The ZOM-B blog - covering the pop culture invasion of the living dead with info, news and reviews of zombie movies, TV shows, books, comics and games.
Looks like ground zero for the zombie apocalypse is... or was almost... Montana.
"Civil authorities in your area have reported that the bodies of the dead are rising from their graves and attacking the living" - that is the message that went out over KRTV's Emergency Alert System in Montana yesterday.
AMC is revisiting the idea of The Walking Dead in black and white after the successful use of the monochrome presentation of the pilot back in July. Word has surfaced on Twitter via a fan's message to showrunner Glen Mazzara of the upcoming airing of the first two seasons of The Walking Dead in good old black and white.
Twitter user @brayingdixon snapped the attached picture of a story in The Walking Dead Magazine and sent it to Robert Kirkman and Mazzara, who then re-tweeted it.
The black and white revisualization of the series will begin airing in February 2013.
Interestingly, the color to black and white de-colorization approach was originally done to great effect with director Frank Darabont's adaptation of Stephen King's The Mist and no doubt inspired the same treatment for his pilot for The Walking Dead.
The Walking Dead has just been named one of the American Film Institute's Television Programs of the Year.
"Each year, AFI Awards – favored by artists and entertainment executives for its intimacy and collaborative recognition – honors excellence in the moving image arts within the context of a Year in Review. One of AFI's national mandates is the creation of an annual almanac that records and preserves the evolution of the moving image arts in the 21st century. AFI Awards records each year's most outstanding achievements in film and television."
The other shows honored as Television Programs of the Year are American Horror Story, Breaking Bad, Game Change, Game of Thrones, Girls, Homeland, Louie, Mad Men and Modern Family.
Great news today for fans of The Walking Dead who use Verizon for their cable service as the two parties have reached a deal to keep AMC programming on the air!
The National Post has put together a graphic, The Stopped Dead, illustrating the the complete, chronological list of all 347 of the on screen zombies kills in The Walking Dead.
"While AMC lets The Walking Dead gang take a short mid-season break – the Post’s Andrew Barr and Richard Johnson look at a few of the key statistics of two-and-a-half season’s worth of undead mayhem. They find noteworthy – the gradual increase in the body count, the increasingly creative means of Zombie dispatch, and the fact that every character seems to have developed a clear enjoyment for putting the ambulatory cadavers down for good."
Check out the full picture of The Stopped Dead on NationalPost.com.
The Walking Dead continues to not only survive but actually thrive in the brutal, savage, cannibalistic world that is the TV ratings business with a historic first in television history.
The Los Angeles Times reports:
"The zombie smash has become the first cable series to win the fall TV ratings in the key demographic of adults ages 18 to 49, according to Nielsen."
The Walking Dead's midseason finale on Sunday night was watched live by 10.5 million viewers. An additional 4.7 million caught encores of the show and another 3.4 million viewers are expected to watch it via their DVR.
Congratulations to AMC and the cast, crew and makers of The Walking Dead.
KOLO reports that a 'PhD Student Uses Zombies to get Students Excited About Learning'
The attempt at the Shocktober Fest Scream Park at Tulleys Farm in England broke the UK record for most zombies in one place but, unfortunately, it fell short of breaking the world record.
"Showing tremendous dead-ication a total of 2113 zombies from around the UK massed at the Tulleys Farm Shocktober Fest Scream Park, near Crawley on Saturday 6th October. Despite a fantastic turnout from the living dead, Guinness World Records adjudicators announced that the world record had not been broken and that the current record of 4093 zombies set in New Jersey USA on 30 Oct 2010 still stands," reported the Crawley Observer.
Even without the world record, it was a great effort. Congratulations to all who participated.
From the official press release:
NEW YORK, Oct. 5, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- What does audience engagement mean in the age of social media? Researchers at the Harmony Institute (HI) collaborated with neuroscientists at Columbia University and City College New York to develop a new method for studying neural and social engagement with entertainment in real-time.
Measuring audience response to an episode of the popular AMC zombie series The Walking Dead, researchers found that moments that produced high levels of brain activity also produced high volumes of social response, suggesting a link between compelling content and social media engagement. Yet there were clear points of divergence, indicating that there may be types of content that people respond to, but refrain from sharing or discussing online.
The Harmony Institute worked with online analytics company Crimson Hexagon and Twitter to obtain and query all 19,000 tweets referencing the show during its original airing in 2010. The tweets were sorted in a customized coding scheme that took into account indications of sentiment, humor, and "immersion" or engagement with the subject matter. They were then pegged to 194 narrative units within the episode.
Together with HI, bioengineering faculty and researchers recruited 20 subjects to watch the show while hooked to electroencephalogram (EEG) monitors to measure neural activity. Since measurements were calculated for every second of the show, researchers were able to identify specific moments in the episode that were associated with high levels of activity for three corresponding brain waves, which have previously been linked to attention, affect, and memory encoding.
HI took an innovative, design-centered approach to analyzing and combining the data from each of these sources and developed a custom, interactive data visualization tool to compare brain and social media data with the content of the episode.
Preliminary findings from the study will be publicly released on Harmony Institute's blog, The Ripple Effect on Friday, October 12, 2012, to correspond with the show's third season launch.
The Harmony Institute, a New York City-based research center dedicated to studying the influence of entertainment, looks beyond traditional indicators (such as box office and audience size) to reveal entertainment's social return on investment.
Press contact: Joanna Raczkiewicz
T. 212.966.0606
E. Joanna@harmony-institute.org
SOURCE Harmony Institute
When the inevitable zombie apocalypse hits, the citizens of Palmyra, Pennsylvania will be more than ready, due in no small part to their new local store - the Zombie PX. From camping gear to survival equipment to knives and "long term food" goods (and some fun zombie stuff too), they've got all you will need to make it on your own when the living dead rise up and walk the earth. And, needless to say, business is good.
HeyUGuys.co.uk caught up with Brad Pitt in London and got in a quick question about the World War Z re-shoots:
NBC News checks in with artist Byron Rempel for an update on his Google+ Hangouts project "1000 Zombies".
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Forbes profiles Byron Rempel, the 'Man Behind a Google+ Zombie Apocalypse':
"There has been a lot of talk the last year about Google+ being a ghost town. It’s not … it’s a Zombieland.
Thank Byron Rempel for that. The artist from Manitoba, Canada has racked up 30,000 followers by turning Google+ profile pictures into zombie portraits."
The emergency first responders in Bangor, Maine are ready for the zombie apocalypse!
"... the gathering served as a training session on how to respond to an epidemic if one spread through Maine. In the mock situation, disease, chaos and the walking dead took over. While the zombie apocalypse wasn't real pandemics like the H1N1 virus in 2009 and the SARS outbreak in 2002 have proven to authorities they need to be prepared for anything."
Zombie Chris Hardwick explains why you need to subscribe to the Nerdist Channel for its April 2nd launch on YouTube!
ABC News correspondent Matt Gutman looks at the zombie phenomenon for Nightline including a visit to the set of The Walking Dead with Greg Nicotero.
It's haunted house season in Salem, Massachusetts and the witches are on the attack!
A little bit of zombie history was made yesterday with the sale of what is now the most expensive undead-related piece of memorabilia of which I am aware. At a Julien's Auctions event yesterday in Los Angeles, Michael Jackson's "Thriller" jacket sold for an incredible $1.8 million, one day after the second anniversary of his death.
According to The Hollywood Reporter - "Julien's said that Milton Verret of Austin, Texas, was the winning bidder; he plans to display it at Austin's Dell Children's Hospital and hopes to raise money for children's charities and hospitals around the world in the spirit of Jackson."
Michael Jackson wore the jacket in the music video for "Thriller", a groundbreaking work that was directed By John Landis and featured narration by horror icon Vincent Price. More ultimate short film than music video, "Thriller" was a mini horror epic with state of the art make-up effects, show-stopping choreography and even its own movie-within-a-movie, that cast Jackson in the roles of hero, werewolf and zombie.
"Thriller" received a well earned place on the National Film Registry in 2009.
As of late, advertising agencies and their clients seem to be infected with the zombie virus with a bunch of fun living dead themed advertisements debuting this year.
Starburst, the candy that touts itself as the "juicy contradiction", got in the game a few months ago by taking on the oxymoron of the 'living dead':
It's probably no surprise that Microsoft's new Windows 7 update couldn't avoid catching a zombie virus infection this year either:
Toyota ended up in a head collision with controversy when this Corolla ad hit print just as the alleged death toll from gas pedal problems accelerated into a massive recall:
Snickers treated their Spanish-speaking customers to a messy look at an undead coffee break.
Ford got an early lead in the undead ad trend back in May of this year when they highlighted the benefits of keyless entry when fleeing a zombie horde:
And just this week, Sears wowed everyone with a very well conceived and quite thorough zombie-themed site re-design.
The products may differ but the message is clear - Shop, Spend, Consume - So we'll being seeing you at the mall!
Zombies are heading back to the mall and this time they are being more than welcomed at Sears. Pulling out all the stops for Halloween, Sears has done an impressive holiday site re-design to cater to their living dead customers.
From fashion that will you "Revive Your Style" to jewelry that will help you "Accessorize Like The Living" to Kenmore washing machines that will make those "Brain Stains Be Gone", Sears is going all out to make sure the undead gets their insatiable needs met.
Not sure what to buy? Your can try out their Zombie Gift Guide or let the Blue Zombie Crew help you find exactly what you need. If English just isn't cutting it for your rotting brain, you can switch the site over to Zombian so it speaks your language. And you can even create your own undead buddy with the Zombie Friend Maker.
They've also thrown together a few videos for their special YouTube channel.
Check out the Sears site and follow their @ZombieShopper on Twitter for some surreal retail therapy
Well done Sears, you managed to make Halloween even more fun than it already is.