Genre Horror

Marvel Zombies (2025)

Item: Marvel Zombies
Rating: 2.5
Author: Ross McLaren

★★½ — Marvel Zombies (2025)

There's a version of Marvel Zombies that genuinely frightens me. A version where the sight of a zombie Thor or a rotting Captain America carries real dread, where the horror of watching Earth's greatest defenders reduced to ravenous, mindless hunger actually lands with some weight. That version, I'm sorry to say, is not this one.

Let me be clear about what Marvel Zombies is working with, because the bones here are genuinely strong. The source material is one of Marvel's most gloriously unhinged alternate universe concepts: a zombie plague tears through the superhero community, and suddenly the most powerful beings on the planet are also the most dangerous predators. Superhuman strength, flight, sorcery, all of it in service of pure, insatiable hunger. That's a great premise. It's dark, it's twisted, and it has real thematic meat to it if you want to dig in. The collapse of heroism, the horror of watching protectors become threats. Good stuff, on paper.

And visually, fair play, the show goes for it. The animation is slick and surprisingly detailed, and Disney+ has clearly let the production push the envelope further than you'd expect from that platform. There are dismemberments, there's viscera, there's decay rendered with a level of grim specificity that genuinely raised my eyebrows. As a zombie fan, I was initially encouraged. If you love the genre like I do, you know that the visual language of rot and ruin matters. It sets a tone.

The trouble is that everything surrounding those visuals fails to match them. The voice acting is the biggest culprit. It's flat in a way that's difficult to explain without experiencing it yourself, almost like the performances were dialled in for a Saturday morning cartoon rather than a dark, apocalyptic horror story. There's a disconnect between what you're watching on screen and what you're hearing, and it becomes impossible to ignore after a while. Super-soldiers and sorcerers are tearing each other apart in grim detail, but the delivery of every line carries the energy of a mid-tier kids' show. It's jarring every single time.

The dialogue doesn't help. It lacks weight, lacks grit, lacks the sense that these are people (or what's left of people) under genuine, unbearable pressure. And the pacing is a real problem too. For a show built around the urgency of survival in a world gone completely to hell, Marvel Zombies drags in places where it should be relentless. The emotional stakes, the moments where you're supposed to genuinely care about who lives and who doesn't, they never quite land. I kept waiting to feel something beyond mild interest, and it rarely arrived.

I've seen animated horror done properly. Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) and Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025) both showed me how animation can carry genuine menace and dread when the direction and tone are fully committed. Marvel Zombies is the counterexample: a show that has the look and the gore but not the atmosphere. It's not badly made, exactly. The craft is visible. But craft without soul is just craft, and a zombie story that fails to generate real tension is, fittingly, a bit lifeless.

That's the frustrating contradiction sitting at the heart of the whole thing. Every piece seems like it should work. The concept, the visual ambition, the willingness to get properly gory. But the direction, the performances and the writing all pull in a softer, safer direction, draining the horror out of what should be a genuinely unsettling watch. It ends up feeling like a missed opportunity, which is almost worse than being outright bad. Bad you can dismiss. This you keep wishing were better.

Two and a half stars. Worth a look if you're a hardcore Marvel fan or a zombie completist who needs to see every corner of the genre covered. But don't go in expecting the brutal, existential dread the source material deserves. This is a strong visual package wrapped around something strangely, ironically hollow.

Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2025 | Watched: 2025-10-03

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