Night of the Living Dead to 28 Days Later to Train to Busan. The horror sub-genre whose specific physical menace has carried serious dramatic substance across six decades.
The zombie film has, since George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968), been one of horror's most-productive sub-genres. Romero's foundational films established the form's conventions: the slow-moving undead, the bite-as-infection vector, the head-destruction kill mechanism, the small-group survival framework. Almost every subsequent zombie production operates within or against these conventions.
The Walking Dead (AMC, 2010-2022) extended the zombie genre into long-form television; the series ran for eleven seasons and became one of the most-watched basic-cable dramas of the 2010s. The series and its multiple spin-offs are, in some sense, the zombie sub-genre's largest contemporary commercial footprint. The series's specific structural choice — to use the zombie premise as the framework for long-form character drama rather than as the central horror engine — has shaped subsequent zombie productions.
Zombie films have, since Romero, carried explicit political content. Night of the Living Dead's casting of Black actor Duane Jones as the sole survivor was, in 1968, structurally radical; the film's closing shot of Jones being shot to death by a white-led posse was openly an allegory of contemporary American racial violence. Dawn of the Dead's shopping-mall setting was an explicit consumer-culture critique. 28 Days Later's biological-warfare framing engaged the post-9/11 anxiety about state-sponsored attacks. Train to Busan's class-and-corporate-greed subtext is the film's structural argument.
The political content is, in some sense, the form's specific gift. The zombie premise allows directors to engage social-political material at the level of physical menace that conventional drama does not produce. The dead-as-other framing has carried, across six decades, almost every contemporary anxiety the form has been deployed to engage.