Queens of the Dead (2025)
Queens of the Dead arrives in 2025 with a premise that feels, on paper, like it was built in a laboratory to generate goodwill: a zombie outbreak tears through a Brooklyn warehouse party, and a motley crew of drag queens, club kids and frenemies have to pool their very particular talents to survive the night. It is the kind of high-concept, community-rooted setup that recalls the best tradition of genre films made with something to say, and it lands at a cultural moment when queer genre cinema has been having something of a genuine resurgence. Films like I Saw the TV Glow and Pride have demonstrated, in very different registers, that stories centred on marginalised communities can carry real emotional weight without sacrificing genre pleasures. The bar, in other words, is there to be cleared.
The film is directed by Tina Romero, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Erin Judge. Romero is making her feature debut here, and the project carries a weight of expectation that goes beyond the usual pressures of a first film, for reasons that the author addresses directly below. The production is a transatlantic co-venture, backed by Vanishing Angle, Creativity Capital, Flexibon Films and Helmstreet Productions, that blend of American independent muscle and British financing being reasonably common in mid-budget genre work of this kind. At 101 minutes, the film sits at a sensible length for the zom-com format, a genre that tends to sag badly when it outstays its welcome. The script pairs horror and comedy, which is always a tricky piece of structural engineering: the two modes can feed one another brilliantly, as the British tradition from which zombie comedy partly descends has often shown, or they can simply get in each other's way.
The cast is led by Katy O'Brian, whose physical presence and screen authority have made her a rising name in American genre and action cinema over the past few years. She is joined by Jaquel Spivey, Nina West, Tómas Matos and Quincy Dunn-Baker, a group that spans theatre, television and the world of drag performance, which gives the ensemble a pleasingly eclectic texture on paper. There are also some notable names on the periphery of the production, in front of and behind the camera, with connections to the wider zombie film world that genre fans will clock immediately.
Visually, the film was shot by cinematographer Shannon Madden, and the warehouse party setting gives her a ready-made palette to work with: strobing neons, deep shadows, the particular grime and glamour of a good Brooklyn night out. It is the sort of environment that can look genuinely atmospheric when the lighting is handled with care and with intent. The score is a collaboration between Martin Macphail and Dean Rode, a pairing that suggests a layered approach to sound, perhaps blending electronic textures suited to the club setting with something more traditionally unsettling underneath. Editor Aden Hakimi has the job of keeping the horror and comedy sequences in productive conversation with one another, which in a film of this type is very nearly as much a tonal responsibility as a technical one. Whether all of that craft coheres into something satisfying is, of course, the question.
I could not have gone into Queens of the Dead wanting to like it more.
George A. Romero is one of my most-watched directors, full stop, and his Day of the Dead remains the only horror film I have ever handed a full five stars. So when I learned that his daughter, Tina Romero, had made a zombie picture of her own, stacked with Romero-world royalty, Tom Savini & Gaylen Ross on screen and the great Greg Nicotero on effects, I was practically willing it to be good.
It pains me, then, to report that it is not. This is a queer, comic zombie romp set at a Brooklyn warehouse party, and it left me thoroughly deflated.
My deepest problem is not that it is a comedy; it is what it does, and does not do, with its zombies. Even the weakest of George Romero's films, (Diary of the Dead and Survival of the Dead), had a real vein of social commentary running through them; the undead always meant something, about consumerism, or the military, or us.
Queens of the Dead has none of that. It takes a good twenty minutes to get its zombie threat properly moving, its comedy-to-horror ratio is badly out of whack, and the ghouls themselves feel almost incidental. You could swap them for vampires, or slashers, or any old menace and lose nothing at all, which rather suggests they are here to trade on the family name more than to say anything. And if you are not going to honour the Romero zombie, why summon him at all?
It stings the more because I have no problem whatsoever with the zom-com when it works. Shaun of the Dead is not just one of the best British films ever made, it is one of the best zombie films full stop, and the reason is simple: it takes the Romero formula seriously. Its zombies are a real, relentless threat first and funny second, so that the horror and the comedy feed one another. Queens of the Dead never locates that balance. Its laughs and its scares keep tripping over each other, and without the underlying threat ever feeling real, there is nothing solid for the comedy to bounce off.
The cast does not help. Katy O'Brian, whom I have been impressed by elsewhere, is the clear exception and does what she can, but far too many of the performances around her land somewhere between grating and amateurish. There is a good, sharp, meaningful zombie film buried somewhere in this premise, one that used the undead to say something about its community rather than simply borrow a famous surname, and it is dispiriting to watch it settle for so much less. Two stars, and a real letdown from a film I desperately wanted to love and simply could not.
Queens of the Dead is a film that will clearly mean different things depending on where you come in. For genre newcomers drawn by the queerness and the colour and the tagline ("They're dead... and they're eating"), it may well land differently than it does for those who arrive with a detailed map of zombie cinema in their heads. The horror-comedy crossover has produced some genuinely thrilling work in recent years, and the Brooklyn drag scene is a genuinely rich world to set a genre film inside. But richness of setting and richness of execution are not the same thing, and the distance between a good idea and a good film has swallowed larger budgets and longer careers than this. For all its energy and all its promise, Queens of the Dead ends up being one of those films you leave wishing someone had been a bit more scared of it.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 2025 | Watched: 2026-08-28
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Queens of the Dead (2025) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Shudder Amazon Channel
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
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