5 Best Zombie Movies Of The 21st Century, Ranked

The early 2000s zombie renaissance gifted us some of the best horror movies of the century, as well as several weirder cult favorites we keep revisiting to this day, and we're still as hungry for this genre as zombies are for brains. With the new "Resident Evil" movie from director Zach Cregger now in theaters, we're taking the time to look back across 26 years of blood, guts and gore to find out the best zombie movies of the 21st century so far.

To determine the consensus favorites, we went to Letterboxd's list of the highest rated horror movies, ranked by the average rating from the site's 30 million+ members. We removed any non-zombie movies and titles released before 2000, and once we had a concrete five, we threw consensus out the window to rank them from our least to most favorite. The ranking of these films on Letterboxd differs from ours, and we've made our case for each placement below.

If this leaves you eager for more zombie movies, check out our list of the 50 best of all time, as well as the best zombie films you might never have heard of. But first, let's sink our teeth into this century's finest.

Surprisingly, "28 Years Later: The Bone Temple" is the only movie in the Danny Boyle-Alex Garland zombie anthology franchise to crack this list. Personally speaking, we'd have opted for the bleak, lo-fi 2002 original or Boyle's 2025 legacy sequel — a strange, borderline folk horror pivot that stealthily hid a commentary on Brexit in plain sight — than director Nia DaCosta's direct follow-up, which sacrifices a lot of that rich cultural commentary for pure adrenaline-laced thrills.

If any allegories remain in Garland's script, they're likely lost in translation. It would be harder for an American director to unpack the full connotations of a villainous gang dressed as Jimmy Savile — a beloved TV presenter posthumously revealed to be one of Britain's most prolific sex offenders — than it would be for Boyle, which might be why "The Bone Temple" has translated better to audiences globally. "28 Years Later" grappled with Britain's increasing isolation on the world stage; "The Bone Temple" is just pure, waking dread, a post-apocalyptic tale shepherded by a "Clockwork Orange"-style gang of Droogs.

If we're being too hard on "The Bone Temple," it's because we found the prior films more thoughtful, but there's plenty here to justify the movie's inclusion. Take the ongoing story of Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), the eccentric doctor who this time begins an unlikely friendship with the Alpha Zombie Samson (Chi-Lewis Parry) he's researching. Kelson is the last semblance of unwavering kindness in a country gone to the dogs, and it's quietly one of Fiennes' best performances; a later scene with an Iron Maiden needle drop might be 2026's greatest.

One of the biggest Korean blockbusters of all time at the box office, and one of the highest-rated on Rotten Tomatoes, "Train to Busan" was an out-of-nowhere horror sensation back in 2016, and it hasn't lost its power to exhilarate despite spawning an underwhelming cinematic universe.

Set aboard a high-speed train going from capital city Seoul to the southeastern title city, a mismatched group of passengers representing all social classes in Korean society band together after a disheveled lady wanders onto the train seconds before the doors lock. She's in the final stages of zombification, and after biting an attendant, triggers an outbreak within the confines of the train. The riders do their best to barricade themselves in a safe carriage and get off at the next stop, where the army is waiting to rescue them — but the virus has spread beyond Seoul, and multiple stops are canceled along their route.

Director Yeon Sang-ho and screenwriter Park Joo-suk understand that the zombie movie has been rife with social allegory since the days of George A. Romero, but they don't lay their class commentary on too thick; if they did, it would have been written off as "Snowpiercer" with zombies. Themes of class struggle and wealth inequality can be found in several of the most well-regarded Korean films of the past 15 years — a seed planted with the influential, subversive 1960 movie "The Housemaid" — and "Train to Busan" doesn't stop to ponder those, instead letting its unequal dynamics play out through the propulsive action. It's pure popcorn fun, but there are plenty of brains beneath the bloodshed.

Classifying director Na Hong-jin's "The Wailing" as a zombie movie might be a stretch because it's frankly difficult to pin his epic police procedural down in any single horror subgenre. Set in a small Korean mountain village, the chaos begins quickly after a mysterious Japanese man arrives, with a mysterious virus breaking out shortly thereafter; soon, infected townsfolk are brutally murdering their families, and a police investigation discovers photos and belongings of the deceased at the eccentric stranger's home. Nobody is quite sure what the curse is, with the man accused of being a demon by some and the zombified townsfolk soon hit with biblical plagues and demonic possession.

"The Wailing" keeps you guessing for 156 minutes as the 2016 film swerves between eastern and western horror genres, playing with all their tropes in ways that shouldn't complement each other as well as they do, but creating a devilishly ingenious mash-up in the process. It's unlike anything else within the zombie genre, combining the familiar hallmarks we've come to expect with the religious paranoia of "The Exorcist" and a dark noir procedural like "Seven" — a tribute to Hollywood's darkest horror movies that no sane Hollywood exec would ever greenlight.

Director Na has more recently taken this approach to the sci-fi genre with his bamboozling "Hope," where he swapped Satanic threats in a small town for alien invaders, to more divisive results. We're happy that a director who approaches genres like a mad scientist, experimenting to see which unlikely styles can be mashed together, is allowed to make his bonkers movies on such an epic scale. It seems unlikely he'll top this mad opus though.

If you haven't seen any of the movies on this list before, our advice is always to go in blind — but in the case of "One Cut of the Dead," we must offer a second disclaimer that what you're seeing is nowhere near as amateur as it looks. This ultra-low-budget Japanese festival favorite (made for approximately $25,000) from director Shin'ichirō Ueda opens with a 37-minute single take which shows a horror film production crumble into chaos after the stressed-out director, annoyed with his actors, gets someone to draw a blood pentagram on the walls. Suddenly, several members of the crew turn into zombies, hell is unleashed within the abandoned factory they're shooting at, and the footage we see is the real-time, behind-the-scenes events.

On Rotten Tomatoes, it remains the only found footage movie with a perfect 100% fresh rating, which might be a surprise to learn at first — the amateur acting and awkward pauses as characters move to different locations within a single take is hard to overcome. If you haven't seen the movie, stop reading here and trust us. 

If you have experienced "One Cut of the Dead," then you'll know it quickly becomes a joyous, feel-good comedy about the challenges of moviemaking, with the second half detailing how the cast and crew came together to make an ambitious project for no money. You won't fear these zombies, but you may feel inspired to pick up a camera, round up a group of friends, and make something of your own. One of the few zombie movies that can reliably leave a smile on your face.

The zombie movie was slowly coming back into fashion in the early 21st century, with "28 Days Later" effectively reviving it for a disillusioned post-9/11 world, but it was Edgar Wright's breakthrough movie which reminded audiences why they loved the genre so much.

Labeled as a "rom-zom-com," "Shaun of the Dead" makes fun of the tropes in the same way "Scream" did for the slasher, but with far more affection than Wes Craven had for dismantling a genre he helped create; it still follows the genre rules it subverts. Pegg stars as the titular slacker, still commiserating with his best friend Ed (Nick Frost) after being dumped by his girlfriend (Kate Ashfield) as London is overwhelmed by a zombie outbreak. In typical British fashion, their half-baked plan for survival revolves around going to the pub.

As funny as this inaugural entry in Wright's "Cornetto Trilogy" of comedies with Pegg and Frost is, the reason "Shaun of the Dead" has endured as one of the defining cult movies of this century is because it fully commits to the brutality of the zombie genre by the third act. For all the standout comedy set pieces the movie is most fondly remembered for — fighting zombies to Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now," or throwing vinyl records at their heads — it takes some risky tonal shifts in its latter stages, presenting characters with grueling moral dilemmas ripped out of the darkest survival horrors.

Even within an often-nihilistic genre, "Shaun" goes to unexpectedly bleak places, and still comes out feeling like a crowd-pleaser, not to mention one of the century's defining comedies. It shouldn't work, but it does so perfectly.