Years ago, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, a little boy named Tony Washington cheers on his father William Washington 's performance in a baseball game. On their way home, Tony, William, and William's wife Louise see two teenagers preparing to rape a young girl. William intervenes, rescuing the girl, but one of the would-be rapists fatally stabs him, leaving him to die as the two teens flee. In the film's present-day, Tony, now a musclebound teenage baseball player, disrupts an attempted robbery at a neighborhood grocery store. As he steps into the street, he is struck dead by a car carrying a gang of reckless teenagers: Bob, Amy, Jim, Peter, and Susie. The carful of teens flees the scene, and neighbors carry Tony's corpse to his home, where his mother Louise mourns for him. She contacts Molly Mekembe, the girl whom William rescued years ago, now a local voodoo priestess, in hope that voodoo can save her son. While Molly is unable to restore Tony to life, she can revive him long enough to allow him to avenge his own death. After Louise agrees, Molly resurrects Tony as a zombie, then uses her powers to aid him in his revenge by guiding him to the guilty teenagers. The next night, Tony, as a zombie, tracks Peter and Susie to an academy gymnasium and fatally breaks Peter's neck, then kills Susie by crushing her skull with a baseball bat. The night afterwards, he is able to find and kill Jim by impaling him with the same bat before the latter could rape a waitress. Police detective Frank Sorrell is soon investigating both incidents and initially agrees with the coroner that a large built, drug-fueled man is responsible. Sorrell brings his suspicions to his boss, police captain Tom Churchman and is told that they have already managed to find a suspect responsible that matches Sorrell's description, closing the case. Believing that the case has not been truly solved, Sorrell investigates photos that place Molly at both incidents and suggests to Churchman that they bring her in for questioning. However the captain dismisses her as a "batty, voodoo palm reader that follows ambulances around" and sends him home to rest. Shortly afterwards, Churchman contacts Jim's father Fred, and informs him of Molly's involvement in his son's death, then tells him to come to the police station. As Fred tries to leave his home, he sees Tony approaching him and shoots him with a rifle. Tony quickly recovers and breaks Fred's neck, killing him. Knowing that they will be next, Bob and Amy decide to leave town. While at a garage getting money, Tony finds them and kills Bob by bashing his head against a car, then does the same to Amy against a door. While monitoring Tony's actions, Churchman abducts Molly at gunpoint and forces her to show him where Tony is going. Sorrell follows the zombie to a cemetery. Molly and Churchman soon arrive, with both telling Sorrell that the priestess resurrected Tony to not only avenge himself, but also to avenge Molly, as Churchman and Fred were the two that tried to rape her years ago, and Churchman was the one who had killed Tony's father. Molly begins a spell, but having learned that a revived zombie's power fades once it has achieved its goal, Churchman shoots Tony, ending his zombie existence, then shoots and kills Molly as well. Before he is able to shoot Sorrell, silencing him as a witness, a second zombie rises out of a nearby grave and drags the still-living Churchman into the ground with him, presumably to Hell. A shocked Sorrell inspects the grave and learns that the second zombie was Tony's father William Washington, avenging his own death years before at Churchman's hands, then departs.
†The "Pantera" that appears on the soundtrack is not the Texan heavy metal band but Jon Mikl Thor's then-wife, a backup singer in his band Thor whose stage name was "Pantera".
Reception to Zombie Nightmare were generally negative. Ian Jane of DVD Talk rated it 1/5 stars and wrote, "Zombie Nightmare is a horrible film by any standards but it's so deliciously goofy that you can't help but have fun with it." Brett Cullum of DVD Verdict called it "a charmingly cheap z-grade zombie thriller". Writing in The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia, academic Peter Dendle calls it "painful and toilsome". Zombie Nightmare was also featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000, a comedy television series about bad movies, in an episode broadcast on Comedy Central on November 24, 1994. The episode premiered during the channel's annual Turkey Day marathon, of which Adam West hosted. In The Amazing Colossal Episode Guide, a series guide written by MST3K members, Mary Jo Pehl described the movie as "painful" and that the members of the show "thoroughly, intensely, and unequivocally hated this movie." The episode was included in the 2009 "Volume XV" box set, along with The Girl in Lovers Lane, The Robot vs. The Aztec Mummy, and Racket Girls, and in 2017, the episode was added to Netflix.
