Zombieland
Rule #1: Cardio. Rule #2: Double tap. The 2009 road-trip comedy that made the zombie apocalypse fun — four survivors named for their hometowns, a nationwide Twinkie hunt, and one legendary celebrity cameo.
Zombieland was director Ruben Fleischer's feature debut, written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, and it turned the zombie movie into a buddy comedy. Jesse Eisenberg's anxious Columbus survives the apocalypse by obsessively following his numbered rules — 'Cardio,' 'Double tap,' 'Beware of bathrooms,' 'Seatbelts' — which pop up on screen as the movie proves each one. He falls in with Woody Harrelson's Twinkie-obsessed zombie-killer Tallahassee and grifter sisters Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin); everyone goes by their hometown instead of a name, the better to not get attached.
Columbia released it on October 2, 2009, and the $23.6 million production grossed $102.4 million worldwide. Within 17 days it had passed the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake to become the top-grossing zombie film to that point (Resident Evil: Afterlife and World War Z later passed it), with critics along for the ride — an 89% Rotten Tomatoes score and an A− CinemaScore for a horror comedy.
The stretch everybody quotes is the cameo. The group holes up in Bill Murray's Los Angeles mansion and finds Murray himself alive, wearing zombie makeup as a disguise so he can still move around outside. The prank goes perfectly until it doesn't: Columbus, startled mid-scare, accidentally shoots him.
A sequel, Zombieland: Double Tap, arrived a decade later on October 18, 2019, but the original stands as the era's comfort horror — the movie that closed out the 2000s by teaching a generation to limber up before running for its life.
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