12 Hidden Gem Zombie Movies You've Probably Never Seen

In the last couple of decades zombie movies have exploded in popularity like, well, the spread of a plague of the risen dead.

In the past a new living dead classic from George Romero every decade may have kept the genre alive and inspired ample cheap knock-offs, but the twenty-first century has seen the zombie go mainstream in a big way.

We now have a major zombie TV series running to 11 seasons and counting, along with multiple spinoffs. A-list megastars like Brad Pitt make zombie blockbusters with budgets and box office takings in the hundreds of millions. Comedies like Zombieland send up genre tropes to huge crowds of zombie lovers and haters alike. Even foreign language zombie fare like Spain's [REC] and South Korea's Train To Busan have found large global audiences and kickstarted on-running franchises and English-language remakes.

But away from your Dawns and Shauns Of The Dead there's a whole slathering horde of smaller, weirder, more out there undead terrors that you might not have discovered. The musical ones, the animated ones, the kind of true story ones, the starkly realistic ones and the wildly satirical ones, they're all out there waiting for you to stumble upon them.

So, while a real-life deadly virus spreads across the globe, how about self-isolating, stocking up on your favourite snacks, barricading your doors and putting on one of these twelve underrated zombie gems?

Back in 2013 Australian duo Ben Howling and Yolanda Ramke's short about a man trying to protect his infant daughter, while infected with a virus that would turn him into a zombie in 48 hours, went appropriately viral on YouTube.

Five years later its feature-length expansion was picked up by Netflix. But the streaming giant haven't really pushed this emotionally resonant zombie story, meaning that many are unaware it even exists.

Martin Freeman brings his embattled everyman quality to the father journeying into the Australian outback to find somewhere for his child to be safe before his time inevitably runs out. Meanwhile, the short's story expands to add newcomer Simone Landers as an aboriginal girl in the opposite situation of trying to protect her infected father.

The post-apocalyptic outback setting provides new and different ground for a zombie story, recalling the stark survival stories of Aussie directors like John Hillcoat and George Miller. This sense of a zombie story that could only have come from this particular country is also present in the themes of the zombie virus as a sort of cosmic payback for the colonial atrocities committed toward Australia's original inhabitants and landscape.

Cargo pushes back against the wider tendency toward modern zombie movies as comedic fun or splatterfests to create a story with real pathos where the horror elements are tied to genuine human fears of loss, both of loved ones and of oneself.