Genre Horror

Marvel Zombies (2025)

Item: Marvel Zombies
Rating: 2.5
Author: Ross McLaren

★★½ — Marvel Zombies (2025)

Before anything else, a bit of housekeeping: the film listed here is Marvel Zombies (2025), a two-minute fan production directed by Scotty Fields and James Ojala, with Fields also appearing in front of the camera alongside Chris Baer and Angela Duffy. It is, in the most literal sense of the phrase, a labour of love: a short, self-funded piece of fan filmmaking that takes the basic bones of the Marvel Zombies comic book universe and squeezes them into roughly the runtime of a TV advert. The source material, for anyone unfamiliar, is a run of Marvel Comics originating in the mid-2000s, written by Robert Kirkman (of The Walking Dead fame), in which a zombie virus tears through the superhero community with cheerfully gruesome results. It has attracted a devoted following ever since, and fan adaptations, cosplay productions, and short films have cropped up in its wake with some regularity. This 2025 effort sticks close to the comic's premise: Mary Jane comes face to face with a zombified Spider-Man, who then crosses paths with a similarly infected Hulk. Simple, punchy, and mercifully free of the kind of world-building padding that can sink short-form projects.

Fields and Ojala are working without the backing of any major studio, and at two minutes the film sits firmly in the territory of fan passion project rather than polished but unremarkable genre exercise. That context matters when you sit down to watch it, because the expectations you bring will shape the experience considerably. Fan films in the superhero and horror space can range from surprisingly inventive to charmingly rough around the edges, and the Marvel Zombies property has always lent itself to low-budget creativity given how much of its appeal is rooted in concept rather than spectacle. It is also worth noting that the zombie horror genre more broadly has proved fertile ground for short-form filmmaking, a point worth bearing in mind if you've read our look at Moshari, another horror production from this decade that plays in the space where dread and limited resources meet. On the adventure and horror crossover front, fans of superhero-adjacent action chaos might also find it useful to revisit the site's take on Hardcore Henry, another film that puts physical spectacle front and centre and lives or dies by the energy of its execution.

What Fields and Ojala set out to do, regardless of budget or runtime, is translate a recognisable corner of Marvel's darker mythology into something watchable and fan-satisfying. Whether they pull it off, and how this two-minute curiosity sits alongside the wider cultural moment for Marvel ZombiesMarvel Zombies currently carries some additional baggage, given the high-profile Disney+ animated series that arrived in the same general window. The comparison is probably unavoidable, and it colours how any version of this story lands right now. On that note, and with all of that context sitting in the background, here is what our man actually made of it.

Marvel Zombies (2024), the new Disney+ animated series, is a frustrating contradiction. It's a show that should work but never quite does. It’s based on one of Marvel’s most gloriously twisted alternate universes: a world where a zombie virus has consumed Earth’s mightiest heroes, creating super zombies I guess. The animation is slick, detailed, and surprisingly gory, definitely pushing the envelope for Disney+, with dismemberments, viscera, and decay. And yes, I love zombie media. The premise is ripe with potential: superhero power meets ravenous hunger, moral collapse, desperate last stands. But despite the mature tone and R-rated visuals, the execution feels… off. The voice acting is flat, almost childish, like it was recorded for a Saturday morning block rather than a dark, apocalyptic horror story. The dialogue lacks weight, the pacing drags, and the emotional stakes never land. You’re watching super-soldiers and sorcerers tear each other apart, but it all plays out with the energy of a mid-tier kids’ show. It’s not badly made, it just lacks soul. The gore is cool, the concept is strong, but the direction, tone, and performances drain it of tension and horror. It ends up feeling like a missed opportunity. Worth a watch for hardcore fans or zombie completists, but don’t expect the brutal, existential dread the source material deserves. A solid visual package wrapped around something strangely lifeless.

That tension between concept and execution is really the heart of it for me, and it applies whether you're watching a two-minute fan film or a full animated series. The Marvel Zombies premise is so inherently charged that it should almost be difficult to drain it of energy, and yet here we are. I keep coming back to the idea that horror, done properly, requires a certain commitment to tone that neither version of this story seems fully willing to make. I've had similar feelings watching other genre pieces that mistake visual business for genuine unease, including some of the horror titles I've covered here like Castle Freak and Tiger Stripes, films that at least understood what atmosphere they were reaching for, even if they didn't always get there. With Marvel Zombies, in either form, the reach and the grasp feel frustratingly far apart. Sometimes the undead just aren't scary enough to be worth the bite.

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

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Trailer

▶ Watch the official trailer for Marvel Zombies (2025) on YouTube

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