The film is set at a Caribbean island cursed by voodoo whose dead residents rise as zombies to attack the living.

Produced on a small budget of 410 million Italian lira, the film earned several times its production costs back in international gross.

It attracted controversy upon its release in the United Kingdom, where it screened as Zombie Flesh Eaters,[5] where it became listed as a "video nasty".

Menard is alarmed to find that one of his colleagues, Fritz, has died of the zombie infection and tells his remaining staff to shoot all the dead bodies in their heads.

The group fends off an attack against them and escapes in a jeep, with West suffering an ankle injury when the vehicle veers off-road after slamming into a zombie.

Resting in a jungle clearing, the group realises they have stumbled upon a Conquistador-era graveyard; Barrett is killed when one of the corpses rises from the earth and bites out her throat.

As more corpses reanimate, the group flees to the local hospital, where Menard explains that the dead are rising as a result of a voodoo curse that he has been trying to stop.

Zombi had been edited by Dario Argento and given a new score by the Italian band Goblin, and proved successful upon its release in Italy.

[9][10] Director Lucio Fulci was De Angelis' second choice for the project, and was hired based on his handling of violent scenes in his previous films Sette note in nero and Non si sevizia un paperino.

[3] Sacchetti began work on this script in July 1978, before it was optioned by Angelis' company Variety Films that December and re-tooled as Zombi 2.

[4] Lead star Ian McCulloch was cast primarily on the success in Italy of the 1975 BBC television series Survivors, which had impressed producer Ugo Tucci.

[12] Richard Johnson had previously appeared in a string of Italian genre productions: Ovidio G. Assonitis' Beyond the Door (1974), Massimo Dallamano's The Cursed Medallion (1975), and Sergio Martino's Island of the Fishmen (1979).

The underwater scene featuring a shark attack was devised by Ugo Tucci, and was shot without Fulci's approval, by De Rossi, in Isla Mujeres.

[14] Multiple other sources identify the trainer as Ramón Bravo, a Mexican underwater photographer and filmmaker known for his work documenting sharks.

[4][15][16] An article in Little White Lies states the zombie was originally supposed to be played by filmmaker René Cardona Jr., who had worked with Bravo on the shark-themed film Tintorera (1977), but fell ill on the day of shooting.

[1] In Italy, La Stampa described the film as "pedestrian", as well finding it hard to bear Olga Karlatos' character's death scene.

In a 2012 review for The Guardian, Phelim O'Neill described the film as "the ultimate undead movie", praising its commitment to gory scenes and convincing effects.

[41] Writing for the Daily Mirror, James Kloda praised Fulci's directing, finding that he consistently made evocative use of particular shots to accentuate the film's action or horror.

[42] Writing for AllMovie, Robert Firsching described Zombi 2 as a "relatively well made shocker" which "led to the zombie-gore film becoming the dominant motif of 1980s Italian horror".

[25] Empire's Kim Newman awarded the film two stars out of five, chalking up much of its "video nasty" reputation to the "eye gouging" scene, comparing this unfavourably to similar material in 1929's Un Chien Andalou.

Newman did compliment several sequences as interesting, particularly one underwater scene depicting a zombie attacking a shark, but found that overall the film did not "keep up the pace or plausibility sufficiently".