THR is reporting that director Zebediah de Soto will tackle this new story with what they are calling "an American-style anime" executed using new technology. Hopefully this will prevent the CG curse that is actors interacting with tennis ball stick monsters.

Call me pessimistic but I'm not sure I want to see a CG zombie film before my Henry Selnick claymation zombie movie ....

The producer De Soto Simon West, who directed Con Air and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, gives us a little hope. He's got good C-movie cred.

As an influence:

Nichelle Nichols decided to quit playing Lt. Uhura at the end of the first season of Star Trek, because she felt the role wasn't stretching her as an actor, and she wanted to return to the theater. But then she met a Star Trek fan at an NAACP event: Dr. King, who asked her to reconsider because of her character's tremendous visibility. Here she is talking about it:

Ammonite author Nichola Griffith says that MLK's marches and speeches coincided with a new wave of science fiction that asked readers to identify with "the Other." For example, John Wyndham's The Crysalids is told from the point of view of a mutant.

Author Harlan Ellison marched with Dr. King from Montgomery to Selma. So did Sulu actor George Takei.

Robert J. Sawyer quotes MLK in several of his books. He has one fictional president quote the "I Have A Dream" speech, and has his characters discuss "the content of his character" in another story. One of his novels begins with a quote from MLK: "Though the arc of the universe is long, it bends toward justice."

George Romero finished his zombie epic Night Of The Living Dead, which has an African American hero, just as MLK was assassinated. And that shaped how people viewed his film, Romero explains:

We cast an African-American actor because he was the best actor from among our friends. And when we finished the film, literally as we were driving it to New York in the trunk of a car, that was the night Martin Luther King was assassinated. So the movie became a reflection of the times. There's a certain anger in the movie already, but a lot of why that film gets applause is because Wayne is a black guy. In the script, his race is never mentioned. In my mind, when I wrote that initial scene, he was a white guy. And he would've been shot by the police even if he was a white guy. But because he happened to be an African-American, that made it much stronger, particularly after the assassination. We shouldn't take all the credit for that. A lot of it was an accident.

Fictionalized representations:

The fictional character most frequently compared to MLK is, of course, Charles Xavier, the leader of the X-Men, a mutant organization that includes a school for gifted and talented mutants. Xavier wants mutants to live in peace among the normal humans, and assimilate as much as possible— in contrast to the mutant villain Magneto, who's usually compared with Malcolm X. The first X-movie makes this comparison more explicit, by having Magneto utter the words "by any means necessary."

But Professor X isn't the only MLK surrogate out there. Paul Fenster, the African American civil rights leader in Samuel Delany's Dhalgren, is frequently described as representing the recently assassinated MLK. He's described as a "colored man up from the South, some civil rights, militant-type person." And the chaos that envelops the midwestern town of Bellona, cut off from the rest of the world, is reminiscent of the riots that struck after King's assassination.

John Barnes' novel Earth Made Of Glass takes place on a planet torn by racial hatred. The only hope is a prophet named Ix, who's portrayed as a Martin Luther King archetype.

DC Comics' black superhero Amazing Man didn't manage to save MLK from an assassin's bullet, but he was a responsible for apprehending shooter James Earl Ray afterwards, in the DC version of events.

In the story "The Space Traders" by Derrick Bell (which later became an episode of the HBO miniseries Cosmic Slop) aliens arrive on Earth on Jan. 1, 2000. They make a simple offer to the United States: we'll give you untold wealth, clean energy, and substances that will clean up your environment. All we want in return is your African American population. After much debate, the U.S. accepts, and hands over all of its African Americans — in chains — on MLK day:

The last Martin Luther King holiday the nation would ever observe dawned on an extraordinary sight. In the night, the Space Traders had drawn their strange ships right up to the beaches and discharged their cargoes of gold, minerals, and machinery, leaving vast empty holds. Crowded on the beaches were inductees, some twenty million silent black men, women, and children, including babes in arms. As the sun rose, the Space Traders directed them, first, to strip off all but a single undergarment; then, to line up; and finally, to enter those holds which yawned in the morning light like Milton's "darkness visible."

The Star Trek anthology Strange New Worlds IV includes a story about the psychiatrist who treated Benny Russell, Captain Benjamin Sisko's 1950s science fiction writer alter ego. (Sisko had a hallucination/vision that he was a 1950s SF writer. Sort of.) In the story, the doctor hears of the assassination of Dr. King, and thinks about his former patient and his stories of a post-racism future Starfleet for the first time in years.

In Roger Corman's batty 1970 film Gas, Or It became Necessary To Destroy The World In Order To Save It, aka GAS-S-S, an experimental nerve gas kills everyone in the world over the age of 25. At the end, all the characters are running around, and people wearing masks of JFK, MLK, Che Guevara and Alfred E. Neuman show up.

Aliens and time travelers:

In Christopher Pike's young-adult Remember Me book series, a woman named Shari Ann Cooper dies, but her spirit winds up in another dimension. She visits demonic aliens on Mars and then goes inside a black hole and nearly gets atomized. But she finds out she's supposed to return to Earth in the body of a living person, as a Wanderer. And it turns out Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were both alien-possessed Wanderers as well.

In the children's TV series A.J.'s Time Travelers, A.J. Malloy travels through time in a ship called the KYROS. In one episode, he decides to celebrate Martin Luther King day by traveling back to witness the famous "I Have A Dream" speech first-hand. But in a (no doubt hilarious) mishap, he sets the coordinates wrong and arrives too early. Instead, A.J. meets King as a teenager, and uses his "time telescope" to share with him a vision of the future, inspiring him to fight to end segregation in America.

Around the same time, a children's book came out called Time Trap: Martin Luther King. Two school rivals are forced to work together on a report about the 1960s, but then they become trapped in that time period together. (And, I'm just guessing here, Martin Luther King explains to them why they should work together.)

In alternate history:

Commenter Grey_Area points out that Harry Turtledove features MLK in many of his alternate histories. In particular, The Two Georges — cowritten with Richard Dreyfuss of all people — features an alternate America where the Revolutionary War never happened. Sir Martin Luther King is governor general of the North American Union, and Richard Nixon is a used car dealer.

Writer Brent Adrian maintains a list of ideas that you can use to start a science fiction story, if you're in need of inspiration. One of his suggestions: an alternate history tale that takes place in a world where the first MLK assassination attempt succeeded. In 1958, a woman stabbed Dr. King in the neck, and he nearly choked on his own blood. If she'd succeeded, who would have replaced MLK in the civil rights movement? Would anyone have been able to?

What if MLK had attended the 1956 Dartmouth workshop on artificial intelligence? That's the question this research paper by Will Fitzgerald at Kalamazoo College asks. Would A.I. research be more humanistic, and possibly more self-aware? He quotes MLK, right before his death, talking about the "technological revolution" of "automation and cybernation," and lamenting its failure to advance human rights.

Perhaps most famously, an episode of Aaron McGruder's cartoon version of The Boondocks took place in an alternate history where the assassin's bullet didn't kill Dr. King. Instead, he merely went into a coma, and woke up 40 years later. He's ill-prepared for this new world of shock jocks, hip hop and Fox News, and especially taken aback by what's happened to African American culture in his absence. It culminates in this scene, which caused angry protests and which you should probably not watch at work with the speakers turned up:

Hulu:
Hulu's Hulloween special section has load of movies to tantalize your horror needs including, 28 Days Later, Night Of The Living Dead, Christine, Near Dark (my favorite horror flick of all times), The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror and lots more. Unfortunately many people can't view Hulu, so we're offering up other options. But while it's there please enjoy John Carpenter's The Thing:

The Thing:

Ez Takes:
EZ Takes has a fantastic collection of the really good old horror/scifi films. You can download a high res copy for a price or just stream the whole thing from the site. It's got all the classic like The Ape Man, White Zombie,and Human Monster (with Bella Lugosi)

The Sci Fi Drive In:
The Sci Fi Channel offers up a fair selection of classic horror black and whites such as The Killer Shrews, Menace From Outer Space, The Mad Monsters, The Attack Of Giant Leeches and other large attacking thingies to fear.
 
 
 

Teen Angst And Treats on The WB:
Yay it's the "Halloween Special" episodes of Buffy, One Tree Hill and Friends. Sure not scifi but still everyone looks forward to the Halloween special ten times more than the Thanksgiving clip show.

ABC Family:
In true Family style ABC Family is hosting the entire first season of The Adams Family. Plus The Joan Collins in Empire Of The Ants where Ms. Collins plays a scam artist real estate agent in Florida selling people crap land that they all later find out is home to giant ants!

Fearnet:
Besides their adorable 66.6 second film recaps of all the horror classics (from Jason to Candyman) they're also hosting The Midnight Meat Train in its entirety.

Here's Night of The Living Dead in 66.6 Seconds:

Thriller:
And of course would it be Halloween with out a little Thriller? We couldn't embed the whole thing but you can check out the entire Michael Jackson Zombie dance over at yyoutube.e. And until we can find it as a whole to embed, please enjoy Indian Thriller:

Indian Thriller:

Google Video:
Google Video is stocked with so many horror classics which we decided to just give you the best straight up.

Phantasm [Some NSFW]:

Plan 9 From Outer Space:
 
 
 
 
 
And Just For Fun Here's A Little MST3K And Some Rocky Horror:

MST3K Pod People:

Hobgoblins (Because It's My Top 5 MST3K)
 
 
Rocky Horror Picture Show:

Free TV : Ustream

Commenter OMG-Ponies proclaimed the other day that the only true zombies come from "voodoo or Jesus," not science. But as champions of a rational, scientific view, we disagree, of course. And here's the list to prove it:

Reanimator. A mad scientist, Herbert, invents a "re-agent" serum that brings the dead back to life in this H.P. Lovecraft adaptation. It starts with cats and devolves into zombie heads and rampaging corpses. Here's a gross and possibly disturbing zombie head scene:

World War Z by Max Brooks. A plague causes a zombie outbreak, which starts in China and spreads around the world. At first people think it's a type of rabies, but they soon realize it's an unstoppable pandemic that resurrects the newly dead.

Fido. This 2007 movie never really explains how the zombie plague happened, but it's definitely science fiction. The last survivors of humanity live in fenced-in bubbles of normality and turn zombies into their slaves using electrical collars. The collars neutralize the zombies' aggression and turn them docile and obedient. It's this weird paternalistic 1950s pastiche where your newly dead loved-ones become your mindless servants. There may be some social commentary buried in there.

28 Days Later and I Am Legend. Two movies with slightly different takes on the same premise: well-meaning scientists create a plague that turns people into monsters. They're not technically undead, but they growl, eat human flesh and rampage just like zombies. In 28 Days Later, their bite turns you into one of them, which is much more zombie-like. In both cases, it starts in the laboratory and ends with pale mutants biting you.

Night of the Living Dead. This one's a bit iffy. At one point, a scientist suggests that radiation from a returning Venus probe may be responsible for the zombie outbreaks. But director George Romero later disavowed this explanation.

Planet Terror. The better half of Grindhouse (sorry, Quentin) features a toxic gas called DC-2, aka Project Terror. A bioweapon deal gone wrong releases some of the fumes onto a sleepy town in Texas, and soon everybody is turning into horrendous zombies. A few people are immune, and you can delay the effects of the process by exposing yourself to the gas again.

Zombie Prom. A lovestruck teenager throws himself into a nuclear cooling tower, only to return as the Atomic Zombie. Reunited with his sweetheart, he wants to attend the high school prom, but principal Delilah Strict (RuPaul!) harbors anti-zombie prejudices. This musical short film is yet another 1950s pastiche, possibly harboring more social commentary. Here's the trailer:

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. The monster is a collection of dead body parts, and Victor Frankenstein zaps him to unlife using a modern science, including electricity and chemistry, mixed with old-school alchemy. Okay, so the monster doesn't go around turning others into zombies, and he's conscious and intelligent in the book. But he acts quite zombie-like in most of the movies, except Kenneth Branagh's. Call him a zombie outlier.

Resident Evil. In the movies, at least, the evil Umbrella Corp. creates viruses to use as biological weapons. The deadly T-virus is later turned into a cosmetic cream to restore your dead skin cells, which has the unfortunate side effect of turning tons of people into contagious zombies. And cosmetics company Olay recently started marketing a rejuvenating product that looks just like it.

28 Days Later
A virus called Rage spreads rapidly through England, turning nearly everyone into zombie-like creatures who eat human flesh. A small band of uninfected humans escape London, only to find themselves in an even worse situation when they encounter a military unit whose madness has nothing to do with the virus. Ends on an ambiguously dark note. You won't be reaching for the cyanide capsules, but you may not be able to sleep.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978 version)
This dark remake of the 1950s communist-scare story takes place in San Francisco and stars Donald Sutherland as a Sensitive New Age guy who discovers all his buddies have become pod people in their sleep. Made very soon after the Watergate scandal, the movie is a satisfying homage to conspiracy paranoia. The ending will make you want to never sleep again.

The Quiet Earth
This New Zealand indie is about a guy who wakes up one morning to discover he's the last guy on Earth . . . until he meets two other survivors. Sometimes having people around can be worse than being the only guy on the planet. Especially when the fabric of space-time keeps getting shredded. The ending is one of the most beautiful and frightening things I've ever seen.

Brazil
Terry Gilliam's mid-1980s dystopian masterwork holds up beautifully, and people a century from now will still be watching this sad tale of a dreamy bureaucrat who gets mixed up with political forces he doesn't understand. Set in a gloomy, fascist nation forever at war with nebulously-defined terrorists, Brazil is about how a little guy who dreams big can fight the system. But the ending — which Gilliam fought the studios tooth and nail to retain — will make you cry, rip your hair out, and question whether there is any hope left in the world.

Night of the Living Dead
There have been sequels aplenty, but none hold a candle to this 1969 speculative classic in which the recently-dead suddenly start walking around eating the living. Though it plays with horror themes, this black-and-white movie has almost a documentary feeling. There's nothing supernatural about government officials trying to explain and suppress information about the risen dead. When a group of strangers get stranded in a zombie-beseiged house, they have to work together to fend off the hordes of dead people. But director George Romero wants to be sure you know that heroism never pays off in late-60s America. The ending will make you want to chew people's arms off just like a zombie would.