There’s just something so oddly funny about this zombie. The get-up, the jingling sound it makes, etc.

#4 – The Bicycle Girl from The Walking Dead

Not only is this zombie expertly made gruesome, but it also has a sympathetic quality few others do.

#3 – The Cemetery Zombie from Night of the Living Dead (1968)

He’s the first modern zombie ever. An absolute classic.

#2 – Forest Speyer from Resident Evil

Finding this longtime ally dead is shock enough. Having him lunge at your throat is even scarier.

#1 – Tar Man from Return of the Living Dead

A disgusting design, a great actor underneath and a fun, yet scary scene (“BRAINS!”) make this one my personal favorite.

Well, hiatus is almost over. I hope everyone has enjoyed these little snippets of zombie information. I’ll be back to episode recaps soon!

The Walking Dead Season 2 returns on Sunday February 12th 10/9c.

Click here to view the embedded video.

-Dane
Gotham Knights Online: Your One Stop Shop For Everything Batman!

Click here to view the embedded video.

-Dane
Gotham Knights Online: Your One Stop Shop For Everything Batman!

Zombies Ate My Neighbors by Konami

Zombies Ate My Neighbors was released in 1993 on the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis consoles. The game features one or two player games, with each player choosing one of the two main protagonists: Zeke or Julie.

These two heroes journey through various levels inspired by horror films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, using weapons like squirt guns and soda cans to defeat vampires, werewolves, and the titular zombies, all while trying to save hapless survivors.

Zombies Ate My Neighbors is a fun filled romp filled with quirky characters, great film references and a cool 16-bit soundtrack. The references alone should give any horror buff a reason to check out this classic. It is currently available on the Wii Virtual Console.

Ghouls n’ Ghosts by Capcom

In this 1988 arcade classic, players take on the role of Arthur, a medieval knight valiantly trying to save a princess from the hordes of hell. The game follows Arthur from a side scrolling perspective as he uses daggers, swords and magical golden armor in his quest.

The game is legendary for its difficulty, as Arthur dies after as little as one hit from an enemy. Only through the collection of armor and upgrades from treasure chests can Arthur extend his life. However, even some chests turn out to be deadly…

If you have the patience and don’t mind being humbled by an over 20 year-old video game, try this one out. It is also available on the Wii Virtual Console.

Sweet Home by Capcom

Only released in Japan in 1989 for the Famicom, Sweet Home may possibly be the first survival horror game. It follows five people who travel to a deserted mansion in the woods to find out the secrets of the ancient paintings within.

The group discovers that the mansion is haunted, forcing them to deal with the spirits, zombies and other demonic creatures lurking within during turn based RPG battles. This premise would be replicated in Resident Evil years later, where five teammates discover a similarly horrifying mansion.

Sweet Home is unavailable to western gamers, though there is a translated version on the internet. If you have any interest in seeing the true genesis of the survival horror genre, try to track this one down.

Hiatus is almost over, but next week I’ll be back with a post dedicated to my favorite zombies from films, video games and more!

“…I was really given no choice. I don’t understand the thinking behind, ‘Oh, this is the most successful show in the history of basic cable. Let’s gut the budgets now.’ I never did understand that and I think they got tired of hearing me complain about it. It’s a little more complicated than that, but that’s as far as I want to go with it because otherwise it’s just provoking more controversy and that’s not really of interest to me. I just want to keep my head down and do my job and be allowed to do my job, that’s key, and continue to, hopefully, enjoy it and do good work.”

Darabont also reveals how the cast and crew took the news.

“These people are like family to me. It has not been easy for anybody. Let me put it that way: It was like a death in the family. Only I was the dead guy. I felt like William Holden, face down in the swimming pool, narrating this thing.”

Darabont also went on to talk about his new show “L.A. Noir” and if you would like to read about it click here and scroll down to the bottom of the page!

-Dane
Gotham Knights Online: Your One Stop Shop For Everything Batman!

Fido (2006)

Set in an alternate version of the 1950s, Fido tells the story of the world after a long war with the undead. The government has found a way to put the walking corpses to good use, outfitting them with collars that inhibit their craving for flesh, allowing owners to use them as servants.

A young boy’s family purchases such an undead servant named Fido, and a bond soon grows between the two. When Fido’s collar malfunctions, he attacks a neighbor, leading to a series of equally gory and hilarious hijinks as the boy tries to save his best friend.

Fido is a fun spin on both Americana and the zombie genre. Smart writing, a lot of heart and an excellent performance by Billy Connolly as Fido make this a zom-com for the ages.

Night of the Creeps (1986)

A forgotten gem of the zombie genre, Night of the Creeps begins when an alien spaceship releases a deadly experiment. Years later the experiment is unearthed, leading to the zombie virus spreading throughout a college town.

As the bodies begin to pile up (and rise again), two college kids and a rugged cop must take back the campus and save any remaining co-eds.

Night of the Creeps is a great 80s horror film that makes plenty of jokes about the genre, the decade and the film itself.

Zombieland (2009)

Zombieland once again takes place after the fall of mankind, as two unlikely partners make their way across the U.S. in search of love, amusement parks and Twinkies.  As they travel, they meet other survivors and form a family of sorts.

The group meets a celebrity (in an incredible cameo), vandalize stores and tell viewers the rules of surviving in the zombie apocalypse.

Zombieland takes the fast paced, frenetic feel of more recent zombie films like the Dawn of the Dead remake, and adds incredibly funny, yet rich characters to concoct one of the best films of 09’.

Dead Alive aka Braindead (1992)

Acclaimed director Peter Jackson crafted the goriest slapstick film of all time with this tongue in cheek zombie movie. A rare “rat monkey” is brought to a New Zealand zoo, biting and infecting protagonist Lionel’s mother.

As mother becomes infected she adds more hapless victims to her zombie ranks, all while Lionel tries to cover up the epidemic and win the love of a local shopkeeper’s daughter. Lionel’s crazy uncle throws a party and the zombies get out, leading to one of the goriest bloodbaths ever on film.

Dead Alive is like The Three Stooges meet the Evil Dead. It’s a great film to watch with a group and even funnier considering it’s place in Peter Jackson’s now-esteemed filmography.

Next week, we’ll cover some vintage zombie video games.

“Sure, I’ll confirm that storyline. Why not? Big caveat here though:

CraveOnline is much mistaken in saying this was for a “web series.” This was never meant as a web gimmick, this was intended for use in the actual TV series. I wanted to kick off the 2nd season with the flashback episode Sam describes, which would have followed a squad of Army Rangers getting trapped in the city and trying to survive as Atlanta falls. 



The idea was to do this with a very focused “you are there” documentary feel. Not going all shaky-cam, but still making it a bit rawer and grainier than the rest of the show. We’d start with a squad of maybe seven or eight soldiers being dropped into the city by chopper. They have map coordinates they need to get to; they’ve been told to report to a certain place to provide reinforcement. It’s not a special mission, it’s basically a housekeeping measure putting more boots on the ground to reinforce key intersections and installations throughout the city. And we follow this group from the moment the copter sets them down. All they have to do is travel maybe a dozen blocks, a simple journey, but what starts as a no-brainer scenario goes from “the city is being secured” to “holy shit, we’ve lost control, the world is ending.” Our squad gets blocked at every turn and are soon just trying to survive. I wanted to do a really tense, character-driven ensemble story as communications break down, supply lines are lost, escape routes are cut off, morale falls apart, leadership unravels, mutinies heat up, etc. (Yes, this approach owes a spiritual debt to a number of great films, including Walter Hill’s Southern Comfort.)

Along the way, I thought we could briefly dovetail this story with a few established characters from the show. Not to overdo that, mind you, because it could get silly and too coincidental if you load too much into that idea. But I thought it would be great to veer off on a quick narrative detour that brushes our soldiers briefly up against some people we know. Picture our squad arriving at a manned barricade where some civilians are being held back from leaving the city on shoot-to-kill orders to stop the spread of contagion, it’s a panicked high-intensity scene, and in this crowd of desperate people we find Andrea and Amy. The barricade gunners panic, the civilians start to get mowed down by machine gun fire, and in this melee the girls get pulled to safety by some old guy they don’t even know. It’s Dale. He’s nobody to them, just some guy who saw the opportunity to do the right thing and reacted in the moment. This would have been perhaps a minute or two of the episode, just a cool detour like the various outposts the soldiers encounter in Saving Private Ryan, but we would have witnessed the moment that Dale meets Andrea and Amy, seen where that relationship began. I also felt it would be a great way to get Emma Bell back into the series for a moment, because she was so wonderful and we were all so sorry that her character died and she had to leave the show. (Of course if this “brush with established characters” idea didn’t work in the script stage, I’d have tossed it out. You try a lot of ideas like that as you go, see how they play. But I thought this one stood a pretty good chance of being engineered to work well.) 



So the story follows these soldiers through hell as the city falls apart and the squad implodes, with Sam’s soldier being the main character and the moral center of the group. He becomes the last survivor of the squad, and he finally gets to the map coordinates they’ve been trying to get to from the start: it’s the barricade at the Atlanta courthouse intersection from the pilot where Rick later finds the tank. The soldier is still alive when he gets there, but he’s been bitten. He’s accomplished his “simple” mission, but he’s gone through seven kinds of hell to do it (including being forced to frag his squad leader), and now he’s dying. And he crawls off into the tank just to get off the street and under cover. As his fever builds and the poor guy starts to hallucinate, he pulls his last grenade and considers ending his life. He sets the grenade down on that shelf for a moment to reflect on all the shit and misery that brought him to this sad end-point of his life, and to dredge up the courage to pull the pin…but before he can act, the fever burns him out and he dies. 



The kicker comes in the last moments of this episode:



After the soldier dies this squalid, lonely death…and after a quiet lapse of time…we do a shot-for-shot reprise from the first episode of the first season: Rick comes scrambling into the tank to escape the horde…blows that zombie soldier’s brains out…now Rick’s trapped…fade out…the end.



The notion was to take the “throwaway” tank zombie Rick encountered in the pilot, and tell that soldier’s story. Make him the star of his own movie, follow his journey, but don’t reveal who he is until the end. The idea being that every zombie has a story, every undead extra was once a human being with a life of his/her own…was, in a sense, the star of his own life’s movie. And we’ve followed this one particular guy and seen how his life ended; we witness his struggles, see his good intentions and his failures, and we experience his godawful death in this tank. That’s why I cast Sam as that tank zombie in the first place instead of just casting some extra. I had this story in mind while filming the pilot, and I knew I’d need a superb actor to play that soldier when the time came.



And then starting with Episode 202, we’d be back with Rick’s group and back in step with the flow of the established story from last season.

I always had in mind to throw in a “wild-card” episode every season, maybe as a season opener or closer. Just a separate story more in the feel of an anthology series, one that appears completely off the track of the regular series but actually does wind up tying in somehow by the fade-out. They did that sort of thing on LOST on occasion, and I really respected it. It always seemed like a bold choice that trusted the audience and rewarded their loyalty with a totally unexpected surprise episode every so often.

That’s it from me. I hope things are well on your end.

Best,

Frank”

And at this years Television Critics Association winter press tour Glen Mazzara also commented on the prequel idea.

“The story was one we discussed internally; that was Frank’s pitch and it was one of many ideas examined in the writers’ room, it just felt like a stall and we wanted to get to our characters. We have a lot of ideas like that… That was not something that was rejected by another party. That’s not accurate.”

Mazzara also commented on the character of Michonne and if she will be appearing in the T.V. Show.

“That’s a character we definitely want to work into at some point in the future,” mentioned Kirkman. “Whether or not it happens this season, I don’t really know.”

-Dane
Gotham Knights Online: Your One Stop Shop For Everything Batman!

Click here to view the embedded video.

-Dane
Gotham Knights Online: Your One Stop Shop For Everything Batman!

The Talking Dead After Show hosted by Chris Hardwick will return on Sunday February 12th at midnight/11c.

Q: How did you end up hosting Talking Dead?

A: I don’t know if that’s really an exciting story. I was a fan of The Walking Dead, Robert Kirkman had been on my podcast, and I had somehow heard that AMC was thinking of doing a wrap-up show. And time froze for a second and I was like, “What?” I immediately got on the phone with my manager and I basically just said, “You have to get me that job!” I don’t know how you can represent that tone in text, but…

Q: Did you have to do any sort of campaigning?

A: I felt like my audition was moderating The Walking Dead panel at Comic Con. I thought, well, if I completely bone this I’m probably not going to get the job. So it worked out that I thankfully did not bone the panel and then right after that they gave me the job.

Q: Is there anyone you fantasize about having on the show?

A: I think, Mark Twain would be delightful.

Q: OK, I was sort of thinking of people who are still alive… but what do you think Mark Twain would say about The Walking Dead?

A: You see, now you make me want to sit down and write a fake Mark Twain speech about The Walking Dead filled with colorful adjectives and jumping frogs. [Laughs] I don’t know, he’d probably say there’s not enough frog-catching in the show.

To read the entire interview click here!

-Dane
Gotham Knights Online: Your One Stop Shop For Everything Batman!