The Most Terrifying Scenes Featuring The Undead
			Day Of The Dead Who said Romero's zombies weren't scary? Oh yeah, it was us. About four films ago. Anyway, forget all that. When he wanted to, the Zombie Master could bring the boo, and nowhere is that better illustrated than in the opening sequence of his darkest, most disturbing zombie flick to date. Opening with heroine Lori Cardille sitting on the floor of a white room, she's drawn towards a calendar at the other end. As John Harrison's unsettling synthesised arpeggios build, she approaches it cautiously, and reaches out to touch it, only for – in a beautifully-timed 'Gotcha!' moment – a sea of zombie hands to plunge through the wall and grab her. It's Romero's greatest shock moment (cribbed in part from Roman Polanski's Repulsion) and, even though it turns out to be only a dream, it's deeply disturbing.
			The Evil Dead Sam Raimi's debut horror is perhaps more notable for its deployment of icky icky goo, and that tree rape sequence than it is for generating truly unnerving scares. But, despite the low-rent effects and amateurish acting, it's often genuinely unsettling, thanks to excellent sound design (a low, menacing wind blows throughout) and Raimi's natural instinct for camera angles that throw you off-kilter. Nowhere is that better displayed than near the end, when Bruce Campbell's hapless Ash, by now the sole survivor, is remorselessly battered, psychologically, by the Kandarian forces that have conspired to kill and possess his friends. Our favourite moment: the 'whump-whump-whump' noise made as Raimi's roving camera – meant to indicate the POV of the omnipresent evil – passes over beams in the roof while watching a paranoid Campbell slowly lose his marbles. Genius.
			28 Days Later Danny Boyle's Romero tribute is often eerie – see Cillian Murphy's lonely trek through a completely deserted London. But it's also truly scary for the sheer ferocity of its visceral onslaught, most notably in this early sequence where Murphy, Naomie Harris and Noah Huntley's Mark have holed up in Murphy's former home. But an errant candle gives away their position and two of the Infected (zombies by any other name) crash through the door in a frenetic, messy, jolting attack that leaves you gasping for breath. It also deserves a mention for its uncompromising nature – when Harris realises that Mark is infected and may have only seconds left as a rational human being, she machetes him to bits without any warning and no room for sentiment. This, Boyle is saying, is going to get pretty ugly.
			Salem's Lot Vampires, generally speaking, aren't scary. They're either camp or overly romanticised – but not in Tobe Hooper's made-for-TV adaptation of Stephen King's retooling of Dracula, where they're unrepentant, evil, bastards, a walking plague that must be contained. There are two great scares here – the first appearance of head vampire Barlow in a dark prison cell is a belter of a jump scare, but since his appearance owes so much to Nosferatu, we've gone for the second, where teenaged hero Mark Petrie (Lance Kerwin) wakes up to find his dead friend Danny Glick – now a vampire – floating outside his window, scratching on the glass, eyes filled with bloodlust. And all he wants to do is come in... Terrifying, and a great advert for shutters.
			Zack Snyder's Dawn Of The Dead For all the existential terror instilled by George A. Romero's zombies (“Is that all there is?” “Are they us?” etc. etc.), it took tyro Canadian director Zack Snyder to really give the groaning undead a kick up the decaying backside and make them truly terrifying. Why? Because they ran. And they were nasty. No longer could you simply and serenely evade zombies while on a pleasant stroll through the park – now the bastards came at you with the force of a ten-ton truck. It's the opening sequence of Snyder's 2004 debut, though, that really unsettles – beginning with a creepy and bloody attack by a little girl on the unsuspecting husband of Sarah Polley's heroine, Anna, and ending with society falling apart. All in less than nine minutes. Whether it's Polley looking in shock as a poor girl gets ripped apart on a bus by savage ghouls, or the pyres of smoke and flame that belch into the air as petrol stations and power plants explode, or Snyder's disorienting placement of a camera behind the bumper of Polley's car, making it float through the carnage, this is truly destabilising and discombobulating stuff.
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