As '80s mainstream horror culture moved on to slashers like Michael Myers and Freddy Kruger, zombie movies went underground. Gordon made Re-Animator, Sam Raimi made the Evil Dead movies, not traditional zombie fare, but in the same family, and then, in 1992, Peter Jackson made Braindead (Dead Alive in the States), and a cult classic was born. Long before he played with Hobbits, Jackson was playing with zombie monkeys and buckets of blood, showing a new generation that the slow, moaning zombies of the Romero films could be tweaked and played with for a new kind of horror. If zombies had become boring to an era used to being entertained by Chucky and Jason, Dead Alive proved that the right director could have fun with the concept once again.
And zombies remained resigned to the underground film world for the next decade or so. Michele Soavi made Cemetery Man, another cult classic, in 1994, but it wasn't until the current millennium that zombies witnessed their biggest resurgence ever. As is often the case, one media medium influenced another. Resident Evil the video game became Resident Evil the movie in 2002 and helped push the sub-genre into new heights of action and mayhem. In Resident Evil, zombies weren't just slowly crawling across a cemetery, they were moving through a new post-apocalyptic world, shuffling faster than ever and with deadlier results. And, in a common theme in zombie movies all the way back to Romero, man was once again to blame for their existence.