Steven Pierce’s Herd is the rare horror film that manages to juggle zombies, queer relationship drama, and small-town militia paranoia without tripping over its own shotgun. It’s sweaty, claustrophobic, sometimes bleakly funny, and surprisingly heartfelt. Imagine The Walking Dead crossed with Blue Valentine and a dash of Duck Dynasty, then add a pinch of emotional therapy homework you didn’t ask for.
The movie opens like a romantic reconciliation weekend gone wrong—which is to say, like every canoe trip ever attempted by a couple with unresolved trauma. Jamie (Ellen Adair) and Alex (Mitzi Akaha) are trying to fix their relationship by navigating literal and metaphorical rapids in rural Missouri. You can tell things are going well because Alex responds to an argument by deliberately capsizing their canoe. Nothing says “let’s heal together” quite like a near-drowning.
Alex breaks her leg, and suddenly this is less a couples’ retreat and more a survival workshop hosted by chaos. They stumble out of the water and into the apocalypse: a viral outbreak turning people into “Heps,” the movie’s term for half-dead, half-hungry nightmares. If you’re keeping track, that’s now three things trying to eat them—zombies, rednecks, and their relationship.
Zombies, But Make It Emotional
Most zombie movies are about survival. Herd is about accountability. Jamie and Alex aren’t just running from monsters; they’re running from years of resentment, avoidance, and one particularly awkward Thanksgiving. The infected are, of course, metaphors—this time for festering emotions that everyone pretends aren’t contagious until they bite someone in the face.
The Heps themselves are well-designed: not the fast sprinters of 28 Days Later, nor the slow-mo walkers of Romero’s classics. They’re twitchy, feverish, and oddly human, like your least favorite cousin after a three-day bender. The infection spreads quickly, but what really spreads faster is paranoia.
When Jamie and Alex are rescued by a local militia, the film shifts gears from wilderness horror to political pressure cooker. It’s not a huge change—both environments involve camouflage and poor decision-making—but it gives the story a new, nastier layer.
Welcome to the Apocalypse, Sponsored by Toxic Masculinity
The militia is led by Big John Gruber (Jeremy Holm), a man whose beard alone could get its own IMDb credit. He’s the kind of guy who’d say “I’m not a bad man, I’m just realistic,” right before casually threatening someone with a shotgun. To his credit, he saves the women from the wilderness—but as we soon learn, this is less a rescue and more a forced membership to the world’s worst prepper club.
The compound is supposed to represent safety, but it’s more like a live-action Facebook comment section. Everyone’s armed, suspicious, and just one “liberal snowflake” away from starting a civil war. When you’re trapped among people who think antibiotics are government propaganda, the zombies outside start looking downright reasonable.
And because irony is alive and well, the compound is also Jamie’s hometown. That’s right—she escaped her small-town upbringing only to return during the literal end of the world. Her estranged, homophobic father (Corbin Bernsen) is there too, ready to make every family dinner flashback feel like an origin story for emotional damage. If zombies symbolize disease and decay, dad represents inherited dysfunction. At least zombies don’t vote.
The True Horror: People Who Mean Well
Pierce’s direction keeps things grounded even when the Heps are tearing through walls. The camera lingers not on the gore but on the faces—people convincing themselves they’re doing the right thing as they commit unforgivable acts. When a rival militia shows up, led by Sterling (Timothy V. Murphy) — basically if a whiskey bottle came to life and learned how to sneer — the whole scenario devolves into what can only be described as Pride and Prejudice and Preppers.
Jamie and Alex become unwilling witnesses to a masculine meltdown. The men posture, threaten, and argue about honor while women and corpses stack up around them. It’s an apocalypse of testosterone, and not the sexy kind.
What’s clever is how Herd never paints the militia as cartoon villains. They’re scared, traumatized, and trying to control a world that’s spinning out of control. The horror isn’t that they’re evil—it’s that they’re us, stripped of Wi-Fi and empathy. The zombies may bite, but the humans have conspiracy theories.
Ellen Adair Deserves an Award (and Probably a Therapist)
Ellen Adair’s performance as Jamie anchors the whole thing. She plays a woman trapped between conflicting identities—daughter, lover, survivor, sinner—with a mix of quiet pain and hard-won grit. When Jamie faces her father, you can see decades of shame and fear crumbling into fury. It’s not just about fighting zombies; it’s about reclaiming her narrative.
Mitzi Akaha’s Alex gives the film its emotional counterweight. She’s less hardened than Jamie, more idealistic, and that contrast becomes the movie’s heartbeat. Even when they’re arguing or limping through backwoods carnage, their chemistry feels lived-in—like a couple who’s survived both therapy and therapy avoidance.
Their love story isn’t tidy or triumphant, but it’s deeply human. Amid all the gunfire and gore, these two women remain the beating heart of the film. You root for them, even as the world around them rots.
Small Budget, Big Brains (and Some Intestines)
For a modestly budgeted indie, Herd looks great. The Missouri wilderness feels both beautiful and threatening—every tree could be hiding either a monster or a man with opinions about fluoride. The production design of the compound is grimly authentic: rusted fences, improvised barricades, and just enough canned goods to suggest everyone’s been watching Doomsday Preppers on repeat.
The makeup on the Heps is nasty in a practical, tactile way—oozing sores, jaundiced eyes, skin tones that say “expired meat at Walmart.” It’s not flashy CGI gore; it’s grimy, textured realism. You can almost smell the rot, and you’ll be grateful you can’t.
Social Commentary, Served Medium-Rare
What really sets Herd apart is how it balances horror with sociopolitical teeth. It’s not subtle, but neither are machine guns or small-town prejudice. The film takes aim at the kind of insular paranoia that festers under pressure—how communities can twist survival instincts into cruelty.
Pierce doesn’t sermonize, though; he lets the contradictions play out. The militia members aren’t all bad, just broken. The queer protagonists aren’t idealized heroes, just flawed people trying to reconnect in a world that keeps punishing them for existing. The infected aren’t moral symbols—they’re just the background noise of a society that already devours its own.
And somehow, amid all that darkness, there’s hope. The ending doesn’t promise a cure or salvation, but it does deliver something rarer: connection. Jamie and Alex, bloodied but alive, choosing each other despite everything. Love as rebellion. Survival as forgiveness.
The Humor in the Horror
There’s a streak of dry, dark humor running through Herd that keeps it from collapsing under its own seriousness. Sometimes it’s a bit of dialogue—Dana Snyder’s Louie, for instance, seems to have been imported directly from a drunk conspiracy podcast. Sometimes it’s situational, like the absurdity of a militia leader lecturing about “family values” while pointing a gun at lesbians who just saved his crew from zombies.
You laugh not because it’s funny, but because the alternative is screaming. It’s the gallows humor of 2023: the apocalypse may be televised, but at least it’s self-aware.
Final Verdict: Love, Death, and Shotguns
Herd succeeds where so many genre hybrids fail. It’s part relationship drama, part survival thriller, part sociopolitical critique, and entirely gripping. It’s thoughtful without being preachy, emotional without being sentimental, and terrifying without being nihilistic.
Ellen Adair delivers one of the year’s most underappreciated horror performances, and Steven Pierce directs with the confidence of someone who knows the scariest monsters are the ones that look back at you and say, “We’re doing this for your own good.”
So yes, Herd has zombies. But it’s not really about them. It’s about fear, power, and the courage to love in a world that keeps giving you reasons not to.
And honestly, that’s way harder to survive than a bite.
