Want to know something about zombies? First, let's tackle the movie that made them a horror icon, with facts from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids. 

Night of the Living Dead (1968), directed by 28-year-old George A. Romero, changed the image of zombies in popular culture from enslaved workers of Caribbean voodoo wizards to hungry all-American flesh-eaters.

The film’s budget was tiny: just $114,000. It eventually grossed $30 million worldwide.

The actors who played the zombies were friends and clients of Romero’s struggling film production company. They had to provide their own costumes. Their pay? $1 and a T-shirt.

The blood was chocolate syrup, and the gory body parts came from one of the producers who was also a butcher.

The word “zombie” never appears in the movie.

Night of the Living Dead featured an African American as the lead of an otherwise all-white cast. That was almost unheard of in 1968.

Last week we went to visit The Rise of the Jack-O-Lanterns at the San Diego Safari Park. This incredible pumpkin-carving festival features over 5,000 pumpkins carved throughout the week so there are fresh ones on display every weekend from now until Halloween. If you're not in San Diego, you can also check out The Rise in Los Angeles and New York and I highly recommend the visit. Here are some highlights from our experience though I get the feeling each event has unique attractions so what you see here is probably a bit different than what you might see in person.

At the start of the event you could see carvers making new pumpkins -in part I'm sure it was to show that the pumpkin works of art were actually real and carved fresh before the event, but it also helped emphasize the talent and creativity of the artists.

Still, as cool as these are, they are nowhere near as impressive as the ones actually inside the exhibit.

It seems appropriate that while there we traditional signs around the event, the main one was made from pumpkins -it also seemed oddly appropriate that like Halloween pumpkins, one of the letters had gone out.

This pumpkin sentinel was on guard to protect his other carved friends.

Each area had a theme and the first theme was Under the Sea and here was the welcome sign.

They say death rides a white horse, but we really can’t be sure of the color when the horse is wearing a Halloween costume! If you were trick-or-treating in a rural area where the houses were miles apart, you’d want a ride, wouldn’t you? And if you’re going to dress as a skeleton, you may as well dress up your horse, too! These youngsters are part of a collection of 30 vintage Halloween photos at The Post-Mortem Post. The images are from back in the days when the whole point of dressing up for Halloween was to be scary, and the homemade costumes were even creepier than the store-bought masks. -via Everlasting Blort

It’s the season for our attention to turn to zombies, for Halloween, for the return of The Walking Dead, for zombie walks, and just for fun. Robert Jones put together this supercut of zombies we’ve seen in so many horror movies over the years.

(YouTube link)

Some are lame, some ridiculous, some scary, and some are the kind that would make you ill if you had to look at them any longer than this. The song is “Pretend We’re Dead” by L7. -via Tastefully Offensive

The way we celebrate Halloween involves buying lots and lots of cheap decorations manufactured in countries that don’t have the same traditions or language. It’s not surprising that items slip through that don’t quite make sense because of spelling errors, like the obtuse costume pictured. Even so, it is kind of acute. Notice they spelled angel correctly in the Spanish text.

Some Ecards rounded up quite a few of the spoopiest items to accompany your trick or treak this Holloween. -via Pleated-Jeans 

Edward J. Cabral is an artist. He makes cakes, ceramics, drawings, paintings, and beautifully carved pumpkins. The carving above above is his latest, posted by DankPawt at reddit.

You must see his other pumpkins. And cakes.  

Cosplayer Ivy Star showed the costume she unveiled at Dragoncon New York last weekend. I hope it dawns on you before you can read this whole post. She mashed two TV genres together for this one. The two genres are reality TV and science fiction. The science fiction is Star Trek. The reality TV is Keeping up with the Kardashians. You’ve almost got it: the Cardassians are a humanoid species from the Alpha Quadrant noted for their gray skin and facial ridges. Therefore, behold Kim Cardassian.

(Image credit: Mig Photography World)

Quick, who played Frankenstein’s monster? Boris Karloff, of course! Karloff played the monster three times, but the role was also filled by Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney, Jr., and Glenn Strange. Who? Glenn Strange doesn’t have the name recognition that Karloff had, but he played the monster in three movie -just like Karloff. The 6’5” Strange made his living playing cowboys in Western movies and TV shows, and he isn’t much remembered for that, either.

As the story goes, while making up Strange for yet another cowboy picture in 1944, Universal makeup legend Jack Pierce offered him a few bucks to stay late that night so Pierce could try an experiment. Strange agreed, and when Pierce finished working on him that night and he saw the results, his first response was “I look like Boris Karloff.”

Read the strange story of how Universal constantly recast Frankenstein’s monster, and how Glenn Strange filled those big, heavy shoes, at Den of Geek. 

You might know Kirk “The Ripper” Hammett as the lead guitarist for Metallica, but he’s also a serious collector of horror ephemera and memorabilia. It started when he was a child and was thrilled to be terrified by the 1962 movie The Day of the Triffids. He started collecting comic books, horror magazines, and models, as much as he could with a kids’ budget. After hitting it big with Metallica, his collecting went into overdrive, as he could then acquire rare and coveted items.  

In 2012, he published a book on his collection called Too Much Horror Business, and the following year, he created “Kirk’s Crypt” to display some of his horror memorabilia at the Orion Music + More metal festival in Detroit. Kirk’s Crypt inspired him to launch a full-on three-day horror convention, Kirk Von Hammett’s Fear FestEvil, in his hometown of San Francisco in 2014. The annual event has featured interactive displays, including one on Hammett’s monster collection; performances by metal bands like Carcass, Death Angel, and Hammett’s pre-Metallica band Exodus; and guest appearances by modern horror actors, directors, and makeup artists, as well as the children of classic horror stars Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. Currently, travelers going through San Francisco on Virgin or American Airlines can view part of Hammett’s horror collection at the San Francisco International Airport Museum’s “Classic Monsters: The Kirk Hammett Collection” exhibition in Terminal 2.

Hammett talked to Collectors Weekly about how his obsession with horror developed, the history of horror films and the memorabilia they spawned, and how he learned the business of collecting such rare items as movie props and custom horror guitars. There’s a bonus gallery of classic horror memorabilia, too.

Creatures of the night don't come much more hauntingly beautiful than Vampira, TV's first horror host who inspired many creepy characters to come, including Elvira, Mistress of the Dark.

Vampira is a character created by the late Maila Nurmi, and although she inspired future generations with her fiendish fashion sense and vampy persona, Maila's time in the spotlight was sadly short lived.

Maila spent her golden years painting portraits of Vampira and selling them through an art dealer in L.A., her iconic character kept alive via paint covered canvas.

Here's a short video featuring Maila discussing where her passion for painting began:

(YouTube Link)

Read more about Vampira's passion for painting at Dangerous Minds

We love terrifying Halloween food, but it's hard to make something mentally scarring without a ton of experience. If you're brave enough to try the DIY approach though, Instructable user SemadarG has put together a handy tutorial on how to make your own nightmarish cupcakes like the one above. 

You and I would go straight for a brain-shaped cake mold and call it a day. But baker and cake artist Yolanda Gampp went all the way, creating an entire brain cake from scratch. The red velvet cake was baked in a bowl, and then sculpted with custom-made fondant to make the cerebellum and the folds of the cortex.

(YouTube link)

Add some raspberry syrup, and the finished product looks like something you’d see in an anatomy class. The real fun will be cutting into this thing! Want the recipe? You’ll find it at Glampp’s blog How to Cake It.  -via Tastefully Offensive

Happy first day of Fall! #pumpkin #jackolantern #bb8 #starwars #autumn #episode7 #artsy #creative #photooftheday #t… pic.twitter.com/Kz8fMYyK0p

— Daniel Hoogkamp (@Dantooine2) September 24, 2015

Star Wars fan Daniel Hoogkamp put together the Jack-o-Lantern we all want, a representative of the BB-8 droid from Stars Wars VII: The Force Awakens. These are orange pumpkins painted white. He used a bowl and a dry-erase marker for the circles. Hoogkamp knew it would rot before the actual holiday (it was made a couple of weeks ago), but as he knew it would be the dominant design this year, he wanted to be the first to post a picture. -via Time

There are some people who like to put a few cute, cartoony window decals up before Halloween night and then there are those who really want their home to be truly horrifying. If you are part of the second group, then you certainly won't want to miss this collection of amazingly scary decorations we rounded up for Homes and Hues.

From ghosts and graveyards to cannibalistic barbecues, these decorations are sure to scare the pants off of your guests no matter how old they are, so don't miss the full collection of terrifying treats at Homes and Hues: 8 More Horrifically Haunting Halloween Decorations

A chemistry teacher did this fiery jack o’lantern inside, but if you want to try it, outdoors would be better. You can get that green flame by burning boric acid and methanol together. Geekologie has the instructions. This will cook your pumpkin, but it won’t be edible because of the boric acid. Then there is the remote chance that such experimentation could summons the demons of hell. Your mileage may vary.