10 Films Directors Wanted You To Hate

Jim Jarmusch’s 2019 zombie flick is an anti-zombie-flick flick, if you can wrap your head around that. The film, which takes place in a small town being overrun with zombies, stars Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Chloë Sevigny, Steve Buscemi, Tilda Swinton, and a host of other familiar faces. It veers away from the traditional zombie film by including zany elements such as characters who not only know they are in a movie, but can actually hear the film’s theme song whenever it comes on. It’s really out-there, and for intended purpose.

Writer-director Jim Jarmusch, who has been making films synonymous with “avant garde indie” going back to the 1980s, actually hates zombie movies. Well, most. He loves the George Romero zombie movies and the ones that predate them, but he hates the current zombie craze. So he made a movie about his hatred of the zombie craze.

The intent of star-studded The Dead Don’t Die was to draw fans of zombies into the theater, only to completely disappoint them. While promoting the film, Jarmusch told Rolling Stone:

I’m just sick of zombies, man. Like, the real zombies that are just walking around us, not paying attention to anything, letting the end of the world happen . . . And look how unconscious so much of the world is right now, for the most part, of its impending end. It’s sad and it’s maddening. And I’m really !*$% sick of it.

The Dead Don’t Die is reflection of the political and cultural state of the world right now: if nobody plays by the rules anymore, why should Jarmusch’s zombie movie have to be just like all the other zombie movies?