Earlier this fall, AlternateHistory.com held a map-making contest detailing the effects of zombie outbreaks, vampire migrations and other supernatural events in alternate history. Among the entries is a map of the Scourge from Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and a few other standouts (recommended by Metafilter).

[AlternateHistory.com via Metafilter]

The Scourge of 1866
Essex County Cricket (& Zombie Eradication) Club
The Great Golem Uprising of 1848 — A non-zombie entry.

PLAGUE - OFFICIAL SCREENER from Matt Simpson on Vimeo.

In anticipation of Death Troopers, StarWars.com asked artists to create their own works of zombie Star Wars art. Artist Matt Busch took movie posters from the original trilogy and prequel films and remade them with zombie leads. All we need now are some Clone Wars zombies to make it complete.

Update: Bonnie Burton of the Official Star Wars Blog points out that Busch is just one of many, many Star Wars artists who created zombified posters. You can check out the entire Flickr set; be sure to scope the blood-spattered Zombie Cantina.

Star Wars Zombies [Coreplanets via Nerdcore]

Released in 2005, this movie doesn't have much going for it other than spiritedness and gore, both of which are shown off admirably in this scene.

The plot is a by-now routine mishmash of Buffy and fast zombie lore, which one amusing twist. Our protagonist is accidentally killed by his mother in a zany drunken noose chair kerfuffle. Totally unfazed, his mother grabs some books about the undead from her local church basement and raises him from the dead in time for school the next day. Most of the humor comes from our zombie trying to get the girl he likes to go out with him, while struggling with the urge to eat people. I love that the zombie transformation scene happens in about 1 minute, just so we can get to the good stuff: adolescent zombie romance.

Though uneven, the movie is still pretty amusing - especially in the blood-soaked climax.

Boy Eats Girl via IMDB

We've selected ten types of science fiction fans, offering you great gift ideas for fans of the big franchises, this summer's biggest movies, and even something for the steampunks and zombie lovers. You can also check out our fan gift guide from last year, which also includes gift ideas for fans of Battlestar Galactica, Harry Potter, and Batman.

Gifts for the Star Wars Fan (Gallery-free view)

Gifts for the Star Trek Fan (Gallery-free view)

Gifts for the Transformers Fan (Gallery-free view)

Gifts for the GI Joe Fan (Gallery-free view)

Gifts for the Doctor Who Fan (Gallery-free view)

Gifts for the Joss Whedon Fan (Gallery-free view)

Gifts for the Terminator Fan (Gallery-free view)

Gifts for the Vampire Fan (Gallery-free view)

Gifts for the Steampunk Fan (Gallery-free view)

Gifts for the Zombie Fan (Gallery-free view)

Additional gift ideas by Meredith Woerner.

Sadly I don't know a lick of Turkish, so I can only extrapolate based on this trailer that we're getting your classic "zombies invade a wedding" scenario. Which is to say, it's a brand-new scenario I've never seen before. Only a gang of truly hardcore people, some of whom will be wearing blood-stained wifebeaters and earrings, can defeat the menace. Maybe there is some kind of toxic waste involved. Or possibly it's a metaphor for joining the EU? I can only hope.

Check out the movie website, via Arabolge.

UPDATE: Thanks to a helpful translator, I have a bit more information. The movie was directed by film critics Talip Ertürk and Murat Emir Eren. They claim this is the very first Turkish zombie movie. Apparently, they found their zombies via an announcement that they posted to Facebook .

ADA: Zombilerin Düğünü

Eco-Apocalypse

2012: It's pure global catastrophe in Roland Emmerich's film. Earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions — every possible natural disaster seems to conspire to wipe out all life on Earth.

Decipher by Stel Pavlou: The year 2012 sees an increase in solar flare activity as scientists see unusual energy signals coming from Antarctica. It soon becomes clear that the sun could be on the verge of triggering a deluge, and all the world's cities could go the way of Atlantis.

Death from the Skies

2012: Supernova: If you're looking for something beyond the usual asteroid strike, here's a different sort of celestial doomsday. A nearby star goes supernova, threatening the Earth's survival, prompting an international team of scientists to launch nuclear warheads to reduce the effect of the impact.

2012: Doomsday: On December 21, 2012, one day before the predicted apocalypse, it is revealed that a celestial object is about to collide with Earth. But this time, it's religion, not science that averts the ultimate disaster.

World War III

Blood of the Beast: Roughly half the population dies in the war of 2012, but the world's chemical weapons render nearly all the men on Earth sterile. The world is repopulated by clones, but 19 years after the first clones are harvested in 2012, the world goes to pot once again.

Zombie Plague

Zombies: A Record of the Year of Infection: The dead start rising early in 2012, and soon the plague has spread across much of North America. And corporate greed has ensured that you can become a zombie even if you've never encountered the walking dead.

I Spit On Your Rave: The film doesn't get released until next year, but its zombie apocalypse starts at the 2012 London Olympics, when a virus is released. Humanity is quickly gobbled up, leaving the zombies to their own devices.

Alien Invasion

The X-Files: Alien colonization has always been a distinct probability in the X-Files universe, and in the episode "The Truth," the Cigarette Smoking Man reveals the date of invasion: December 22, 2012.

2012: The War of Souls by Whiley Strieber: Michael Bay is looking to adapt this tale of alien invasion. It turns out that the world's ancient monuments provide a gateway for alien invaders looking to conquer Earth and eat humanity's souls. And, if the invasion is not prevented in time, the gateways will open December 21, 2012.

RahXephon: The end of the Long Count Calendar marks another alien invasion, this one by the Mulians. The Mu declare war on humanity and enclose the city of Tokyo inside a spherical barrier.

Domain Trilogy by Steve Alten: Scientists may suggest that the dinosaurs were killed off by a meteorite, but the truth is that they fell prey to an ancient weapon buried beneath the Gulf of Mexico. And, if we don't learn the truth about those extraterrestrial exterminators by December 2012, we could be next.

Doctor Who "Dalek": Fortunately, the Doctor and Rose manage to stop Henry van Statten's captive Dalek before it can surface from his Statten's Utah bunker in 2012. Otherwise, the Dalek could have very well exterminated a good chunk of humanity.

A Glitch in the System

Wapsi Square: It's not that the Mayans predicted the end of the world in 2012, it's just that the quantum clock that runs the world must be reset at precisely the time and date the Long Count Calendar runs out. Otherwise, time resets back to an earlier point in time, trapping us all in a time loop. But you won't notice it — after all, it's happened several times before.

Goats: After the untimely demise of God, the Mayan programming firm One Death was hired to keep the multiverse going. Unfortunately, a glitch in the system will cause the multiverse to crash on December 21, 2012, unless the prophesied Programmer can be located in time.

PW2: 2012 by MC Miller: Former professor Hamilton Ray begins to notice strange patterns and synchronicities in in the universe, and develops a theory about a Probability Wave, something that's about to bring about a radical change in the universe at the end of 2012.

The World Is Radically Transformed

The Invisibles by Grant Morrison: The world as we know it may come to an end on December 22, 2012, but it's hardly doomsday. Instead, humanity ascends to the Supercontext, the next level of existence, at the word of Jack Frost.

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure by Hirohiko Araki: The priest Enrico Pucci acquires the stand Made in Heaven, which gives its user the power to rewrite the universe. And in 2012, Pucci attempted to remake the universe to suit his master Dio Brando. However, Pucci died before the universe could be completely rewritten, causing it to return to something close to its original form.

Shadowrun: Similarly, the world doesn't end in the Shadowrun universe, but as the Mayan calendar resets, the world undergoes a dramatic transformation. Magic returns to the Earth, allowing individuals, governments, and corporations to utilize a potent combination of cutting edge technologies and newly harnessed magic.

Additional reporting by Josh Snyder.

James Turner, an editor for O'Reilly Media, claims that zombies share a kinship with Godzilla. His theory is that, just as Godzilla was inspired by the dropping of the atomic bomb, Western filmmakers (Romero aside) latched onto zombies in the wake of Three Mile Island, the recognition of AIDS, the Ebola outbreak, and similar medical and technological disasters. He goes on to posit that the increasing popularity of zombie movies involving a biological outbreak suggests a Western ambivalence toward biotechnology.

It's an interesting thought, though perhaps a bit reductive. Certainly zombies have been used to comment on biotechnology, but they've also been used to comment on a number of social issues, including consumerism, corporate greed, and the objectification of women. And what causes the zombie outbreak is often less important than what comes afterward. Still, Turner makes an interesting case that biotechnology-based zombies could evolve to more acutely reflect our biological and technological fears:

Blackberry-spawned abominations, anyone? Dawn of the Single-Payer Healthcare Undead? What about, They Came From H1N1?

He's far more convincing when he talks about the important differences between giant monsters and zombies, namely that it's the military and scientists who fight Godzilla, where zombies fall to resourceful and self-reliant survivors.

Americans must like the idea that, as out of control as our hubristic science might become, a good machete and a 12 gauge in the hands of a competent man or woman can always save the day. The 2003 bestselling title, The Zombie Survival Guide, offers the same message of self-reliance. (I'm not sure what lesson we can take from the success of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.)

A Brief History Of Zombies [Forbes]

When I first heard about Matt Youngmark's Chooseomatic book, I fully expected I'd get a fairly straightforward (perhaps even perfunctory) take on the zombie apocalypse where the only twist was the multithreaded, Choose Your Own Adventure-inspired storytelling layered over it. It's something we've seen before; last year, a pair of designers released a choose-your-own-ending film, The Outbreak, with a similar premise. But I was pleasantly surprised when the book arrived and I found a pink, chainsaw-wielding bunny on the cover and a note inside warning me to avoid the zombie kitten.

Zombocalypse Now doesn't just feature a pink stuffed rabbit; you are the pink stuffed rabbit, living in a world where stuffed animals walk, talk, and intermarry with the human population. As the book opens, you are waiting on what is sure to be another atrocious online date. And sure enough, when he or she shows up, they're disheveled, glassy-eyed, lacking in hygiene, and mumbling something about brains. You've been on so many bad dates that it takes you a while to figure out that they're undead, but soon enough, you're up to your fuzzy elbows in the walking dead.

From here there are, of course, multiple paths your bunny self could take from here. You could tag along with a renegade cop named Mittens (who, despite the name, is not a stuffed animal). You could visit your conspiracy theorist friend Ernie, who is convinced that the walking dead are powered by fluoride in the water. You could try to strike out on your own and bash in as many zombie brains as you possibly can. You just hope that the choices you make lead to your ultimate survival.

Spoiler alert: you usually end up zombie chow.

To get the full effect of Zombocalypse Now, you have to read through several of the plotlines. Some are, admittedly, stronger than others (there's an oddly rushed one where you go all I Am Legend and start experimenting on the zombies), but taken together, the stories do form a cohesive narrative, and the logic from one plotline still holds true in the others. For example, in several storylines, the zombies are unusually attracted to your car (as in licking the windshields), and in one of threads, we learn exactly why. The chilling and rather amusing cause behind the zombie outbreak is also key; you learn about it in certain storylines, but it plays a significant role in others — including one ending where you mistakenly believe you've survived.

Youngmark packs a lot of strange odds and ends into his zombie adventure, and cherrypicks references from a wide variety of genres: mob movies, cop dramas, the works of Stephen King, and The Postman, to name a few. There's even a moment where you let out the battle cry "Leeeeeeroy Jenkins!" The effect is over-the-top silliness, like someone set a particularly manic children's book in the midst of a zombie outbreak. Sure, it's a bit on the fluffy side, but I found myself eagerly flipping back to try out different plotlines — at first to see if I could survive, then to root out some of the book's more bizarre twists and turns. It's a satisfying way to spend a couple hours here and there, even if you do die most of the time.

And do watch out for that zombie kitten. It's a killer.

Nothing would make us happier than a return to zombie greatness like Dawn of The Dead and Night of the Living Dead. Sadly, it's been a hard road for this much-loved zombie director. Especially after his last flicks Diary of the Dead and the zombies-that-can-learn feature Land of the Dead. But we haven't lost hope yet, and this is the first trailer for his new film Survival of The Dead that has us really excited. But what do you think?

Quick someone get Dr. Monster a comic book deal stat, we want to see what happens next.

UPDATE: The name of the artist is Travis Pitts, we want to make sure this brilliant design gets lots of love so spread it around! To see the rest of his work check out the Travis Pitts' site Zom Bot.

Thanks for the tip Sean!

As near as I can find out, there's only one horror movie that actually involves Alzheimer's directly: in Renny Harlin's Deep Blue Sea (1999), scientists are trying to find a cure for Alzheimer's. So (as one naturally would) they genetically engineer SUPER SHARKS with amazing brains. What can possibly go wrong? Oh, yes. The shark thing, is what can go wrong.

Here's a good chunk of that movie, which conveniently starts out with the foolhardy scientists explaining their scheme to Samuel L. Jackson, and ends with indications that things are going wrong. (I do not think Jackson, at any point, utters the words, "Get these motherfucking super-sharks out of this motherfucking seabase." More's the pity.)

But that movie just uses Alzheimer's as a plot device. If you're looking for stories that actually play on our fears of Alzheimer's and what it means to our tenuous grasp of personhood, you have to look a bit further afield. And as Sir Michael Caine says, Alzheimer's is scarier than any shark, no matter how big.

But here are the ways in which i think we're starting to see the rise of horror that takes about Alzheimer's, obliquely rather than dead on.

Forgetting:

There's been a rise in stories about people's memories getting siphoned off. I have a vague but vivid memory of reading a comic book (or maybe seeing a TV show) with baddie who exults in erasing people's memories, and says things like, "I just took your memories of your mother," with a smirk. But I can't for the life of me remember where I saw this — almost as if my memory had been erased, fiendishly. And googling has turned up nothing. (Any suggestions?)

(Update: Thanks to everyone who commented. I think Ian Cyr is right, and it's a recent issue of Green Lantern Corps. by Dave Gibbons et al., featuring a baddie with mental powers. Although, someone reminded me The Surgeon General does something quite similar in Give Me Liberty by Frank Miller and, yes, Gibbons again. But it's fascinating how many other examples people came up with.)

In any case, there are lots of other examples of recent stories about mind-erasure. Dollhouse is an obvious example, which asks explicitly what's left of us after our memories have been stolen away. (And comes up with a moderately hopeful answer, over time: There's still something that remains even after our minds are gone, although it's hard to define.)

Heroes has the walking plot device, the Haitian, who mostly just shows up and zaps some of your memories whenever HRG or someone else needs a little memory lapse — then wanders off to do his own thing, until he's needed to henchman up again. But there is that one super-creepy bit where HRG is interrogating his former mentor in Russia, and he gets the Haitian to zap bits of the mentor's memory, piece by piece, gloating the whole time. You get the full scariness of being unable to remember your mother, or your wife, or other bits of your past.

Torchwood season two had Adam, the guy who insinuates himself into your memories. Smallville had Lex getting some super-advanced electro-shock therapy, which erased seven months of his memory, and being shattered as a result. DC Comics grappled with the ethics of the magician Zatanna erasing people's memories in "Identity Crisis." Acheron Hades in the Thursday Next series has shown a propensity for zapping people's memories as well. Various X-Men have gone around zapping memories of late, including Rogue, Professor X and Jean Gray. (And in
one recent X-Men comic, Emma Frost sadistically erases an assassin's only happy memory, vowing to do worse if the assassin comes back. In Mark Millar's Authority issues, the Evil Doctor also gets off on nuking people's memories.

The 2001 movie Time Lapse features someone who's been dosed with a memory-erasing drug, rushing to stop an evil nuclear scheme before his memory goes away completely. Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind featured people paying to have memories selectively erased, only to discover how terrifying that is in practice. And Dark City was all about people's memories being rearranged every night.

I feel like this is just scratching the surface — there's a lot of fiction right now talking about how fragile your memories are — and how, if they go, what's left may or may not be recognizeably "you."

The shambling hordes:

And then there's the fact that we're seeing a proliferation of zombie movies, which are all about people who are falling apart physically and have lost all of their personality and sense of identity. As someone who's lost a few close relatives to Alzheimer's, slowly and horribly, it's easy for me to recognize how zombies are a metaphor for this dissolution of the self. People with Alzheimer's are still conscious and aware, they still move around and seem to respond to stimuli, but as disease progresses they get less and less capable of reasoning or having any kind of meaningful interaction with anyone around them. It's heart breaking and horrible — the person you knew is still there, but no longer really him- or herself.

As I pointed out a while ago, the zombie movie which comes closest to depicting the awfulness of losing a parent to Alzheimer's is Peter Jackson's Dead Alive, which is also sometimes called Braindead:

Quasi-zombie movie I Am Legend even makes the link clearer by showing that the "zombies" still have vestiges of humanity and are capable of caring about each other. In the movie's original ending, Robert Neville is able to get through to the zombies and help them remember they used to be people — he comes up with a cure for their condition, and is able to get through to them. Because their real problem isn't that they're feral or mindless — it's that they've forgotten themselves.

The movie Fido also plays with this fairly explictly, by having the main character's dad become a docile, enslaved zombie by the end. He's still recognizeably the same old dad, but the biggest change is that he's lost most of his mind.

Obviously, a huge part of the zombie fad simply comes from the fact that they're a cool way to have an apocalyptic scenario — they're unstoppable and nasty, and if they bite you, you're screwed. They have many of the hallmarks of a good monster: loud, relentless, biting, overwhelming. But at the same time, as the zombie genre continues to expand and diversify, people are using zombies as metaphors for a bunch of different things — and one of those things, clearly, is having a loved one disappear, inexorably into the mists of forgetting.

So if it's true that we're only just seeing the beginning of the onslaught of dementia in our rapidly aging societies, you can expect to see more fantastical and science-fictional stories that attempt to capture the madness of it all. As Caine says, no monster can ever be as scary as Alzheimer's... but some monsters can help us come to terms with it.

Thanks to Kevin Schmidt, Morgan Johnson, Capt. Snowdon, Lynae Straw, Michael Wilson, Martina de la Cruz, Nivair H. Gabriel and anyone else I missed.

Apparently, you people have no respect for the classics. How else to explain the poor performance of the Mummy in yesterday's first round of io9's Hallowe'en Smackdown - but with Zombies being the clear winner of that clash of the undead, we thought we'd put them up against the peculiar ghostly phenomenon known as poltergeists. You know, like this:

What happens with an unthinkable physical force meets an invisible, untouchable ghost? You tell us.

For the uninitiated, poltergeists are described by Wikipedia as "an ostensibly paranormal phenomenon attributed to an an invisible spirit or ghost that manifests itself by moving and influencing objects, generally in a particular location such as a house or room or place within a house," and aren't necessarily out to destroy humanity and eat their brains like our zombie brethren, but which one would be more annoying, terrifying or outright deadly to your average horror movie victim? After all, everyone can knock the head off a zombie, but not everyone is an exorcist...

Poll stays open until the witching hour tonight. Vote early and often, and feel free to share your reasoning in the comments below - The winner goes on to face the next opponent tomorrow, all the way up until Saturday's final showdown.

Frankenstein Conquers The World

Because, sometimes, a monster has to save the world from a Godzilla-esque other monster, who's threatening (where else?) Japan.

Dracula The Superhero
We'd love to say that we can't blame Dell Comics for trying to cash in on the Batmania of the 1960s by turning Dracula into a superhero, but... Well, it's Dracula as a superhero. Even worse, it's a modern-day Count Dracula as a scientist who accidentally swallows some formula that allows him to transform into a bat and then decides to fight crime in a purple jumpsuit. Seriously, in what world is that a good idea?

Supporting Team Spirit Is Some Kind Of Good-Doing, Right?
Maybe werewolves were meant to be working for a common good. Exhibit A:

Frankenstein's Monster... Hunter
Ignore the shortlived attempt to turn the character into a superhero from the same people behind the Dracula superhero (Although we're slightly charmed by the secret identity "Frank N. Stone"); the best comic version of Mary Shelley's creation is undoubtedly Grant Morrison's sullen hero from the Seven Soldiers series, packing heat and a grim demeanor as he dispatches demons, alien invasions and deals with his former Bride, who just so happens to be a reanimated agent of a secret government agency investigating weirdness. Freaks have never had such a strong defender as this son of Victor Frankenstein.

Zombies Can Do More Than Shuffle
It's hard to make a case for zombies being good guys; they're mostly unthinking forces of brain-eating chaos, as opposed to particularly malicious. And yet, who could argue that this didn't improve their life just a little bit?

Werewolf By Night
His name is Jack Russell, people. Whoever said that the 1970s wasn't the age of Mighty Marvel Bad Ideas?

Buffy The Vampire Slayer In General
Vampires with souls, sarcastic werewolves in bands and demons with perfectly justifiable fears of bunnies. Joss Whedon's calling card may have specialized in making heroes out of monsters - even Dracula helped out the Slayers in the Season Eight comic series - but he made sure to keep them interesting even after they'd seen the light (Metaphorically so, in Angel's and Spike's cases, of course).

Dracula Saves Hallowe'en

Any movie that has a plot where Dracula has to save Hallowe'en because the classic horror monsters are seen as funny rather than scary already has our love, but where The Hallowe'en That Almost Wasn't goes horribly wrong isn't even the Munsters-esque treatment of the characters, but the casting of Judd Hirsch as Dracula. There's just no way to find that man scary, sadly.

We Ain't Afraid Of No Ghosts (1)

'Nuff said? No, wait...

We Ain't Afraid Of No Ghosts (2)

Definitely 'nuff said. Paranormal Activity would've been so much better if it'd been Casper visiting instead...

Today's match can only be described as one of grudge! In the red corner, we have the Egyptian undead known as The Mummy! In the blue corner, their modern-day counterpart, the Zombie! Both are shambling monsters of decay and destruction looking to inflict rigor mortis on whoever gets in their way, but which! Is! The! Greatest!?

While the Mummy has age and experience on his side - Not to mention a distinctive look that's been been stolen by others - he might be at a disadvantage when compared with the fact that zombies have that whole plague thing going for them instead of requiring a time-consuming ritual (and a few thousand years) to create them. But does the timeless, mindless rampage of an undead lover trump even the immediacy of instant desire to eat brains? You decide.

You should know the Smackdown drill by now: Whoever wins in this vote goes forward to take on tomorrow's opponent, and so on, throughout the week, leading to a Horror Showdown on Hallowe'en that may possibly make the internet quake in its cyberboots. Voting open until midnight tonight PST, so vote early and often.

Zombie image by Eric Ingram, Mummy image by Jon Worth.