Echoes: Why Did It Take So Long For Lollywood to Make Its First Zombie Movie?

The Pakistani filmmaking industry has a long-held tendency to make safe, risk-free, family-oriented commercial films. Romantic comedies and social dramas are a more favored formula that filmmakers are inclined to opt for rather than taking an experimental route for zombie films.

Lollywood's delay in taking the first bold step towards the zombie genre is primarily due to a lack of financial investment and talent to handle the technical VFX so cleanly as they have now done in Zombeid (2026). It should be noted that, despite 2007's Zibahkhana (Hell's Ground) being the actual first zombie-horror flick directed by Omar Khan, Nabeel Qureshi's Zombeid is the first time major production houses came forward to handle a full-scale mainstream zombie horror film.

Hell's Ground was more of an underground, English-and-Urdu slasher film that was devoid of the mature visual effects seen in Zombeid. It was Pakistan's first gore film shot entirely on digital HDV video, leaning heavily on 1970s Hollywood classics like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. One more unconventional addition to the film was the use of underground Pakistani rock music, instead of classic film playback scores.

Pakistan has struggled for years with shrinking cinema infrastructure and tight competition from Hollywood and Koreans, who have mastered the zombie genre like anything. Even building an audience for such content remains a number-one issue for industry figures, a topic that has been discussed for decades.

Taking creative risks at this level requires a lot of strength, and projects like this, which could be considered the first highly developed VFX project, could not be crafted in a rushed state. Though the film still needs a massive amount of work in scriptwriting and story development, the VFX process alone requires extensive time, resources, and technical expertise, making it difficult for Lollywood to fully realize the budget, time, and experience for the first mainstream zombie film.

The visual effects and post-production were driven entirely by the local team at Postistan, supervised by VFX director Jazib Junaid. Several short films and small-scale projects have set the bar higher, as creativity was evident long ago.

Experimentation in short projects gives room for artists to create designs and environments with digital manipulation that could later be developed into a feature film. Spotting talent for such projects becomes easier, as the same techniques could be applied with the help of homegrown and gifted brains.

It is now good to see Pakistan moving away from repetitive stereotypical stories and utilizing global digital innovation. Filmmakers are stepping forward for sci-fi stories fused with cultural realism and local heritage that attract local as well as international audiences.

It appears that local filmmakers in general have rejected misery cinema to test high-concept fantasy narratives in speculative storytelling, which is a courageous leap into unfamiliar territory. Better late than never.

Echoes is an opinion column on film and television from the perspective of a writer based in Pakistan.