Horror films here have traditionally featured vengeful female ghosts, but Japanese filmmakers do also take cues from Hollywood, where zombies have long flourished since George Romero's seminal "Night of the Living Dead" (1968) and "Dawn of the Dead" (1978). Even so, Japanese zombie films, such as Hiroshi Shinagawa's "Z Island" ("Z Airando," 2015) and Takashi Miike's "Yakuza Apocalypse" ("Gokudo Daisenso," 2015), have trouble taking the undead seriously.
"I Am a Hero" ("Ai Amu a Hiro"), Shinsuke Sato's disaster thriller based on Kengo Hanazawa's hit manga of the same name, is a rare local film that uses zombies for scares, not punch lines. In fact, its lurching menaces do their job so hair-raisingly well that the film arrives in the theaters with an R-15 rating, meaning junior high school kids — usually a prime target audience for manga adaptations — can't see it.
To fans of Romero's masterworks, if not their many imitators, "I Am a Hero" will look derivative, though its full-bore zombie action may win their grudging admiration. And compared to the many so-called thrillers in Japan that offer only the appearance of action, with blood and bodies airbrushed out, "I Am a Hero" is the real unironic deal.