The war film genre is one of the oldest in Hollywood. Within that genre is a subsect of its own that follows commandos on a mission. This goes back to classics like The Guns of Navarone and The Dirty Dozen to something as recent as The Suicide Squad. Many films have taken the simple premise of a group of individuals tasked with completing a mission and having wildly different executions of it. But none more so than 2018’s Overlord.

This year marks the fifth anniversary of the release of Overlord. Directed by Julius Avery, who would later go on to direct Samaritan and this year’s The Pope’s Exorcist—comparatively speaking, the better 2023 film with the word “exorcist” in the title—Overlord had modest box office returns (just barely matching it’s roughly $38 million budget), but positive reception from critics. If it flew under your radar, you might remember it as the film your friend referred to as “The Movie with Nazi Zombies.” While in a literal sense, that is what the film is about, for the vast majority of the movie, Overlord plays like a straightforward, almost classic in style, war film. It’s not until 47 minutes in (almost exactly halfway through) that it completely flips genres with just one scene and becomes a horror film.

The film follows Boyce (Jovan Adepo), an American soldier, the night before D-Day. His squadron is faced with the task of taking out a German-controlled radio-jamming tower that’s within an old church in France. When his plane is attacked, and the majority of his squad is killed, it’s left to him, three other surviving members, Ford, Tibbet, and Chase (played by Wyatt Russell, John Magaro, and Iain De Caestecker respectively), and a French civilian named Chloe (Mathilde Ollivier) to take down the tower. They don’t realize that inside the church, the Nazis are working on something far more nefarious than anything they can imagine.

Based on that synopsis, barring the ominous final sentence, would you assume this is a creepy, mad scientist movie with body horror elements? Of course not. You would probably think it’s in the style of Saving Private Ryan. And that’s how the movie plays for most of the running time.

The biggest hurdle the film faces by most viewers expecting a movie about Nazi zombies is that they probably expect something closer to something like Planet Terror (Robert Rodriquez’s half of Grindhouse). When in reality, it plays out like From Dusk Till Dawn. The characters in Planet Terror are written like they’re in a B-movie, but the characters in From Dusk Till Dawn think they’re in a crime thriller. That makes it much more surprising and fun when vampires randomly show up. The same thing happens in Overlord (sans vampires).

Related: 23 Unpredictable Horror Movies to Watch If You Loved Cabin in the Woods

Setting the Stage for a War Film
Paramount Pictures 

From the first frame of the film, Overlord plays like a classy picture. It seamlessly transitions from black-and-white into color while overlooking an armada of navy vessels and planes flying overhead (all with what looks like a handheld shot, giving it a documentary feel). The film’s title card wipes across the screen in an old-fashioned film font—meaning it takes up the majority of the screen—and it’s joined by a copyright notice and the year of release in Roman numerals (also known as the thing all film nerds love, but can’t explain why).

Again, based on the opening couple of minutes and the scene that follows (the key characters being introduced, their plane crashing, and the now-famous one-take of Boyce ejecting from the plane), everything points in the direction of this being a raw and dirty war film. And it continues that way…until the 47-minute mark.

Plot Twist: It’s a Monster Movie
Paramount Pictures 

At a point, Boyce gets separated from the group and ends up inside the church, and that’s when things get bizarre. Until this point in the story, the film has remained grounded and based in plausible reality. Anytime there’s violence and gore, like when the plane gets shot, and the soldiers get annihilated with enemy fire, or when a character gets obliterated by a landmine, it’s grotesque but fitting with the reality of a war film. The only early hint of things to come is when Boyce gets a glimpse at Chloe’s aunt, who’s disfigured after being sent to the church sometime earlier to be tested on.

Related: Overlord Review: A Great WWII Movie Gets Invaded by Zombies

By the time Boyce enters the church, he’s established as a likable lead who reacts to situations realistically. He’s not goofy, and he’s not courage overload. He’s just a guy. So, when he enters the church, it’s unsettling because he’s reacting how a real person would. There are people in bags full of what looks like blood, people in cells who are crazy and turning into monsters, and there’s even a disembodied woman’s head and spinal cord, and she’s, y’know…alive. Even the soundtrack becomes more ominous once he enters the laboratory.

It’s horrific, and the movie never winks at the audience and acknowledges the situation’s absurdity. This isn’t a horror comedy. It’s a horror film that snuck into a war epic, and because the characters react like real people and not stock horror movie characters, it gives the scenes more tension.

Even Russell’s character, Ford, who throughout the film is the cynical, no-nonsense soldier, is mortified when he witnesses the horror firsthand. This doesn’t fit with the reality they’ve previously accepted, which makes it even more jarring and disturbing. Overlord is great because the characters are well-defined, and the stakes are clear if they fail in their mission. If you remove the horror element, it’s still a solid movie, but adding that gives it personality and makes it feel much more fresh and original.