These Are The Only Near-Perfect Zombie Movies, According To Metacritic

There are few things like a good zombie movie. Whether you're watching a serious drama like "28 Days Later" or a lighthearted parody like "Shaun of the Dead," there's something enthralling about the zombie-apocalypse scenario. From the genre's origins in early 20th-century cinema to its modern incarnations in movies, TV, and video games, zombies continue to captivate.

Perhaps this has to do with the genre's potential for social commentary. Throughout American history, zombie stories have always been used to express people's fears about the social or political "other." Different interpretations of this theme expressed the fear of different issues (via Vox). Prominent issues tackled through these depictions include nuclear extermination, mass contagion, and race relations.

But just because a film is a zombie movie doesn't mean that it's making a statement about the real world. Only a handful of zombie films in history have achieved this feat while also telling an amazing story. In fact, the popular movie review site, Metacritic, only ranks one zombie film high enough that it ranked among its top 15 horror movies.

As the highest-rated zombie movie on Metacritic's list of horror films, with an average score of 89, George Romero's original "Night of the Living Dead" stands as the closest thing a zombie movie has ever come to perfection.

Fans of the zombie-apocalypse genre should not be surprised by this. The 1968 film is often looked at as the first film to bring zombies into the cultural mainstream, establishing many of the tropes we see in zombie films to this day. It was the first film to depict zombies in hordes capable of toppling modern civilization, and it also made poignant observations about racial and militaristic violence during the late '60s.

With all that in mind, 89 sounds like a low score for a "near-perfect" zombie film that focuses on the world's most dire political issues. However, it's important to point out that this is only an average of the film's professional critic scores. A closer look at all 17 reviews listed by Metacritic reveals that all but two of the film's scores are above 80. The film's lowest score, 50, proves itself to be an extreme outlier among reviews, which are otherwise overwhelmingly positive toward the classic cult film.

Aside from "Night of the Living Dead," 2019's "One Cut of the Dead" was another zombie film that scored very well on Metacritic, receiving an 86.