structural:reformatting
Global film revival (2001–2008)

The zombie revival, which began in the Far East, eventually went global, following the worldwide success of the Japanese zombie games Resident Evil and The House of the Dead. Resident Evil in particular sparked a revival of the zombie genre in popular culture, leading to a renewed global interest in zombie films during the early 2000s. In addition to being adapted into the Resident Evil and House of the Dead films from 2002 onwards, the original video games themselves also inspired zombie films such as 28 Days Later (2002) and Shaun of the Dead (2004). This led to the revival of zombie films in global popular culture.

The turn of the millennium coincided with a decade of box office successes in which the zombie subgenre experienced a resurgence: the Resident Evil movies (2002–2016), the British films 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later (2007), the Dawn of the Dead remake (2004), and the comedies Shaun of the Dead and Dance of the Dead (2008). The new interest allowed Romero to create the fourth entry in his zombie series: Land of the Dead, released in the summer of 2005. Romero returned to the series with the films Diary of the Dead (2008) and Survival of the Dead (2010). Generally, the zombies in these shows are the slow, lumbering and unintelligent kind, first made popular in Night of the Living Dead. The Resident Evil films, 28 Days Later and the Dawn of the Dead remake all set box office records for the zombie genre, reaching levels of commercial success not seen since the original Dawn of the Dead in 1978.

Motion pictures created in the 2000s, like 28 Days Later, the House of the Dead and Resident Evil films, and the Dawn of the Dead remake, have featured zombies that are more agile, vicious, intelligent, and stronger than the traditional zombie. These new type of zombies, the fast zombie or running zombie, have origins in video games, with Resident Evil ' s running zombie dogs and especially The House of the Dead game's running human zombies.