10 Horror Movie Franchises That Forgot How To Be Scary

While the concept of the walking dead had been around for generations, particularly in regions of Haiti, onscreen they were typically individual creatures, not massive hordes.

And the hordes attacking the small farmhouse in Night of the Living Dead were unquestionably representative of the political and social fears of the 60s. America had undergone four major assassinations, racial riots and was deeply embroiled in a war many considered unjust. However, the hordes were bad, but that's nothing compared to the humans, ready to turn on one another on a dime.

Ten years later, George A. Romero re-visited his zombie wasteland with another object of ridicule, to greater success with Dawn of the Dead.

He would keep up the tradition, exploring a different angle of societal collapse, but the returns started to diminish toward the end. Romero often suffered budget and releasing issues, but the auteur always saw through his vision. However, his vision turned more political than fear-inducing. It was as though he didn't want to scare anymore, and preferred instead to just be cantankerous about the state of the world.

Though the weakest entry, by far, is his found-footage Diary of the Dead (which doesn't seem to understand how found-footage films work), his politics had already replaced the scares in Land, an almost translucent indictment of the Bush administration.