Exploitation films

Sugar Hill

Revenge via Haitian zombies. The best of the blaxploitation horror crossovers.

Messiah of Evil

Made by the couple who then wrote American Graffiti. A nightmare that never explains itself.

Night of the Seagulls

The Blind Dead ride out one last time. A quiet, sad closer to Spain's best monster series.

The Ghost Galleon

The Blind Dead put to sea on a model boat in a visible fish tank. The runt of the four.

The Living Dead Girl

Rollin's best late film. Melancholy where the Italians were loud.

Burial Ground

Incoherent even by the standards of the cycle. The Peter subplot is unforgivable.

Cannibal Apocalypse

Vietnam veterans as cannibals. Sillier and kinder than the jungle cycle.

Nightmare City

Zombies that run and use guns, decades early. Incompetent in enjoyable ways.

Return of the Evil Dead

Blind Dead again, this time besieging a whole village. The best of the four.

Zombie Holocaust

Cannibals and zombies at once, reusing the Zombi 2 sets and cast.

A Virgin Among the Living Dead

Franco at his dreamiest. Distributors added zombies later without telling him.

Shock Waves

Underwater Nazi zombies rise off a tropical island. Peter Cushing, John Carradine, and real dread.

Hell of the Living Dead

Bruno Mattei rips off Dawn of the Dead with a Goblin score he also stole. Gloriously shameless.

The Grapes of Death

Rollin does an outbreak. A pesticide turns wine-country villagers into oozing killers.

Tombs of the Blind Dead

Eyeless Templars on skeletal horses in slow motion. Best monster design of the 70s.

Cemetery Man

A cemetery caretaker shoots the returning dead and falls in love repeatedly. Beautiful and deranged.

Let Sleeping Corpses Lie

Spanish-Italian, shot in England, and much smarter than its stablemates.

The Crazies

A military bioweapon drives a town homicidally insane. Romero on institutional failure, again.

City of the Living Dead

The drill scene. Otherwise thin, but the atmosphere is thick.

I Walked with a Zombie

Val Lewton doing Jane Eyre in the Caribbean. Beautiful and barely horror.

The Beyond

Makes no sense whatsoever and is Fulci's best film. Dream logic, fully committed.

The Return of the Living Dead

Punk soundtrack, running zombies, and the film that invented 'BRAINS'.

White Zombie

Lugosi, Haitian folklore, and the first zombie film. No eating involved.

Zombi 2

A zombie fights a shark. Fulci's splinter shot is still the worst thing here.

Day of the Dead

The bleakest Romero. Bub is the only sympathetic character in it.

Dawn of the Dead

A shopping mall, four survivors, and Savini's finest hour.

Night of the Living Dead

Made for $114,000 in Pittsburgh. Invented the entire modern genre.