Tilda Swinton ninja-slices zombies in The Dead Don’t Die trailer

The peaceful town of Centerville is terrorized by zombies in The Dead Don't Die.

The peaceful town of Centerville finds itself battling a zombie horde as the dead start rising from their graves in the first trailer for The Dead Don't Die, director Jim Jarmusch's deadpan foray into the zombie-comedy genre.

It's an interesting new direction for Jarmusch, but based on the trailer, the genre is tailor-made for his idiosyncratic style and deadpan wit. His career took off in 1984 with his first major film, Stranger Than Paradise. Shot entirely in black-and-white (a signature of the director's early work), the film won the Cami(C)ra D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival that year and established the director as a darling of arthouse cinema.

Movies like Dead Man, Mystery Train, Down by Law, Night on Earth, and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai further cemented his auteur status. In 2005, Jarmusch won the Grand Prix at Cannes for Broken Flowers, which starred Bill Murray as middle-aged man searching for the mother of the son he never met. And Jarmusch is no stranger to unusual takes on traditional horror stories, as evidenced by his 2013 "crypto-vampire love story," Only Lovers Left Alive.

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