Fuck! Zombies!

If thou openest not the gate to let me enter, I will break the door, I will wrench the lock, I will smash the door-posts, I will force the doors. I will bring up the dead to eat the living. And the dead will outnumber the living.

— Ishtar, The Epic Of Gilgamesh

With the conclusion of the Cold War, the specter of nuclear Armageddon mostly had passed by the end of the 1990s. But 9/11 jumpstarted a whole new set of societal jitters, and in the years after, the entertainment industry looked to a once-moribund subgenre of apocalyptic fiction to sell stories about the end of the world: zombies. While the popular conception of zombies as a horde of flesh-hungry walking corpses goes back to at least Night of the Living Dead, with its grim social commentary at the height of the Vietnam War, the mid to late-2000s saw a widespread resurgence of zombie horror in film, video games, comic books, even television. I've always been a big fan of zombie stuff, and so while most zombie fiction is explicitly apocalyptic in nature, I've given it its own category to accommodate for the outsize presence it has in apocalyptic fiction. There might be vampires and mutants in here too, I don't know, there's more overlap than you'd think.

[Note: this list is pretty sparse right now, but expect it to grow fast all of a sudden, just like a real zombie apocalypse.]

Dawn of the Dead
Dawn of the Dead 2004
Day of the Dead
Land of the Dead
28 Days Later
28 Weeks Later
28 Years Later
The Last of Us