Winter in Atlanta Resembles a Zombie Movie

Five people have died, and 23 people have been injured because of Tuesday’s wintry weather in Alabama, the state Emergency Management Agency said Wednesday.

Asked if officials should have closed roads and urged people to stay home before Tuesday’s snowfall, Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal said Wednesday: “If we close the city of Atlanta and our Interstate system based on maybes, then we would not be a very productive (state or city).” He said that some forecasts called for just a dusting of snow. “It’s easy to make judgment calls after the fact, but I daresay there’s not anybody in this room that could have (predicted the degree) of the problem that developed.”
 
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Vermont Beekeepers are Up Against Zombie Bees

Vermont beekeepers face mite infestations, extreme temperature swings and the possibility of colony collapse. Last fall, a new threat emerged: zombie bees.

Beekeeper Anthony Cantrell of Burlington discovered zombie bees in his hive in October, the first time they’d been found in the eastern United States.

John Hafernik, a professor from San Francisco State University, discovered the first zombie bees in 2008. A fly called Apocephalus borealis attaches itself to the bee and injects its eggs, which grow inside the bee, Hafernik said. Scientists believe it causes neurological damage resulting in erratic, jerky movement and night activity, “like a zombie,” Hafernik said by phone Tuesday.

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Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare is Like No Other

If you haven’t already guessed, Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare–a game where teams of anthropomorphic flora take on the heavily armed undead–is not your typical third-person shooter. Sure, this spin-off from the Plants vs Zombies tower defense titles may borrow elements from established games like Gears of War and Battlefield, but it’s also trying to chart it’s own course through the crowded shooter market by creating an experience that remains true to the series’ offbeat, goofy roots (pun intended).

At a recent hands-on session with the game’s offline cooperative mode, it also seemed clear to me that developer PopCap is trying to mix established shooter mechanics with a more newcomer friendly and, dare I say, casual approach to things like levelling up and unlocking new features or weapons. So in what ways does Garden Warfare try to creep away from typical shooters?

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‘The Walking Dead’ Welcomes the Zombie Bowl

AMC’s first ever “Zombie Bowl” kicks off at 10am ET on Super Bowl Sunday.

Fans of “The Walking Dead,” TV’s #1 non-sports show, won’t be left out on one of television’s biggest nights of the year.

Every Humans vs. Walkers moment from “The Walking Dead’s” season one and two will run in a marathon all the way through the big game. Fans looking to be part of the action will have a full day and night of zombie hits and tackles so they can catch up on early episodes before the mid-season premiere on February 9th.

Watch the promo below.

“The Walking Dead” season four returns Sunday, February 9 at 9pm ET. “Following the devastating events of the mid-season finale, Rick and the group are still reeling from the loss of their home, family, and friends. With the destruction of the prison, we see the group of survivors broken apart and sent on divergent paths, unsure of everyone else’s fate. What was a challenging life behind fences and walls grows that much more perilous and precious as they are exposed to new dangers, new enemies, and heartbreaking choices. They will have their faith thoroughly tested — a faith that breaks some of them and redeems others.“
 
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Zombies Love For Jazz

PARK CITY, Utah – Let it be known. If you get a group of Class A comedians and comedic actors around a table, add a little booze, and start asking about things like zombie sex, things are going to get weird. When that group are the stars of the horror-comedy Life After Beth and it’s the end of a day of interviews at the Sundance Film Festival when everyone has a bit of cabin fever, it’s only going to get weirder.

After the Sundance unveiling of the film, WIRED sat down with writer/director Jeff Baena and some of his cast to discuss the dark rom-com where a young man named Zach (Dane DeHaan) finds out that his girlfriend (Aubrey Plaza) has miraculously come back from the dead. The catch? Despite initially looking as alive as ever, she’s actually a zombie.

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‘The Girl With All The Gifts’ Provides New Take on Zombies

Zombies are flesh-eating flavour of the month. If vampires have been co-opted as the perfect, pallid romantic emo boyfriend, the flesh-eating undead are the unlovely lumpen rest of us, hanging out in shopping malls, staring into space until the prospect of convenience food piques their interest.

You’d be forgiven for thinking there wasn’t much that could be added in the way of a new twist to George A Romero’s definitive recipe after their starring role in Pride And Prejudice And Zombies. In MR Carey’s terrific speculative-fiction thriller The Girl With All The Gifts, though, the ancient Greek myth of Pandora, the girl whose curiosity led her to open the box and unleash horrors into the world, and an inter-species love story, combine to create a book that is original, vividly memorable and unexpectedly poignant.

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Sundance on ‘Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead’

Well Go USA Entertainment has nabbed U.S. rights to Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead, the Norwegian zombie sequel that premiered in the Midnight program at Sundance.

Written and directed by Norwegian filmmaker Tommy Wirkola, the film stars Martin Starr, Vegar Hoel, Ingrid Haas, Stig Frode Henriksen, Jocelyn DeBoer and Orjan Gamst. The story picks up after the events of the 2009 film Dead Snow, which followed a group of students surviving a Nazi zombie apocalypse. Well Go USA plans to announce a domestic release date shortly (there is a theatrical commitment).

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Zombies Inspire Fashion

Zombie apocalypse is not longer just movie-material, but also a source of inspiration for the fashion industry. After Rick Owens, Marc Jacobs and Karl Lagerfeld took the catwalk by storm with an epidemic taste for a zombie takeover, other brands like ASOS, Byredo and Urban Decay are a clear sign that fashion shows are made after a screenplay worthy of an Oscar.

Spring 2014 makes way for an apocalyptic trend and the designer who rocks the boat of normality is none other than Marc Jacobs. New York Fashion Week becomes the birthplace of a new era in which survivors are set to annihilate the zombies in heavy military jackets. The scenario goes like this: a deserted beach, old trashy paperbacks, empty Jack Daniels bottles, scads of cigarette butts and crumpled copies of Vogue. The “Jaws” music theme sets the tone for an apocalyptic landscape and gives attendants goosebumps as the electronic music becomes more intense. Survivors with bleached blonde bobs step on the catwalk wearing heavy military jackets and dark sweaters matched with shorts and black dresses with helms that portray humans’ inner warriors.

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'Walking Dead' Is Not Far Gone

“The Walking Dead” is set to return for the second half of its fourth season on Sunday, Feb. 9, and AMC has released a short trailer teasing what’s to come for the beleaguered survivors on the hit zombie show.

In the wake of the events of December’s mid-season finale, the Governor is no longer a threat, but Rick Grimes and his people have lost the option of sheltering in the prison. After a bloody confrontation that left key players dead, the members of the group find themselves back out on the road searching for some kind of safe haven, and one another.

Difficult choices and potential enemies, not to mention walkers, greet them at every turn.

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Zom-Com Hits Sundance

Mainstream Hollywood never has had a problem taking inspiration from indie movies. But this year, the trend is being reversed, with indies borrowing from Hollywood's most popular genre flicks. Zombies, vampires, ghosts, even aliens -- they're all turning up in Park City.

Director Jeff Baena, for starters, has a rom-com (or zom-com?) in competition titled Life After Beth, about a lovesick boyfriend (played by Dane DeHaan) whose deceased girlfriend (Aubrey Plaza) returns from the grave as a pasty-skinned zombie. Think (500 Days) of Summer meets The Walking Dead. There's also Jamie Marks Is Dead in competition, a coming-of-age ghost story directed by Carter Smith -- he made The Ruins for DreamWorks -- about a teenage track star (Cameron Monaghan) who becomes obsessed with a bullied boy (Noah Silver) after his dead body is discovered in a river.

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Instant Horror Films on Netflix

Earlier we posted a list of 47 new horror titles that have just arrived on NETFLIX instant and it got many of our readers thinking about whether the service was starting to offer more for horror fans.

I for one have always been a fan of Netflix because what else am I going to use? I can not afford to buy every horror movie that comes out and NETFLIX is an easy way to partake without going broke.

So as a followup to my list of new horror titles added to Netflix I wanted to share 13 horror films on Netflix to watch while you still can. I have chosen horror films from a wide cross-section of genres and dates to appeal to as many readers as possible.

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‘Code Red’ Indi Zombie Coming in February

Indi Films knows how to talk to zombie fans. They know we’re jonesing for Walking Dead and they’re offering some methodone. Code Red is a zombie movie meets military mash-up–they’re saying it’s Band of Brothers meets The Walking Dead, which wouldn’t be a bad title either.

Code Red is a World War II zombie movie. Seems Staling had a secret weapon, zombies. Or at least a nerve gas that turns people into zombies. Code Red hits the streets on February 4. The screenplay is by Valeri Milev and Mathew Waynee. Code Red stars Paul Logan, from the movies Mega Piranha and Killers and the soap opera Days of Our Lives; Forbes KB from HBO’s Game of Thrones; Borislav Iliev from Wrong Turn 5: Bloodlines and Mya-Lecia Naylor from the film Cloud Atlas.

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DayZ Zombie Games Top Sales

We’re probably going to get a whole bunch more zombie and survival games thanks to DayZ
The PC shooter, which has players trying to cope with a world crawling with undead, is continuing to find success on Steam’s Early Access program. Today, DayZ lead designer Dean Hall revealed that studio Bohemia Interactive has sold over 1 million copies in less than a month.

The game has reached that milestone in under four weeks. DayZ launched on Steam and on the DayZ website for $30 on Dec. 16. It’s still in an early “alpha” testing phase. Gamers that pay to get the game in its current state will get all future updates to the title at no additional charge even if the studio decides to charge more for the final release.

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What Zombies Have to Say on Our Fear of Apocalypse

Zombies are everywhere.  Ok not (yet) on the streets (so far as I know); but in our cultural imaginary they are everywhere.  You can find them (in small groups and hordes) in high budget nail biting thriller movies like Brad Pitt’s World War Z (2013), on television, and all over print and digital reading material, much of it spoofing both our literary and political histories (including Zombies in Jane Austen and Abraham Lincoln).

For those of us engaged in probing America’s culture of fear and its highly toxic institutionalizations like mass incarceration and mass deportation, zombies seem to be a potentially important proxy for the demons that haunt contemporary society. But what do they tell us?  Actually, I think, quite a lot, and the news is mostly good.

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Zombie Chart and Classification

While most attempts to classify the different types of zombies limit their analysis to fast vs. slow, alive vs. dead, Jason Thompson‘s massive zombie taxonomy map goes far beyond that, cataloguing more than 350 different types of zombie.

Thompson is an obsessive fan of the of the horror genre—we’ve previously highlighted his comics adapting H.P. Lovecraft’s Dream Cycle and his webcomic The Stiff—and here he puts that obsession to great use. Drawn in the style of a vintage medical chart, this map classifies zombies from numerous books, movies, comics, video games, and TV shows, from literary proto-zombies to modern zombie romantic comedies. It’s fun to get lost looking through this chart. (Be sure to click “expand” on the image below in order to read all the type.)

Thompson is also offering 24″x36″ posters of his zombie map through Kickstarter (it should be noted that he’s still refining it), and the campaign is running for just a few more days. Keep it as a handy reference in case of the zombie apocalypse.

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Jughead to Undead on ‘Afterlife with Archie’

IT ISN’T SUCH a far creative leap, apparently, from Jughead to the Undead.

Archie Andrews and the rest of the eerily eternal youngsters at Riverdale High have been deftly riding the trends for more than 70 years — from burgers and shakes at Pop Tate’s, to texting and tweeting on smartphones. Now it’s only natural that they sink their teeth into…zombies.

In “Afterlife With Archie,” perhaps the most popular redhead in comics has more to worry about than choosing between Betty and Veronica — assuming Archie’s favorite gal-pals make it out of this series alive.

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