MacAbre, a.k.a. public radio producer Doug Gordon, got the idea to create All You Need Is Brains, which he describes as “Night of the Living Dead meets Spinal Tap,” from Madison-based band The Gomers.

Recalling The Zombeatles, the Halloween-time alter ego of The Gomers complete with songs like “I Want To Eat Your Hand” and “Hard Day’s Night Of The Living Dead,” he was inspired to bring them together. Gordon thought the respective acts [his and the Zombeatles’] could easily be combined thematically to create a short mockumentary set in a “zomniverse” where the walking dead have evolved, and apparently have staged their own British Invasion.

A report from the set gives us a taste of the film’s musical zombie humor:

At one point during the scene, [Jaw Lennon portrayer Steve] Burke strummed his axe with one dead hand before dropping it to the floor, at which point the zombie audience literally ate it up.

Gordon hopes to have a rough cut of the film done in time for the October 25 Madison Horror Film Festival, but you can get a peek at the Zombeatles’ shtick with their single, “A Hard Day’s Night of the Living Dead.”

The Zombeatles and undead fans infest Frequency to shoot mockumentary [The Daily Page]

Jada Fitch has a terrific line of monstery tees, including one of a zombie nurse. But our favorite is this scary bear, which looks like a cross between a teddy bear and those freakish things out of the mutant bear movie Prophecy.

Here's a scruffy robot pirate, created by James Ellis. OK it may not be strictly horrifying, but it does look rakish. And rakishness can lead to fear . . . and maybe even to hate!

And finally, if you want to get truly scary, there is nothing more menacing than an 8-bit alien invader.

Just think — any one of these designs could be emblazoned on your chest right now.

Electric Zombie Tee [via Hide Your Arms]

Scary Bear [via Jada Fitch]

Robot Pirate [via Red Bubble]

I Was Scary in the 80s [via The Analog Revolution]

Michael Bay
The Transformers director offers egomaniacal musings on vegan grub, explosives, and beach volleyball. What’s not to love?
Soundbite: “Right now, I am combing my hair. Holy hell it's a breathtaking mane.”

William Shatner
Apparently the real Shat has started his own official Twitter feed, but we’ll always have a soft spot for his original, macho imitator.
Soundbite: “Khhhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaannn!!!!! There. I said it. Happy?”

Captain Picard
Ooooh, it’s on! At the risk of mixing metaphors, thus far fake Jean-Luc Picard has secured the lead over fake former James T. Kirk in the wackadoodle division.
Soundbite: “Captain’s Log: Did Horatio Hornblower ever have to put up with this?”

Dr. Walter Bishop
The brilliant/nutty doc from Fringe makes for bountiful fodder for satire in this more-creepy-than-deadpan offering.
Soundbite: "When given the option I prefer human test subjects as opposed to animals, simply because humans can better describe the type of pain."

Darth Vader
Or as he’s come to be known: nerd comedy gold
Soundbite: “Just realized I could totaly [sic] go SCUBA diving right now if I wanted to, no special equipment needed. It’s good to be me.”

Bad Horse
The Evil League of Evil leader riffs on villainy and reveals that he's a gadget hound.
Soundbite: “Developing a new superweapon; gathering ingredients. Wondering if I should make this hoof-triggered or telepathically controlled. Decisions.” (Meanwhile, we’re eagerly waiting for his spitfire take on Harry Potter’s provocative turn in Broadway's Equus.)

David Hasselhoff
Oh, ex-Knight Rider. Why are you so easy to make fun of?
Soundbite: “Deciding which leather jacket to wear.”

Aquaman
The curious trials and tribulations of superherodom’s most muscular swimmer gets immortalized. In yo’ face, Michael Phelps.
Soundbite: “Emergency over. Making some crab salad.”

Buffy Summers
The one-liners don’t even come near to rivaling Joss Whedon’s clever TV (or comic-book) scripting, but for sentimentality’s sake—and a quick Slayer fix—this will do.
Soundbite: “Ok. Seriously: Nigerian Masks and Hawaiian Tiki dolls are never a good thing to bring into the house.”

Zombie Attack
Which zombie attack? Well, any of them. Here, the walking-dead genre is imagined in a rather gripping play by play.
Soundbite: “I grab Greg and tear him away from the body. We run towards the exit as he tries to wipe the blood from his face.”

The Brothers Brick, who organized Zombie Apocafest, gave out awards for best zombified building and best zombified vehicle, and integrated all of the entries into a single, zombie-battling city. Andrew Becraft of the Brothers Brick documented the tiny apocalyptic horror:

Zombie Apocafest 2008: Children, avert your eyes! [The Brothers Brick]

Created by husband and wife design team Chris and Lynn Lund, The Outbreak puts you in a seemingly abandoned house with four other survivors while the zombies are quickly closing in. At the end of each "chapter," you are asked to make a decision that will affect your ultimate survival: Do you save the injured guy or blow his brains out? Do you stay in the house or try to drive toward salvation? Only one sequence of choices will guarantee your survival, but if you die, you can use the chapter select menu to revise any of your earlier decisions. Zombie-filled trailer below:

The Outbreak [via Metafilter]

Romero told Movieset that:

“We’re shooting underwater zombies,” Chartier revealed. “They’re swimming, grabbing people’s legs, pulling them down. It’s a lot of fun.”

Good, good — methinks the World War Z people will be pissed to hear this, but it sounds like more of a Lord of the Flies take on the zombie genre. At least I hope it's more LOTF and not Survivor. Shock Around The Clock was told by Romero:

“It’ll be about three weeks in [past the outbreak] and it doesn’t start with the people in the mansion [at the end of Diary]. It starts with the blonde who drove away and the national guardsmen who robbed the people. So those are the only characters that return. What it’s about is tribalism. How the internet creates a Hatfields and McCoys situation. It’s on an island, where people have been lured by someone on the net as a safe haven, but really what these guys are trying to do is hold them up at the boat docks.”

Wow Hatfields and McCoys-type fighting, fantastic. Will there be banjos? Either way I like the idea. It sounds relatively new (for a zombie pic) and I still love everything Romero.

[Movieset and Shock Around The Clock]

Deadgirl is such a striking entry in the zombie feminism genre because it's just so damn literal. You've got a naked girl, strapped to a bed in a mental institution, being raped by a bunch of teenaged guys. Clearly a situation in need of a feminist zombie intervention if I ever saw one. If you were to boil the message of this film down to one basic point (which you probably shouldn't), it would be that men shouldn't rape women because those women might turn out to be superpowered zombies who want to eat your you-know-what.

As you can see from this tiny piece of the teaser, the movie is an emo arthouse take on your standard "how do you contain a zombie" plot. Filmmakers Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel did not accidentally create a movie that dabbles in questions of how women are degraded by men. That's basically the point of the story: Our vengeful zombie's refusal to be raped and ruined is symbolic enough to provide social commentary, but grody enough to keep you entertained.

Still, it wasn't that long ago that raped women in movies just stayed dead.

What struck me immediately on seeing the trailer for Deadgirl was that Sarmiento and Harel were clearly referencing another dead, raped girl wrapped in plastic. Laura Palmer, the girl whose murder rips apart the tiny town of Twin Peaks in the eponymous cult TV series, is also found "dead, wrapped in plastic," as one character puts it. You can see her glamor shot above, an image that was used to advertise the haunting David Lynch series starring Kyle McLaughlin as FBI agent Dale Cooper, come to investigate the former prom queen's murder.

Investigating the horrifying events that led to Laura's murder takes Cooper into a supernatural world of ghosts and the undead. But Laura never avenges herself. Her spirit lingers, as does the evil BOB spirit who has helped perpetrate the crime, but Laura herself never has a chance to fight back zombie-style. Maybe she's the pre-feminist zombie, the modest and lady-like creature who lets men solve the mystery of her death for her.

The message of Twin Peaks, at least in terms of its dead girl protagonist, is that men won't get away with rape — but they'll be brought to justice by other men, not the women they've victimized.

Similarly, the cult 1980s film River's Edge features a very Deadgirl-esque plot. A teen rapes and murders his girlfriend, then leaves her body out for all his friends to see. They decide to cover up the murder, visiting the dead girl's body every day until a few of them realize what they've done is wrong and turn in the perpetrator. That haunting image of the dead girl, unable to fight back, is partly what fuels the bizarre rage at the heart of zombie feminism. Watching that pretty, dead face, you want her to get up and scream: You want her to bite that raping bastard's scalp off and drool his brains all over the place.

And that was precisely the pleasure in watching this year's other great zombie feminist masterpiece, Zombie Strippers. This flick features porn star Jenna Jameson as a stripper bitten by a zombie infected by a government drug to keep soldiers fighting after they die. The more zombie-fied she gets, the more the clientele goes crazy for her. Even when she drags men into the back room and rips their throats out and bites their dicks off. Soon, the other strippers are begging to be infected too, so they can make more in tips.

Before long, nearly all the strippers are infected, and they've got a giant basement room full of all the reanimated, mutilated men they've been gnawing on. None of these strippers are being raped or murdered by men — they're just dealing with standard-issue stuff like objectification and the dangers of working in the sex industry. And yet it's hard not to see their undeaths as a kind of revenge on men who treat women like objects. These guys come to the strip club to "get some meat," and then they're turned into meat themselves.

The problem here is that the men actually like it. Their favorite strippers are the zombies, and the women have gained "power" only by becoming monsters. Just as our girl in Deadgirl can only fight back because she's a monster. So is the message of zombie feminism that a strong women is always a monster? That she must die and return as a ghoul in order to fight back against rape and less violent forms of sexism?

Or is the message that men must die and become zombies themselves before women will ever be happy? Two years ago, a brilliant Canadian comedy called Fido posed that very question. A traditional housewife played by Carrie Ann "Matrix" Moss falls in love with the zombie servant her husband brings home from the zombie control factory (after people start rising from their graves, his employer invents a "control collar" that makes them docile). Why is the zombie man better than her husband? He cooks, he cleans, he takes care of their son and pays attention to her. An object himself, he's able to see the humanity in a woman who is treated like an object by all the living men in her life.

Ever since Dr. Frankenstein reanimated a woman to serve as his monster's bride and she said no, the zombie woman has been a weird figure for female resistance to control. Zombie feminism is an uneasy subgenre, daring to use freakish gore and death slapstick to pose questions about what it might take for women to become unrapeable. Or for men to see women the way women see themselves.

The question is, why do we have to imagine ourselves as monsters in order to tell stories about what it would be like to become fully human?

The two main characters are Mitsuo and Fujio, two ordinary blue collar workers who work at a fire extinguisher factory. They accidentally kill their boss, so they bury him at the foothills of Mt. Fuji. It's fertile ground for zombies to be born, and sure enough, that's exactly what happens. The two guys manage to escape the doomed city, and they end up living—one as a slave, one as a zombie—in a walled enclave where rich people pit poor people against zombies in spectacular cage fights.

Hanakuma is a quirky guy with unique artistic sense. He was drawn to illustrating at an early age, and worked at factories all day and wrote manga all night until he finally had enough cash to quit his day job. He drew Tokyo Zombie in heta-uma style, an aesthetic that commands high quality drawings that look deliberately bad. Another distinctive characteristic of his work: he uses the same characters over and over in his different works. In Tokyo Zombie, the bald guy and the guy with the afro star as two jiujitsu-loving blue collar friends. Baldie and Afro have made numerous appearances in Hanakuma's earlier works, too, but they take on different personas each time. Sometimes they're evil; at other times they're just ordinary businessmen. "It's similar to how Tezuka used archetypes in his different works," says Ryan Sands, who edited and translated Last Gasp's English version of Tokyo Zombie. Afro and Baldie have also appeared in ad campaigns, and on little wallets and other paraphernalia carrying the Hanakuma brand.

Most of the time, protagonists in zombie movies use hand-held weapons like guns and axes to slay our dead-but-alive enemies. Hanakuma—himself a serious practitioner of martial arts—eschews conventional arms for jiujitsu. He also uses the cage fight scenario to make social commentary about blue collar exploitation and the human inclination to prefer brainless entertainment over real skill. (Even though Fujio is the reigning champ at the cage fights, the crowds of rich people hate him because he almost always beats his zombie opponents with one swift move rather than putting on a show.) "It's very Roman Empire," Sands says.

Tokyo Zombie was first serialized in a manga collection called Ax from 1998 to 1999; the movie—starring the super popular Tadanobu Asano—came out in 2005.

The zombies in Tokyo Zombie are generic humanoids that walk really slow, eat brains, and make stupid noises that really aren't that scary until they bite you and you turn into a zombie too. But Tokyo Zombie is not just about stupid zombies; it's a metaphorical story about friendship, class warfare, and the appreciation of high art. And most importantly, as Sands points out: "This is one of the first zombie tales where the apocalypse begins with a female zombie biting a junior high gym teacher's dick off."

Enough said.

Tokyo Zombie (Amazon.com)

Here's an excerpt from her weird tale, which is as much about prison social networking websites as it is about zombies. Link's main character, an ex-con named Soap, is infatuated with zombies, and here he explains why:

Zombies weren’t complicated. It wasn’t like werewolves or ghosts or vampires. Vampires, for example, were the middle/upper-middle management of the supernatural world. Some people thought of vampires as rock stars, but really they were more like Martha Stewart. Vampires were prissy. They had to follow rules. They had to look good. Zombies weren’t like that. You couldn’t exorcise zombies. You didn’t need luxury items like silver bullets or crucifixes or holy water. You just shot zombies in the head, or set fire to them, or hit them over the head really hard . . .

Zombies didn’t discriminate. Everyone tasted equally good as far as zombies were concerned. And anyone could be a zombie. You didn’t have to be special, or good at sports, or good-looking. You didn’t have to smell good, or wear the right kind of clothes, or listen to the right kind of music. You just had to be slow.

Read the rest today at lunch.

Some Zombie Contingency Plans [via Living Dead]

No clue who the new partner is, but the trades say Harrelson's zombie fighting partner in crime is an unlikely match to his character. We'll have to wait for more details to surface. But the bigger news is that real Hollywood filmmakers are going to start making undead pictures. Has the world become so over saturated with zombie movies that it's now popular? Is Woody about to break this genre onto the A-lister side of the street? [The Hollywood Reporter]

Written by UK Guardian columnist and media critic Charlie Brooker, the show will be mostly zombie horror but its setting obviously gives it a satiric edge to it. According to the Guardian:

It is understood that in Dead Set, the Big Brother house becomes one of the last places where people can shelter from the zombies . . . the contestants in the Big Brother house are unaware of the massacre going on outside. [It's] described as being like cult US show 24 "but with zombies."

Big Brother has always had a bit of a science fictional feel to it — the show is named after the dictator in George Orwell's 1984, after all, and the new Doctor Who paid homage to the show during its first season. The show will be directed by Yann Demange, who recently worked on Diary of a Call Girl with Doctor Who alum Billie Piper. The show, which will span six episodes, is set to air on the E4 digital channel later this year. Hopefully, more details to come on Monday, after the creators make some announcements at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival and at the Film4 FrightFest.

Charlie Brooker's E4 Zombie Thriller [UK Guardian]

There isn't too much detail on this foreign monster flick that's set to release in January. But it does prove that zombies can live forever if frozen. Which leads me to the question: What would happen if zombies stumbled into The Thing territory? Now that's a hybrid movie I'd pay to see. Still the pictures from Dead Snow look intriguing enough to show at any foreign film fest in a major city, so hopefully it'll come to one near you.

[Dead Snow via Twitch]

Sarah Jane follows a group of teens have to parent themselves in a world over-run with zombies. Jane is pretty spot on as to what would actually happen if kids (or me) had to parent themselves in the apocalypse. They all look filthy, the house is a mess, every other word is a curse and they chase each other around with weed whackers. It's got a great twist and absolutely worth a few minutes of your time.

[via SF Signal]

Shia LeBeouf is still rumored to be attached to the Y The Last Man movie adaption that Benderspink is producing — or at least there's a dialog about him being attached to it in some big wig Hollywood office. Who else could be in Y? The producer, JC Spink, told UGO that he was interested in either Zoe Saldana or Alicia Keys for the role of Yorick's bodyguard, Agent 355. But for Dr. Mann, he doesn't want Lucy Liu, he wants an unknown.

I don't know what I'm more excited for over at Benderspink: Vampire Zombies, Zombies Of Mass Destruction or Y: The Last Man. Well, okay, maybe Y.

[Hollywood Reporter]

Reality television producer Thom Beers is pitching Chopper Zombie, as a comic and later a movie. The idea is this genius inventor develops a special new kind of fuel. When he won't sell the formula to big brother, they drown him in his own recipe. He of course comes back as a zombie and seeks revenge.

Dead At Sea is a zombie script that has kicked around for years, focusing on what would happen if the undead ran rampant over a cruise liner. It hasn't been picked up yet, but it surely can't be any worse than Ghost Ship. Hopefully the new comic Dead Ahead (which follows the same story line) will inspire this wacky story to be told on screen. Dead Ahead follows two fishermen stranded at sea that can't return to their infected dry land. Unfortunately for them they stumble upon cruise ship jam-packed with zombies. The comic comes out this September, and I expect will be made into a movie by end of Christmas.

[Variety and Shock Till You Drop]

A Parisian gang takes on a group of corrupt cops. The two have a massive shoot-out over a murder within the cops' ranks. The criminals set an ambush on top of a skyscraper, and just as they are ready to strike, zombies overtake the group (on top of the building no less). Next thing you know, it's up to the group to work together to save their own skins. Sounds like a valuable lesson is learned through death and destruction once again.

[Twitch and Bloody Disgusting]

Becerra's animation is scary-real, and often times it's impossible to tell the difference between the drawings and reality. The original animated short made its way through the festivals and can be viewed at Moving Pictures Magazine.
[Quiet Earth]

[TNT via Bloody Disgusting]

The Zombie Lord commands his zombie minions from his throne.

Director Joey Evans put his Texan family and friends to work creating this spicy zombie flick, which was screened at the Film4 Frightfest in England. It looks like there's a great balance of zombie camp without abusing our undead friends, along with a few scary moments. And some good beef paranoia.

[Fright Fest]

Since I'm pretty sure that zombies don't exist yet, the show will most likely be fake (most likely) although it will probably make more sense than The Mole. America's Zombie is paired with VH1's new reality horror show, Scream Queens. The pilot for the show will begin shooting in June this year. Let's hope it's a success so we can find out what happens when zombies stop being polite and start eating brains.

[Shock Till You Drop]

The back story is that the world has been ruined by several World Wars. Paul lives with his Mother in the middle of a remote woods, where his mom's cult mines a black liquid drink that keeps her alive forever. In typical zombie-induction fashion, the drink decays the host's body and they become deformed and mindless. Basically, there's a lot of full frontal mom decay. Eventually Paul realizes he's got to get his mother out of the black fluid daze and acts. What's most interesting about this movie, though, are Hand's references to George Orwell: the characters are constantly being watched by secret government cameras.

It should be interesting to see where this project goes.

[JRH Films via Twitch]

The Marvel Zombies franchise - created by Civil War's Mark Millar for a Fantastic Four storyline before being expanded into a very dark comedy of its own by Robert Kirkman, known for his own independent zombie series The Walking Dead - has previously taken place entirely in an alternate universe where all the familiar characters have either become zombified or been eaten by their zombie brethren in various ways. The latest series, announced this weekend at the Wizard World Philadelphia convention, breaks the mold in three ways: Firstly, it brings onboard a new writer, Fred Van Lente (accompanied by new artist, Kevin Walker, replacing Criminal's Sean Philips). Secondly, it's taking place partially in the same universe as all your other Marvel comics (Unless you happen to get the Ultimate titles, in which case, never mind). And thirdly and most importantly, this time it isn't being played for laughs.

Van Lente explained what he's planning for the new series:

What I'm doing here tapping into my inner James Cameron. The analogy I keep using is that Marvel Zombies 3 is like what James Cameron's Aliens was to the original Alien. We're using the same sort of props, but we're just doing something completely different with them. Marvel Zombies 3 is more of a sort of action/suspence/horror comic. I really want people to care about the protagonists and hope they don't get eaten or infected and turn on their comrades... Pandemics are terrible things, and they're very unpredictable. They can have long-lasting and permanent effects, and this one definitely will.

Fred Van Lente on Marvel Zombies 3 [Newsarama]

The plot is simple and to-the-point. President George W. Bush, with new VP Arnold Schwarzenegger, has just been "reelected" a fourth time due to the wonders of electronic voting machines. All forms of public nudity (including in strip clubs) have been made illegal. The war still rages in Iraq. And scientists at the evil W Corporation have created a zombie virus to give to dead soldiers so that they can keep fighting even after being killed. Sort of a futuristic stop-loss situation. With zombies.

Inevitably, the zombie virus escapes the lab via an infected dude, with the Z Squad in hot pursuit. Of course the dude winds up in a strip club (whose owner is played by Robert "Freddie" Englund). He promptly proceeds to zombie out after biting Kat (Jenna Jameson), the star stripper. For some reason, her superpowered, rotting-flesh style of zombie stripping makes the guys go crazy! They just love all those veins in her boobies and her bloody teeth. So the other strippers start asking Kat to zombie them out too, so they can compete for tips.

Pretty soon, after about twenty zillion zombie stripping scenes that get weirder and more fucked up as the movie progresses, you've got a whole passel of zombie strippers who have to eat men every night. The men they pick from the audience imagine they're about to get some special attention — until they find out what it's like to get their dicks, tongues, brains, and guts gnawed out by apeshit zombie strippers hopped up on Nietzschean goofballs.

Inspired by classic existentialist play Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco, the flick is larded with references to philosophy (it takes place in Sartre, Nebraska) and surreal speeches which combine direct quotes from Nietzsche with Juno-style smartpatter. "It's not about a sense of self but of regression to the mean!" cries one about-to-be-zombified stripper, who then adds, "But it's so fucking cool!"

The special effects are great, the mood is pure fucked-up, and there is (of course) a zombie stripper showdown involving pool balls where Jameson commendably allows her naked body to look truly disgusting. After about an hour of watching the same dark sets in the strip club, you really do get the feeling that you're watching one of those claustrophobic existentialist plays where everyone is in hell screaming "I HATE YOU" to their own reflections in mirrors.

This movie is like some kind eruption from the dark heart of pop culture and intellectual culture at once, a meditation on female sexual conformity that nevertheless shoves boobies in our faces. But rotted boobies! That kill you! Are we supposed to enjoy the stripping or be grossed out by it? Are these just regular old cool zombies, or do they represent the disease of submission in political life?

All I have to say is: Damn that tongue-eating scene was great! And I don't think my life will be complete until poststructuralist feminist film theorist Kaja Silverman has explained this movie to me — or, if not me, at least someone.

Keep your eye on director/producer team the Lees. I think we'll be hearing from them again, and it's going to rock.

Zombie Strippers opens in theaters across the U.S. tomorrow.

And you can friend The Dark Lurking on Myspace, just in case you're feeling lonely. [QuietEarth]

The Descent and Doomsday both focus on women venturing into perilous situations. Do you think it's important that the heroes in your films are women? Do you write women characters differently, or are they just heroes who happen to be women?

It's certainly not some kind of career plan to have my heroes be women, it's just turned out that way. I actually wrote the story for Doomsday several years before I made The Descent. It was one of 3 scripts I tried to get made in the wake of The Descent and it was the one that Rogue Pictures chose to back, so it's really just a coincidence that my new hero is also a woman and I saw no reason to change the character into a man just because of what I'd done previously.

I try to write women as authentically as possible. Above all things, no matter how tough and rugged I make the characters, they should never lose their femininity.

The thing that seems most intriguing to me about Doomsday is that it seems to straddle genre lines, including horror, scifi, medical thriller, etc. Do you think this is true? Are you consciously trying to blend genres?

I love to blend genres. Taking the best elements from different inspirations and throwing them all into the mix is what makes it fun. Besides, I think the lines between genres have often been blurred at best, and that's no bad thing.

Most post-apocalyptic movies nowadays feature monsters (28 days, I Am Legend, etc. ) Are you consciously trying to reclaim post-apocalyptic movies from the monster-movie genre?

Absolutely! It's like there's an unspoken rule in movies now that virus = zombies! Well that's not what post-apocalyptic movies are about for me. It should be about human survival, because the day the next big global pandemic arrives, there won't be any zombies running around, I can promise you that. This is real, terrifying stuff, just as real as nuclear war was when the last great post apocalyptic movies (like The Road Warrior) came out. And that's the kind of gritty, savage world I'm trying to revisit with this movie.

Those tubes are escalators connecting different living areas to each other.

Koolhaas says he's using this 6.5-mile square mini-city to launch a critique of generic cities filled with acres of sameness. He wants this city to look like a cross between the supergeneric urban spaces of New York and the superfantastical, weirdly-shaped buildings for which Koohaas is known. According to the New York Times:

The core of the development would be the island, which would be divided into 25 identical blocks. Neat rows of towers — some tall and slender, others short and squat, depending on the zoning — line the blocks, as if a fragment of Manhattan had been removed with a scalpel and reinserted in the Middle East.

The monotony is broken by mixed-use structures whose immense scale and formal energy draw on mythic examples from architectural history. A spiraling 82-story tower might have been inspired by the minaret of the ninth-century Great Mosque of Samarra in Iraq; a gargantuan 44-story sphere brings to mind the symbolic forms of the 18th-century architect Étienne-Louis Boullée.

City on the Gulf [NYT]

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.

Doomsday, coming in May, is post-apocalyptic but not a zombie movie. People assume Doomsday features zombies because it's about a plague that wipes out most of the population, complains director Neil Marshall. But no. The plague liquefies your insides, but you don't ever come back to (un)life after that. People probably also jump to the zombie conclusion because Doomsday involves the infected Scotland being walled off, and everybody knows Scotland is full of zombies already. [Rabid Doll]

Famous names: Danny Boyle, Cillian Murphy, Christopher Eccleston

Crunchy goodness: 5

Life lesson: Sometimes one rogue military unit is worse than a nation of zombies.

Sight you'll never unsee: Cillian Murphy poking out Christopher Eccleston's eyes with his bare hands.

Design breakthrough: Boyle revolutionized the zombie genre by turning the traditional shambling, rotting zombie into a fast-moving menace, making subsequent flicks like the Dawn of the Dead remake twenty times scarier - and parody Sean of the Dead forty times funnier.

28 Days Later Review at Movie Freak