls than Resident Evil and allows you to take a more hands on approach.  You can destroy hoardes of zombies with items ranging from sledge hammer to shopping cart.  There are a few annoying flaws, like people calling you constantly and having to take photos all the time, but you can just ignore that and smash zombies like crazy. You’ll never see so many on screen at once and smashing them down with a sledge hammer or slicing them to pieces with a katana sword is the most satisfying zombie slaying experience to date.

8. Zombi 2 Movie aka Zombie (1979 Film)

zombie vs shark

Marketed as Zombi 2 to capitalize on the Zombi title that Dawn of the Dead was released under in Europe, this film started the zombie craze overseas. It sticks to the Romero formula and it a great addition to any zombie lover’s collection.

Zombie is most noteworthy for the excellent makeup special effects.  Fulci zombies are famous for their trademark rotted worm infested faces.  The one must see scene in this film is zombie vs shark in the ocean.  So realistic, the film was banned in 21 countries for cruelty to sharks.

9. 28 Days Later (2003 Film)

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Technically not a zombie movie. The creatures are not living dead, but living people who are infected with the rage virus.  Because of this, we don’t deduct points for it’s fast running zombies that deviate from the slow shuffle that is zombie law. This movie is directly responsible for a rash of recent fast running zombie movies including 2004’s Dawn of the Dead remake.

Great visuals and soundtrack make this one of the better zombie films.

10. Pool of Radiance: Dungeons & Dragons SSI Gold Box Series (1988 Video game)

Pools_of_Radiance_title_screen copy

This Commodore 64 classic is technically not a zombie game, it’s the first in a great, but very involved,  series of Dungeons and Dragons role playing games.  The early part of the game makes the list because of the awesome campaign to clean out Sokol Keep. This area is infested with hundreds of undead zombies that your party must clear out before the citizens can return.  If you are wise enough to have a cleric in your party, you can experience one of the most amazing zombie holocausts in gaming history.  Have your cleric do a “turn undead” command and watch hundreds of pixelated undead warriors turn to dust (represented by a red skull and crossbones.)

This game is also great because if you level your party up enough, you can put the battles on automatic and let the computer do the fighting for you.  Some battles can be pretty lengthy with your 8 characters having do duke it out with literally hundreds of creatures. Thankfully you can switch over from C64 to TV using the tv/video switch from your Atari 2600 and watch new epodes of Alf and Family ties while your party battles it out.

Honorable Mentions

They didn’t make the top 10 list, but don’t skip the following zombie classics.

Re-Animator (1985 Film)

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Herbert West is a mad scientist who starts his own zombie outbreak.

 

Army of Darkness (1993 Film)

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Chainsaw hands and zombies galore.  Bruce Campbell at his finest.

Tombs of the Blind Dead (1973 Film)

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Zombie knights with stick hands attack! So bad it’s good.

Day of the Dead (1985 Film)

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The last good Romero zombie movie.  Introduces the loveable zombie Bub.

Return of the Living Dead (1985 Film)

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Solid film.  Alternate reality continuation of NOTLD.

So there you have it, the top 10 EMToast Zombie sightings plus 5 honorable mentions.

What are your top zombie sightings?

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12 thoughts on “EMToast: Top 10 Zombie Sightings

  1. Extra bonus points for including Dead Alive. Extra platinum star for mentioning shark vs. zombie. People sleep on Return of the Living Dead, that movie is way better than shite like Citizen Kane. Rosebud was a zombie!!! Oh, and Walking Dead is the best comic on the market.

  2. Let us not forget Jorge Grau’s Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, the 1974 Spanish/Italian Zombie Gem. A movie replete with true zombie chow downs, and the most frightening 1/2 second scene of a gang of kids rollerskating in the dark, a tightie whitie undie wearing mummy zombie and some chick in plaid skirt getting her guts ripped out. Most importantly this movie teaches us
    – beware of scientist with giant machines in the english countryside
    -watch where you are pointing those ultrasonic waves, you’ll wake up the dead!
    – cops hate dirty hippies and say things like”You’re all the same the lot of you, with your long hair and faggot clothes. Drugs, sex, every sort of filth! ”
    -and people in zombie movies who say things like,
    ” The dead don’t walk around, except in very bad paperback novels!”, are going to die.

  3. Yeah I struggled with putting Let Sleeping Corpses Lie on the list or not. It should have gotten at least honorable mention. I’m convinced the makers of 28 Days Later were fans of that one. Many scenes in 28 days reminded me of it.

    Also I skipped another Romero zombie, the Steven King movie Creepshow which Romero Directed. It has a pretty cool zombie that comes back from the grave but it talks and keeps saying “where’s my cake” so it’s too annoying to make the list.

    Incidentally, that monkey in a crate still freaks me the fuck out though.

  4. I just lost my zombie street cred. I said the rollerskating kids were in ‘let sleeping corpses lie’, but they were in ‘Zeder’.

    yeah that creepshow zombie was good on looks but that’s it.

    Don’t even talk about that crated monkey, or howlings scratching on the 2nd story screen window.

    I wish the super creepy first zombie from RE was in the pic, he still creeps me out. Seeing that on playstation was one of the top 10 most terrifying things ever.
    That hallway under the stairs in the player’s choice version of Resident evil, is my own personal hell, I was trapped there for like 3 years(seriously) with one bullet left, and those bitches come at you so fast and so hard that they are already taking snack bites out of you before you can even react. I died thousands of times, and eventually I was just so afraid and defeated because I knew what was coming, that I just stayed in that damn storage closet, and had to ask the toastmaster to get me out of there. I mean yeah they made the zombies super fast so it’s so goddamn terrifying your heart explodes before you can even react and that it awesome, but it’s still the same shit ass controls so you are just double fucked. Nintendo, thanks for letting me know what it would feel like if i were a crippled mongoloid trying to fight off uber fast zombies, otherwise I would have gone through life without ever knowing what that’s like, I think that kind of opportunity is pretty rare in real life.

  5. Yeah man the #1 site for Zombie Sightings 1993. It scares me when people do such specific searches because it makes me think they heard some kind of rumor or something is going on I don’t know about.

  6. Some people insisted that I looked like Bruce Campbell, but that was nearly 20 years ago.
    Army of darkness was creepy, that dead bitch in the basement, I still remember that.
    I’m not a big fan of zombie movies though.
    Zombie monkeys in crates?

    1. It wasn’t a zombie monkey. Just a scary gorilla.

      Evil Dead 2 is the one with the dead girlfriend in the basement and the tree roots. Army of darkness came later on.

      You’re 20 years older, so maybe you still look like a b rate actor.

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