Spawn of the dead: a history of strange zombie movie mashups
The Christmas-set zombie musical Anna and the Apocalypse is just the latest in a long line of unusual attempts to add some bite to the undead subgenre
Much like the reanimated corpses at their center, zombie films refuse to die. With this week’s US release of Anna and the Apocalypse – a Christmas-themed zombie musical – coming out only a few weeks after Overlord – a second world war action-horror hybrid – it’s clear that film-makers are still finding new ways to fashion stories around the walking dead.
Even before George A Romero’s groundbreaking Night of the Living Dead, the modern zombie mythos was proving itself extremely malleable, and film-makers have continually found creative, surprising and often ridiculous new ways to fit these creatures into stories across a variety of genres. Here’s an overview of some of the more memorable examples of genre-bending zombie mashups.
