Our obsession with the living dead has been going on for decades. Dig into these great moments from zombie movie history

By Don Kaye
Special to MSN Movies

Zombies! From their beginnings as part of the mystery and folklore surrounding voodoo rituals to their modern reinvention as reanimated corpses that mindlessly eat the flesh of the living, the walking dead have fascinated us for more than a century. As Jamie Russell writes in his excellent study of zombie cinema, "Book of the Dead," the zombie represents, perhaps more vividly than any other horror creation, the fear of death, and more specifically what happens to our bodies and souls after we die. If we become a zombie, we lose the latter, while the former becomes a shambling, decaying, fetid corruption of the human form, driven by unspeakable primal instincts.

Zombies have found their way onto the screen since the Depression, although early classics such as "White Zombie" (1932) and the supremely eerie "I Walked With a Zombie" (1943) played on racial prejudices and the white world's ignorance about Afro-Caribbean culture. It wasn't until George A. Romero's revolutionary "Night of the Living Dead" in 1968 that the zombie's voodoo roots were cast aside in favor of the living dead as metaphor; starting with that landmark film, the zombie came to symbolize everything from social unrest to scientific failure to greedy consumer culture.

The genre has had its ups and downs in the 41 years since "Night" came on the scene, but now zombies are more popular than ever. Romero is on his sixth "Dead" movie, the "Resident Evil" series is chugging along, and indie titles pop up all the time. Meanwhile, Max Brooks' harrowing novel "World War Z" and the satirical "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" were both best sellers. The new movie "Zombieland" takes the mythology into the realm of all-out comedy, although, hopefully, with the genre's trademark gore and ghoulish action intact. Starting with Romero's benchmark, here are some of the greatest moments in modern zombie history for you to feast upon.

('Dawn of the Day'/Universal Pictures)