We Bury the Dead Trailer Puts a New Spin on the Zombie Apocalypse
Daisy Ridley stars in the upcoming horror film We Bury the Dead, and the new full trailer makes a strong case that this is one of early 2026’s big horror plays. The zombie survival thriller, written and directed by Zak Hilditch (1922), follows Ava Newman, a woman who volunteers with a body retrieval unit after a catastrophic military experiment devastates Tasmania—and may have taken her husband with it.
We Bury the Dead | Photo Credit: Vertical
The trailer opens on that disaster’s aftermath—military checkpoints, ash-choked landscapes, and neat rows of body bags being hauled out of trucks. Officials insist that some of the dead have come back in a docile, almost manageable state, offering families a twisted kind of hope. Those reassurances don’t last. As Ava pushes deeper into the quarantine zone in search of her missing husband, the footage cuts to corpses twitching, standing, and eventually sprinting, with a voiceover hinting that only those with “unfinished business” return—and they’re getting faster and meaner by the hour.
Ridley’s front and center throughout, swapping sci-fi stoicism for something rawer and more rattled. The trailer keeps her in tight close-ups as she moves through fogged-out forests, abandoned suburbs, and mass grave sites, mixing axe swings and shotgun blasts with flashes of panic and grief. Brenton Thwaites and Mark Coles Smith also show up in quick cuts as fellow members of the retrieval unit, suggesting a small, fragile team trying to police an area even the military doesn’t fully understand.
We Bury the Dead leans into desaturated blues and greys, with the Tasmanian setting giving the usual apocalypse imagery a coastal, almost wind-blasted feel. There’s scale too—aerial shots of smoke-covered towns, convoys rolling in—but the trailer keeps circling back to intimate, nasty moments like the intial moments of a reanimated corpse, something moving at the edge of a floodlit field, or Ava staring down a loved one who isn’t fully gone. It feels closer to a survival drama with zombies baked in than a straight splatterfest, which also tracks with the film’s festival buzz.
Vertical will release We Bury the Dead exclusively in U.S. theaters on January 2, 2026, with Australian and New Zealand dates set for early February. Coming right at the top of the calendar, and with a trailer that emphasizes mood and mourning as much as bloodshed, it looks poised to be one of the first horror conversation-starters of the new year.
Watch the trailer for We Bury the Dead, included below.
