A trailer has arrived for Ellen Page’s creepy zombie drama The Cured. While zombies have been a horror movie staple for decades, there was a period in the recent past where they fell out of favor on the big screen. From around the late 1980s until the early 2000s there was a remarkable lack of zombie movies, but the ailing genre’s fortunes turned around thanks the triple threat of 28 Days Later, Resident Evil and 2004’s Dawn Of The Dead remake.

Since then zombies have appeared in every conceivable form; from the weekly blood splattered chills of The Walking Dead to the glossy blockbusting thrills of World War Z. The genre has reached the saturation point at this stage, so filmmakers must try to find a fresh angle in the overstuffed zombie market if they want to stand out.

Now a trailer has landed for The Cured, a post-post-apocalyptic drama where former zombies have been cured of their flesh-eating ways. Ellen Page plays a woman who takes on her “cured” brother-in-law, but as the ex-zombies struggle to cope in a society that hates them, an uprising starts to brew. The Irish set thriller has a unique twist that combines zombies with a hefty dose of social commentary, and in a tide of samey zombie movies, the concept helps it stand out.


The film also looks like a marked improvement on Ellen Page’s previous genre effort Flatliners, which took the cult 1990s Kiefer Sutherland movie and remade it into a painfully generic horror flick. She’ll be supported in The Cured by Tom Vaughn-Lawlor, known to Irish audiences for his starring role in acclaimed gangster drama Love/Hate, and will soon appear as Ebony Maw in Avengers: Infinity War.

Indie horror has started to experiment with the zombie formula in the past few years, with The Cured bearing a resemblance to Arnold Schwarzenegger drama Maggie. That movie presented a more human take on the zombie apocalypse, where a father has to look after his infected daughter in her final days – while hoping she doesn’t turn on the rest of her family. Train To Busan and The Girl With All The Gifts also used the zombie genre in interesting ways and showed there’s some life in the undead genre yet. Hopefully, The Cured proves to be one of the better offerings.

The Cured release date: Feb 23, 2018