Zombie

Zombie films are horror films about the walking dead, in three distinct waves that have very little to do with each other: the Haitian zombie of the 1930s and 40s, George A. Romero's flesh-eating dead from 1968, and the Italian cycle of roughly 1979 to 1985.

Wave one: the Haitian zombie

White Zombie (1932) with Bela Lugosi, then I Walked with a Zombie (1943). These draw on Haitian Vodou, where a zonbi is a person robbed of will and put to work. The horror is slavery and loss of self. Nobody eats anybody.

Wave two: Romero

Night of the Living Dead (1968) threw out the folklore and kept only the walking corpse. Romero's dead are anonymous, they arrive in numbers, and they eat people. He never called them zombies in that film. The rules everyone now takes for granted, headshots, bites that infect, siege in a confined space, all come from here, along with a Black lead in 1968 whose ending still lands like a slap.

Dawn of the Dead (1978) added the shopping mall and the satire.

Wave three: the Italian cycle

This is the wave that matters for this site. Dawn of the Dead was released in Italy as Zombi, cut and scored by Goblin under Dario Argento's supervision, and it was a hit. Lucio Fulci made Zombi 2 (1979) as an unauthorised sequel to a film that was itself a sequel to nothing.

What followed, roughly 1979 to 1985, was a flood: City of the Living Dead, The Beyond, Burial Ground, Zombie Holocaust, Nightmare City. The house style is heavy on gore effects, light on plot, and frequently dreamlike by accident or by budget. Fulci's best work in this cycle is barely coherent and works anyway.

Spain ran a parallel line with Amando de Ossorio's Blind Dead films, whose eyeless Templar corpses on horseback are the single best monster design of the decade.

Where the tag overlaps

Most of the Italian cycle also carries video nasty, because most of it was on the DPP list. That tag is about British distribution, not content. Both can be true of the same film.

Where to start

Night of the Living Dead for the invention, Zombi 2 for the Italian version of it, The Beyond for what happens when Fulci stops pretending to care about plot.