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by Annalee Newitz
Editor, io9
San Francisco, California
Chart by Stephanie Fox. Additional reporting by Katharine Duckett.
There’s been a huge spike in the production of zombie movies lately, and many of them seem to be inspired by war. Everything from 28 Days Later… to Zombie Strippers makes explicit reference to wartime, as did seminal 1968 zombie flick Night of the Living Dead. Is there really a connection between zombie movies and social unrest? We decided to do some research and find out. The result is a line graph showing the number of zombie movies coming out in the West each year since 1910, and there are definite spikes during certain years, which always seem to happen eerily close to historical events involving war or social upheaval.
Mostly we’ve focused on movies from the U.S. and Europe, and we’ve included mummies but not vampires and ghosts. It’s necessary to correct somewhat for the fact that more movies are being made as we get closer to the present, and (more importantly) there are better records of those movies with better tagging. So it’s easier to research movies with zombies in them if you’re looking at productions from the 1980s onward. In addition, there’s been a huge boom in indie and low-budget horror movies over the past ten years, and that undoubtedly accounts somewhat for the giant spike you see during the last 8 years or so.
Click image to enlarge.
If you’re going to look at these historical correlations, you have to consider that movies inspired by a real-life event aren’t going to show up in theaters for at least six months to a year, so we’ve accounted for that. Still, even correcting for these factors, there are distinctive spikes in zombie popularity, and they always seem to fall slightly after a huge political or social event has caused mass fear, chaos, or suffering. World War II, Vietnam, and the current Iraq War are all followed by a zombie rush at theaters, as are other periods of trauma such as the AIDS epidemic. Is there a causal connection, or is it just coincidence? You be the judge.
It’s not the first zombie-centric dating site, but it does have the best commercial.
Gravedate.com is a real site set to launch “soon”. If you’d like to be notified when undead folks just like you are looking for someone to talk to over a few brains, maybe a little uncoordinated running through town square, then sign up on the site.
via Kuriositas
The city council of Leicester, UK, has twenty days to respond to this Freedom of Information Act request by resident Robert Ainsley:
Leicester City Council has 20 working days to answer but its head of information governance, Lynn Wyeth, took to local radio yesterday to address the issue.
She said: “We’ve had a few wacky ones but this one did make us laugh.
“It’s one of those questions that you could do a one-liner saying there is nothing specifically in the emergency plan to state a response to a zombie invasion.
So either the government officials are either (1) guilt of gross negligence or (2) hiding their true plan — one that probably provides for the security of selected elites.
Link | Image: United Film Distribution
The Centers for Disease Control, an agency of the United States government, finally got with the times and decided to warn the public about the dangers of zombie attacks. Here’s what the CDC plans to do during an outbreak, assuming that its staff shows up for work:
If zombies did start roaming the streets, CDC would conduct an investigation much like any other disease outbreak. CDC would provide technical assistance to cities, states, or international partners dealing with a zombie infestation. This assistance might include consultation, lab testing and analysis, patient management and care, tracking of contacts, and infection control (including isolation and quarantine). It’s likely that an investigation of this scenario would seek to accomplish several goals: determine the cause of the illness, the source of the infection/virus/toxin, learn how it is transmitted and how readily it is spread, how to break the cycle of transmission and thus prevent further cases, and how patients can best be treated.
This sounds a trifle naïve. Anyway, the website then offers tips on how to prepare your family to live through this kind of unnatural disaster. There is one, huge, glaring oversight: no weapons. There’s not a single mention of the utility of guns, machetes, and such during the most obvious time when they will be absolutely necessary to survive.
But that’s probably more a job for FEMA. Maybe the CDC isn’t the place to go for survival advice.
The hit viral video “Charlie Bit My Finger” is now being turned into a feature length major motion picture. OK, maybe not but this short film imagines what a horror version of the video would be like. See full video at the link.
The architectural firm KWK Promes takes security very seriously. Its “Safe House” design, at the push of a button, drops steel shutters, swings concrete slabs over windows, and lifts a drawbridge. For those of you who think that this is silly (because zombies, unlike vampires and werewolves, aren’t real), just remember:
If you’re prepared for the zombie apocalypse, a hurricane is just a storm.
Link via Geekologie | Photos: KWK Promes
Is there something about a cute bunny rabbit that brings out the perverse side of toy designers? You’d think so by looking at these! The bunnies on this list are scary, bloody, or dead, and may be disturbing to some readers. To be fair, they are marketed to adults. Shown here are the Killer Bunny Slippers of Caerbannog, the most innocuous image of the lot. Link
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We’ve had some marvelously funny and inventive submissions to our contest imagining life trapped inside the NeatoShop warehouse while surrounded zombies. Neatoramanauts were challenged to think of creative uses for the contents of the warehouse as survival tools and weapons. Here are the three runners-up, each of whom wins a free t-shirt of his choice:
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Redditor TheLocoYoko and his fiancée wanted to set the right mood for their wedding, and so commissioned this image for their wedding invitations. When he was asked “Are you inviting people to a wedding, or a massacre?”, TheLocoYoko responded “Depends on how things go with the open bar.”
It’s May, 2011 in sunny Santa Clarita, California. A gentle breeze is rolling in from the sea, adding a nice cool to the air on your face. It’d be a wonderful day to go down to the beach, or a hike in the mountains. You’d might consider doing either, but you’re surrounded by a horde of the undead while inside the NeatoShop warehouse.
The fall of civilization came surprisingly quickly, as most people simply refused to divert their attention from petty concerns while the infection spread. You, too, were distracted by silly things, like the newest Rebecca Black video and Charlie Sheen’s astonishing career comeback.
Now it’s too late to make serious preparations. You’ll just have to improvise from materials in your current location — the warehouse serving the NeatoShop retailing empire.
What will you do? You came without so much as a rock in your pocket and now must survive using only the contents of the warehouse.
This is a contest. Look through the contents of the ‘Shop and devise materials that you’ll need to survive — improvised weapons, water filters, medical equipment, cook stoves — anything that you’ll need to see through the end of this dark chapter in human history.
Leave the description your improvised survival tool in the comments. The most inventive/funniest/silliest will win your choice of any item under $25 from the NeatoShop, and several runners-up will win a t-shirt of their choice!
When you enter the description of your survival implement(s), be sure to also provide the name of the item that you want if you win. Please make sure that you provide a selection or your entry will not be considered.
(Original image credit: Flickr user theogeo)
Last year, John Farrier wrote a great Neatogeek post about geeky love songs. While the twelve listed were great, there were still plenty more great geek ballads out there. Here are ten more love songs sure to get your nerd juices flowing.
How is it nerdy? This is the song that inspired me to write this list. It’s an ultimate geek love song in that a woman is able to seduce her love interest not through her looks but through chemistry and other scientific fields.
Choice lyrics: It’s poetry in motion/And now she’s making love to me/The spheres are in commotion/The elements in harmony/She blinded me with science/”She blinded me with science!”/And hit me with technology
Video:
How is it nerdy? It might just be impossible to write a romantic song with more Dungeons and Dragons references.
Choice lyrics: I picked up spell resistance from the enchanted school/So I could bend up all these magic pretences/And though always use it as a general rule /This time I’m lowering all my defences
Video: There’s no official video for the song, but here’s a YouTube video with the song.
Video link
How is it nerdy? MC Chris is one of the biggest stars of the nerdcore hip hop scene and this serenade to a nerd shows just how geeky he can be, even when discussing matters of the heart.
Choice lyrics: She’s romantic, known to panic/With anxiety attacks/Literary, it’s so scary/Reading Brontes back to back/She’s playing Ragnarok on her mom’s Magnavox/She’s underneath my skin like a million nanobots
Video:
How is it nerdy? It’s not even about a girl, it really is about loving a computer and how the computer is far better than a real girlfriend.
Choice lyrics: I’ve never been quite so happy/all I need to do is click on you/and we’ll be joined/in the most soul-less way/and we’ll never/ever ruin each other’s day
more …
Just when you think a Twitter feed is run by machines, something happens to remind you that a real person with a real sense of humor is on duty. The Boston Police Department assures us that they aren’t holding back pertinent information. -via Breakfast Links
This is kinda cute! Click the zombies in the Zombie Tabernacle Choir to make them sing their little heads off, sweetly, yet a little bit creepily. Link -Thanks, John Schnall!
Sears has an entire advertising campaign built around zombies, complete with a zombie shopping website. Link -via Bits and Pieces
Quirk Books is the publisher of offbeat titles like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. Their new book by Kevin David Anderson and Sam Stall imagines a zombie outbreak in the midst of a Star Trek convention. The above video is a trailer for that book.
via Fanboy | Amazon Link
Jason McDonald, a fan of Robert Kirkman’s Walking Dead series has mapped out major events from the comic book series. Markers on this interactive map illustrate exactly where all the action goes down. It’s zombielicious.
Deliver Me To Hell is an interactive zombie movie that contains the things you love: zombies, violence, mild gore, scantily-clad women, iphones, and pizza. You decide which directions the plot takes, and if you don’t like how the story turns out, just start over again. I wish life were like that. Produced by Hell Pizza of New Zealand. Link (embedded YouTube clip)
The ScienceBlogs network had “Zombie Day” on Thursday. Just about all of the scientists who blog there posted at least one article about zombies, most of them somehow pertaining to their normal field of expertise. Some just had fun with it! To accompany the madness, Joseph Hewitt of Ataraxia Theatre created two dozen zombie portraits of the scientists. Click on portrait at the main page to go to a zombie post by that author. Link
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Mira Grant, author of the zombie novel Feed, shows how to make adorable braaains cupcakes for the zombies in your life.
So you’re preparing your ultimate zombie-themed dinner party, and you’re stuck for a dessert. Or you’re entertaining a zombie who’s recently gone vegetarian, and is jonesing for those good old days of gray matter and the delicious taste of human brains. Whatever your reasons, you need a brainy treat that puts the “sweet” back into “sweetmeats.”
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by jimmdare.
The flesh-eating reanimated dead exist in ancient writings, in folklore, in news accounts, and in movies. What is it about these creatures that captures our imagination?
Representations of the flesh-hungry undead have been common throughout world mythology. While this includes the deformed and cannibalistic, though still living, ghoul and the blood draining vampire, the zombie in its more common, modern form has appeared in tales dating all the way back to 1000 BC. The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest known works of literature, which was recorded on twelve clay tablets, written in Mesopotamia, now modern day Iraq. Like most epics it records a struggle between a hero, Gilgamesh, and the Gods, as he undertakes quests which displease his spiritual overlords. It is in the sixth tablet that the zombie is alluded to when the Goddess Ishtar threatens to raise the dead who will outnumber and devour the living. The dead do not actually rise in the epic; however it is the first overt mention in recorded literature of the zombie we know today.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by vedran84.
Quirk Books is on a roll with their runaway success of the Jane Austen and zombies mash up series. First came Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, then Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters by Ben H. Winters.
Now, here’s the book trailer for new Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls
It looks awesome – hopefully they’ll make a movie, too! Thanks Melissa!
Previously on Neatorama: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies | Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters
2009 has been a great year for weird news. Asylum has collected the best weird stories this year that were featured on the Digg homepage. Remember when Woody Harrelson attacked a photographer, claiming he thought he was a zombie? Or when the girl with stars all over her face lied about falling asleep in the tattoo artist’s chair?
Zombaritaville is a Seattle-based blogger who writes parodies of popular songs, reimagining them as zombie-themed. Here’s a passage from the lyrics for his song “Rippin’ Off Your Skin”, based on Bob Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind”:
How many lobes must a ghoul gulp down
Before he eats the whole brainpan?
How many skulls must a sniper nail
Before her rifle has jammed?
Yes, n’ how many bites must I take of this guy
Before I’ve digested his hand?
The zombies my friend, are rippin’ off your skin
The zombies are rippin’ off your skinYes, n’ how many folks must cease to exist
Before it’s called a “killing spree”?
Yes, n’ how many years in this mall can we subsist
‘Til we’re forced by bikers to flee?
Yes, n’ how many towns must shamblers infest
Before they all turn to debris?
The zombies my friend, are rippin’ off your skin
The zombies are rippin’ off your skin
Other songs that he’s rewritten include Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler“, Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U“, “Jack & Diane” by John Mellencamp, and “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen.
Link via Boing Boing
Image by flickr user ingridjee used under creative commons license
Four statisticians at the University of Ottawa and Carleton University have published an article in the peer-reviewed journal Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress on the subject of zombie epidemiology. It’s entitled “When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection.” It’s a very math-heavy article, but their conclusion is straight-forward and dire:
An outbreak of zombies infecting humans is likely to be disastrous, unless extremely aggressive tactics are employed against the undead. While aggressive quarantine may eradicate the infection, this is unlikely to happen in practice. A cure would only result in some humans surviving the outbreak, although they will still coexist with zombies. Only sufficiently frequent attacks, with increasing force, will result in eradication, assuming the available resources can be mustered in time.
Well, that was fairly obvious. But now there’s hard science to back up common sense, and the academic community is starting to take the undead threat seriously.
Image by flickr user ingridjee used under creative commons license
More awesome than Pride and Prejudice and Zombies? I don’t know yet, but the novel Death Troopers by Joe Schreiber looks promising. Here’s a synopsis:
When the Imperial prison barge Purge–temporary home to five hundred of the galaxy’s most ruthless killers, rebels, scoundrels, and thieves–breaks down in a distant, uninhabited part of space, its only hope appears to lie with a Star Destroyer found drifting, derelict, and seemingly abandoned. But when a boarding party from the Purge is sent to scavenge for parts, only half of them come back–bringing with them a horrific disease so lethal that within hours nearly all aboard the Purge die in ways too hideous to imagine.
And death is only the beginning.
The Purge’s half-dozen survivors–two teenage brothers, a sadistic captain of the guards, a couple of rogue smugglers, and the chief medical officer, the lone woman on board–will do whatever it takes to stay alive. But nothing can prepare them for what lies waiting aboard the Star Destroyer amid its vast creaking emptiness that isn’t really empty at all. For the dead are rising: soulless, unstoppable, and unspeakably hungry.
Schreiber has a blog, where you can find pictures of his zombified Storm Troopers staggering around ComicCon, promoting his book.
A promotional shirt for Resident Evil: Darkside Chronicles. Looks like an ordinary and rather plain t-shirt, right? But flip over the front and pull it over your head….
And you’re wearing a zombie mask! Strangely, they don’t make this shirt in a women’s style.
I’m thinking that Neatorama needs to create one of these. Neatorama logo on the front, flip it up, and you’re wearing an Alex mask.
Link via Topless Robot
Just in time for Mothers’ Day! It’s the Zombie Stomper Heel, which the seller describes as “Perfect for stompin’ on zombies..and men’s hearts.”
What do zombie chickens, Osama bin Laden and Paris Hilton have in common? They’re all in the best bad movies that have come out in the past 20 years.
Movies that were box office bombs, universally panned or just made as a bad movie from the ground up, here’s the 20 you hate to love as compiled by I Heart Chaos.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by cbz3000.
Dr. Steven Schlozman, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, will present a public lecture on the neuropsychology of zombies, as well as that of zombie attack survivors:
And that’s the crux of one of Schlozman’s arguments: The story changes as the situation grows grimmer. Here, the professor draws on “mirror neuron” theory, which holds that humans are hard-wired to reflect the psychological states of the people around them. (Show a test subject a short film of a face displaying disgust, or pleasure, and regions of the brain associated with those feelings activate in the subject.)
Unable to relate to the hordes of undead, the survivors in zombie films enter a spiral of despair, feeding off the panic and hopelessness of the uninfected people around them.
If you’re in Boston on Monday night, check it out.
Link — Thanks, Tom Jackson!
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