All 5 Zombie Movies Of 2026, Ranked
Shawn S. Lealos is an entertainment writer who is a voting member of the Oklahoma Film Critics Circle. He has written for Screen Rant, CBR, ComicBook, The Direct, The Sportster, Chud, 411mania, Renegade Cinema, Yahoo Movies, and many more.
Shawn has a bachelor's degree in professional writing and a minor in film studies from the University of Oklahoma. He also has won numerous awards, including several Columbia Gold Circle Awards and an SPJ honor.
He also wrote Dollar Deal: The Story of the Stephen King Dollar Baby Filmmakers, the first official book about the Dollar Baby film program. Shawn is also currently writing his first fiction novel under a pen name, based in the fantasy genre.
To learn more, visit his website at shawnlealos.net.
With Resident Evil hitting theaters and breaking franchise records, it continues a strong year for zombie movies. While Resident Evil presents a very different kind of zombie, it is still the dead rising and attacking the living with the intention of turning others into the undead. This stands out because zombie movies in recent years have taken all sorts of different looks, with fast zombies, smart zombies, and zombie-adjacent creatures.
The year also isn't finished yet, as there is a Return of the Living Dead remake coming, returning the zombie comedy franchise decades after the original film premiered in 1985. In the first nine months of 2026, there were no fewer than five zombie movies released, not including smaller indie releases. These included two franchise releases and a movie by the director of one of the best Asian zombie movies of the last decade.
Of the zombie movies, there was a video game adaptation that was better than every previous film in the series. There was a great sequel to another zombie franchise that was a box office disappointment but deserved more love than it received. There was an alien-based zombie movie, a new film by the Train to Busan director, and a zombie movie that doubles as a meditation on loss and grief.
5 Cold Storage
Cold Storage is a very different zombie movie because it is actually an alien movie with an infection running rampant, but it still fits in similar ways as movies like Resident Evil. The movie has a cast that includes Joe Keery (Stranger Things) and Liam Neeson, with the former playing a nighttime security worker at a self-storage facility in Kansas. One night, he and a co-worker stumble upon a bizarre parasitic fungus in the US military base under the storage facility.
As with Resident Evil, this fungus mutates the people and animals it comes in contact with and turns them into monstrosities. The movie is clever, and David Koepp's script has touches of humor, but the problem here is the obvious comparison. Resident Evil showed how to do this masterfully, and it makes Cold Storage feel lesser in comparison. The movie has some fun moments, but it lacks the depth of the rest of 2026's zombie movies.
4 Colony
In 2016, Yeon Sang-ho directed the zombie movie Train to Busan and found critical acclaim for a movie that looks and feels like a zombie movie, but has a father-daughter relationship that makes it so much more interesting. The zombies are still relentless killing machines, but with the main theme being a man trying to protect his daughter, it feels more personal, and that helps it stand out. Colony is the director's new zombie movie, and it doesn't quite hit the same level.
The zombies in Colony are still terrifying, but this is a more straightforward zombie movie, and it lacks a lot of the human connection that made Train to Busan so enthralling. That doesn't make Colony a bad movie. It is still an action-packed apocalyptic zombie thriller, but losing the idea of the family sticking together hurts this and holds it down somewhat compared to the best 2026 zombie movies.
3 We Bury The Dead
One of the most underrated horror movies of 2026 is the zombie horror movie We Bury the Dead. This movie stars Daisy Ridley (Rey from the Star Wars sequel trilogy) as Ava, a woman who travels to Tasmania looking for her husband after the island was devastated by an American experimental weapon. What she finds are zombies, and as she tries to make her way around looking for her husband, she makes a terrible discovery.
What really makes this stand out, and helps it work better than some other zombie movies, is that this is not about fighting the zombies. Ava has no way to fight the undead, and she just wants to find her husband, so it is almost more of a drama than a horror thriller. The zombies here are unique in that some are not attacking, but just doing what they remember from when they were alive. This movie looks at the undead as shadows of people, which makes it scary in its own right.
2 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
When 28 Years Later hit theaters in 2025, it was a huge hit. With Danny Boyle and Alex Garland back as the director and screenwriter, they brought back what was so great about 28 Days Later, and it revived the franchise. One big problem with the sequel, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, was that it came out six months later. Movies need time, and this was way too soon for a second movie in the series, and it flopped horribly.
Directed by Nia DaCosta with a script by Garland, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple featured a fantastic performance by Ralph Fiennes and helped further the zombie mythology in this series, with an alpha showing intelligence. With the zombies getting smarter, it increases the danger level more than anything else that has happened in the franchise. However, the box office failure has put the franchise in doubt, which is disappointing because this was a great zombie movie.
1 Resident Evil
The best zombie movie of 2026 is also one of the best video game adaptations of all time. Zach Cregger directed the new Resident Evil and destroyed the opening weekend records from every other movie in the franchise. It also has the best Rotten Tomatoes score of any film in the franchise, and it is one of the best-rated horror movies of 2026, whether dealing with zombies or any other monster. What makes it work so well is the mix of comedy and horror.
This is not a comedy movie, but there are so many great one-liners and reactions from both the main character, Bryan (Austin Abrams), and the few characters he encounters. The horror is also great, with the creatures grotesque and monstrous. While these are not zombies like many movies present, they are bodies of dead people coming back to life thanks to a parasite and trying to kill or infect everyone around them. Resident Evil is the best zombie movie of 2026, and nothing else is close.
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