Zombiemania

This 2008 documentary directed by Donna Davies (available for Instant viewing on Netflix) is slickly produced, blackly humorous, and thoroughly entertaining.  It features interviews with special fx maestros Tom Savini and Greg Nicotero, authors Max Brooks, Wade Davis, and Brian Keene, and (best of all) legendary film director George Romero.  With the help of such commentators, Davies traces the history of the zombie in horror cinema (a slew of grue-some film clips are included) and ponders the monster's cultural significance.  Modern phenomena are also addressed, such as the rise of zombie walks, Brooks's Zombie Self-Defense Lecture tour, and even the work of a zombie portrait artist.  As fun as it is informative (e.g. Romero offers some wonderful anecdotes about the filming of Night of the Living Dead), Zombiemania is a must-see for every Undead-head wandering around the Macabre Republic.

Quicklist: The Six Best Zombie Novels I've Ever Read

In alphabetical order...

*Cell by Stephen King.  Frighteningly relevant, it taps into our modern phobias concerning technology and terrorism.  The opening section dramatizing the "zombie" outbreak in Boston is as good a hook as King has ever written.
 
*Green Eyes by Lucius Shepard.  A lushly-detailed Southern Gothic/quasi-S.F. masterpiece.  One of the first books to transform the zombie figure into a sympathetic protagonist.

*Ladies Night by Jack Ketchum.  Hard-core homage to George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, in which beleaguered males square off against legions of infected females in New York City.  The action here is fast-paced, but the reader will be slow to forget the various scenes of bloody mayhem.

*The Damnation Game by Clive Barker.  Not strictly a zombie novel, but the passages employing the unwittingly undead Anthony Breer as the viewpoint character are absolutely amazing.

*The Reapers Are the Angels by Alden Bell.  Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets AMC's The Walking Dead.  A supreme work of post-apocalyptic fiction, filled with unforgettable characters.

*The Rising by Brian Keene.  The book that ostensibly launched the zombie renaissance in pop culture.  Features a terrific--and truly terrifying--premise: fugitive demons inhabiting and reani-mating human and animal corpses all across the globe.

Hangmany

[For the previous game of Hangmany, click here.]


Can you solve the following puzzle within 20 seconds, or are you going to choke?


CATEGORY: MOVIE QUOTE


" T  ___  ___  ___ '  ___  ___       ___  ___  M  I  ___  ___


T  ___      ___  ___  T      ___  ___  U ,


___  A  ___  ___   ___  A ."


MISSES: D, F, L, P, S












HINT: cemetery teasing


Answer appears in the Comments section of this post.

Short Story Spotlight: "Twenty-Three Second Anomaly"

"Twenty-Three Second Anomaly" by Ray Wallace   (The Zombie Feed Volume 1)

To delve here into details of plot would surely spoil the reader's enjoyment of this story (and gradual discovery of what is actually transpiring).  I'll just say that "Twenty-Three Second Anomaly" could be envisioned as a Deleted Scene on the Day of the Dead
DVD.  In this short piece, author Ray Wallace creates a significant amount of suspense by ticking off the seconds on a stop watch (the numbers steadily creeping up to the "twenty-three" foreboded by the story title).  Such methodical progress is reinforced by the hideous image of a fly crawling across an open, unblinking eye.  The climax of the story packs all the wallop of a close-range head shot, as Wallace demonstrates that the shocks of zombie fiction involve more than graphic depictions of cannibalistic carnage.

Zombie Week Begins: Ranking the Romeros

It's Zombie Week here at Macabre Republic, and I'm going to kick things off with a post ranking the six films in director George Romero's ...the Dead series, from worst to best.


6.Survival of the Dead (2009).  Ridiculous melodrama 
concerning feuding Irish-American families on an island off the coast of Delaware.  Playing like a bad Western, this one could have been dubbed Gunfight at the O'Shea Corral.  The indisputable nadir of the series.


5.Dawn of the Dead (1978).  A much-too-long film whose single-note satire (of American consumerist greed) quickly grows old.  There are also some jarring bits of slapstick (pie-faced zombies!).  Most laughable of all, though, is the blue-pancake makeup on the undead extras.


4.Land of the Dead (2005).  Unfortunately, Land is riddled with three major fault lines: the attempt to depict zombies as a sympa-thetic proletariat; the equipping of the undead with handheld weapons (a decision that distracts from the distinct threat posed by zombies--their sheer voraciousness); and the casting of John Leguizamo (whose putative acting could ruin any movie) as one of the leads.


3.Day of the Dead (1985).  All that bickering between the soldiers and scientists grows wearisome, but the film has a great premise (research experiments are being conducted on captured zombies at an underground base) and some brilliantly graphic special effects.  The shift to a sunny Florida setting also makes for a nice change from the first two, Pennsylvania-based entries in the series.


2.Diary of the Dead (2007).  Surprisingly effective, this one modernizes the living-dead film by adopting the camcorder viewpoint/pseudo-documentary format so prevalent in 21st Century horror cinema.  It also reboots Romero's series by setting its action at the time when the zombie outbreak has just begun.  The bits involving the student film (featuring a shambling mummy) are fiendishly clever.


1.Night of the Living Dead (1968).  More than four decades later, the original remains the strongest film in the series.  A groundbreaking (not just in graveyards) work whose apocalyptic scenario and ghoulish violence are rendered even more haunting in stark black-and-white.  The claustrophobic, house-under-siege setting has furnished the template for countless future horror flicks.  Night's dark and bitterly ironic final scene constitutes one of the most memorable endings in the history of the genre.