Polar Express (2004)

In 2004, motion capture technology had not come as far along as Robert Zemeckis evidently thought. (Hell, it didn't even look that much better by the time Beowulf came out three years later.) Why else would the director have spent $170 million on a movie in which the world's most charming actor was processed through a thousand computers only to emerge with a charmless, dead-eyed gaze. Some of the best minds in the world couldn't figure out how to use this technology effectively, and it turned what could have been just another unremarkable children's movie into a chilling zombie classic.

The story is set on Christmas Eve, when a young boy is kidnapped by a mystery train filled with other zombie children being absconded to the North Pole. The children are frequently left alone, every once in a while receiving visits from a spooky conductor or a dance troupe of waiters flinging hot chocolate every which way on a moving train. They are then thrown into a series of meaningless adventures, one more terrifying than the next. I can't answer for sure whether the children make it to the North Pole and discover the true meaning of Christmas after all, because the 100 minute runtime proved to be about 30 more minutes of zombie train conductors than I could possibly handle.