No, you won’t really crave brains after watching these zombie films, sorry for the clickbaity title. I didn’t really know how else to phrase it though. But yes, zombie films were aplenty this 2016, so much so that you can’t claim to be a true film lover without knowing all the tropes of zombie movies. We had nonsense like “Cell” and “The ReZort” but there were plenty of gems among those zombie films.
I know I squirm whenever the heroes come oh-so-close to a corpse to investigate if it’s a zombie or not. I mean, come on guys! It’s a zombie! Don’t you know better?
Anyway, here were the best zombie films. And as a point of Asian pride, two of them were from Asia.
“I Am a Hero” made its way on this list by dint of its sheer violence. In true cheesy Japanese horror movie fashion, you see the zombies transform into grotesque mockeries of humans, and they also get similarly eviscerated in gory fashions. The finale was an awesome shootout that showed the main character finally achieving his desire to be a hero.
But it was one messy, bloody show. You wouldn’t have finished your popcorn if you brought it in.
3. The Girl with All the Gifts
Branded as a thinking man’s zombie film, as if that wasn’t an overused marketing sentence for zombie films, “The Girl with All the Gifts” gave great power to a incredible innocent. It had a horrific twist at the end, but what made it all the more terrifying, in a moral sense, was that Melanie was a curious, compassionate, and ultimately good girl.
That she was a zombie, and that she was the only one capable of being a bridge between two races, made the ending bittersweet but really, really creepy.
2. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
Come on, the premise was already pretty awesome and as a comedy, this almost made it into my other 4 best comedies list. It’s like a geekified version of “Pride and Prejudice” – the heroines sacrificed manners and upbringing to learn swordplay so they could swing katanas to behead zombies everywhere. The men had guns and all sorts of firepower, and in between all this fighting, they were navigating the marriage market.
They spent half the time treating the zombies as flies and swatting them away as such, and yes, they were so highly skilled that getting married to the right person was more important than stopping a zombie plague. For that reason alone, you should watch “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”.
“Train to Busan” was the best zombie film of 2016, hands down. It wasn’t just because they depicted zombies as super fast creatures that came in gargantuan hordes (to the point that they broke glass walls with the sheer weight of their bodies) or that it took place in a claustrophobic train. It’s because it was about a father trying to gain redemption in the eyes of his daughter… while zombies were munching on humans all around them.
It took a zombie apocalypse for the daughter to see how much her father loved her, but the emotional impact was worth it.
What zombie films did you like in 2016? Leave a comment with your thoughts!
Marcus Goh is a Singapore television scriptwriter. He’s also a Transformers enthusiast and avid pop culture scholar. He Tweets/Instagrams at Optimarcus and writes at marcusgohmarcusgoh.com. The views expressed are his own.
If you liked the article, follow me on Facebook and Twitter for more (presumably) good updates!
To get in touch with me, send an email!
Leave a Reply