'The World's End' Creators Talk About Cops, Beers and Zombies

Back in 2004, Shaun of the Dead became a cult hit. That alone was a victory for its creators—director Edgar Wright, actor and Wright’s writing partner Simon Pegg, and actor Nick Frost, who collaborated on the British TV series Spaced—but the fact that it set them on the road to creating one of the great genre trilogies is a miracle. Their follow-up, 2007′s buddy-cop send-up Hot Fuzz, cemented their reputation for whip-smart scripts that both satirized and embraced the sci-fi and pulp tropes they’d grown up with. (Hell, Pegg’s 2011 memoir, Nerd Do Well, includes enough Star Wars meditations to choke a Hutt.)

Since then, Edgar Wright directed Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and has been developing Ant-Man for Marvel. Pegg nabbed plum roles in the Mission: Impossible and Star Trek franchises, and Frost has popped up everywhere from Attack the Block to Snow White and the Huntsman. Now, at last, the band is getting back together. Its Three Flavors Cornetto trilogy concludes with August’s The World’s End. The movie follows a group of friends who try to re-create an epic pub crawl from their youth but become humanity’s only hope in the face of an otherworldly apocalypse. Just your typical night out, really. WIRED asked the trio about bromance, revelry, and the ice cream treat that brought it all together.

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Film School, Zombies

Welcome, my dear students, to the 113^th lecture in CraveOnline's Free Film School, hands down the single best film school you will ever encounter. Why is it good? For one, it's informative and educational, and will – if working properly – expand your view of the world of cinema. Perhaps more importantly, it's free, and you're allowed to attend classes in the nude. Take THAT, NYU. This is also a film school that, when not expounding endlessly about queer cinema, or offering you half-baked editorials that escaped from the mind of the sometime-humble professor masterminding the whole deal, will have fun lectures on obscure subgenres of film. This week's lecture will be all about that now-everpresent stalwart of popular culture: zombies.

Over the course of the '00s, zombies (like vampires) somehow escaped the purview of the Halloween season, and started to shamble through every facet of pop culture at any time of the year. There was, it seems, a shared zombie apocalypse fantasy on the fingertips of every blogger, video game fan, and geek who had internet access. The joyous chaos and delightful gore promised by a good zombie attack proved to be a delicious escape that everyone seemed to share. There were the occasional books or board games or movies with zombies in them, and video game most certainly felt a huge influx of zombie material, but the zombie phenomenon seemed to be predicated on something far less tangible than a singular piece of art; it wasn't a book or a movie that kicked off the neo-zombie craze. 

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Smarter Zombies Come Up in 'Dead Rising 3'

Capcom has released a new trailer for Dead Rising 3 that features the game's new protagonist Nick Ramos and some of the toys, friends and possibilities of the new open-world zombie hack-n-slash.

The trailer, released by IGN, features some quick construction of weapons on the fly and teaming up with other characters. It also features shotgun-wielding zombies - just one of the many new, smarter zombie types - that may be a tinny bit smarter than the general hordes. New zombie types will include cops, prisoners, and football players.

Dead Rising 3 is an Xbox One exclusive set to drop this holiday season. Prepare yourself to lead Ramos in his survival after an outbreak in the open-world of Los Perdidos.

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Zombies Plague the Streets of Vancouver

NBC - The streets of Vancouver were filled with the living dead this weekend.

Although it looked like the zombie apocalypse, this is only the city's annual zombie walk.

It's a chance for regular people to ham it up as corpses
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The "undead" costumes were a little too real for some people.

Transit police said they received numerous calls from people who thought the zombies' replica weapons were real.

Hundreds of "zombies" take part in the event each year.

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Victory for the Dead as Zombies Arise

My first zombie movie was “Night of the Living Dead,” viewed at a midnight screening at the old Harvard Square Cinema, attended by a small coterie of late-night freaks and stoners. With its relentless dread and entrail-chomping ghouls, it was a film beyond the pale of normal, daytime moviegoers.

Flash forward three decades and zombie series “The Walking Dead” is one of America’s most popular TV shows, with a record-breaking 12.4 million viewers tuning into the Season 3 finale, while “World War Z” is a Hollywood summer blockbuster. Zombies are everywhere you look: The iOS app store has best-selling game “Plants vs. Zombies,” the bookstores have moved plenty of Seth Grahame-Smith’s parody novel, “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,” the news gives us reports of actual face-eating attacks, and the streets occasionally fill with “zombie walks,” flash-mob style parades where participants shuffle about in full undead makeup. (Walkers were even spotted in Yoyogi Park back in May.)

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Zombies, an Effective Teaching Tool for Kids

Texas Instruments, the company that made the graphing calculator the most ubiquitous learning tool since the book, is giving teachers everywhere an invaluable new tool for teaching science and math: zombies.

Yes, zombies. Zombies on graphing calculators, no less.

The walkers aren’t alone, either. Their ambassador is actress (and scientist IRL) Mayim Bialik. The woman we all knew as Blossom before she got a PhD in neuroscience and joined the cast of The Big Bang Theory has helped TI develop a program that teaches middle and high school students science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). The program uses models of zombie outbreaks loaded onto TI graphing calculators, computers, or iPads to demonstrate everything from brain damage (natch) to the patterns in which disease spreads. It’s brilliant, really. Students, inundated by walkers from World War Z to The Walking Dead, already understand the basics of zombie behavior, which provides a gruesome yet entertaining mnemonic device for understanding much more complex ideas.

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Facts About Zombies

Zombie culture simply won't die. From monster hits like The Walking Dead to epic video games like The Last of Us, the theme of infected humans shambling their way to world domination plays on our real, deep-seated fears of disease, war and psychological dysfunction.

While zombies aren't real (right? Right?), our latest #5facts video unearths some trivial tidbits about classic zombie films, the taste of human flesh and how America was so close to getting the undead president it deserves.

The episode above features actress Mayim Bialik, who stars on the CBS hit comedy The Big Bang Theory. Bialik also holds a Ph.D. in neuroscience and serves as the brand ambassador for Texas Instruments. TI teamed up with Hollywood and leading educators to create free software that delves into the science behind zombies, space, superheroes and forensics in the movies, so if you're a teacher or student looking for a leg up on these STEM education topics, check out StemHollywood.com for more info.

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