The Inevitable Zombie Apocalypse

You can thank Italy for this classic moment

The modern zombie movie is a thoroughly American invention, forged in Pittsburgh by George A. Romero. But like rock and roll and nuclear weapons, it wasn’t long before foreigners had a look and decided they just had to make their own homegrown versions. Before the blood was even dry on his incredible undead innovation, zombie began popping up all over the world, a trend that continues to this day. Once you’ve finished picking the corpse of Romero’s canon clean, had your brains eaten by Return of the Living Dead and devoured Zombieland  and are ready to travel the world in search of new zombie thrills, this handy guide should get you started. It’s by no means comprehensive—that’s a book, not a blog post—but it should serve as an intro to what the world outside of the good old USA offers the zombie aficionado.

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Photo by nicolas genin

George A. Romero. The father of the modern zombie. Arguably the most influential filmmaker in the horror genre. Legend. Icon.

And, as it turns out, a pretty nice guy.

When I first launched this site, one of the biggest things I hoped it would eventually lead to was a chance to talk to George A. Romero (my very first post was a happy birthday message to him!). This past weekend, it did and I got 20 minutes with the man himself. It wasn’t long, certainly, but it was still pretty fucking great. We talked about The Walking Dead, video games, what he’s working on and lots more. I’m sure I don’t have to sell you on reading this — if you’re reading this site, you love zombies. If you love zombies, you’re going to want to read this. So onward…

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Return of the Living Dead 3

Yesterday marked the halfway point of the fifth annual Zombie Movie Marathon Month, so it seemed like a good time to check in. For those of you who haven’t been reading since last time, ZMMM is my annual month-long zombie-a-day film fest: one zombie movie a day, every day, for an entire month. For those who have been reading a while, you may be wondering why the hell this is happening now, rather than in June as it has in years past. My reasons are twofold:

1) My wife has long petitioned for me to move the marathon to a fall/winter month, arguing (rightly) that we have too much going on in summer — camping, travel, friends visiting — to give up time every day in June to watch a zombie movie. This might have been reason enough but then something came along to seal the deal…

2) We had a baby May 29, two days before I would have ostensibly started the marathon. Let me tell you, having a newborn in the house makes it pretty hard to get something like this done. It’s been hard enough now, and she’s almost five month old! Bottom line is, June was out, so October is in! And let’s face it, October is a more fitting month anyway.

Okay, on to this year!

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Worst. wedding day. EVER.

The third film in the REC series has arrived, and with it arrive some changes. The first film inverted the paradigm of Night of the Living Dead, trapping survivors in a building with zombies. REC 2 turned the dials to 11, injecting a first-person shooter angle into the cinéma vérité mix and upping the adrenaline levels (think of REC as Alien and REC 2 as Aliens and you’ll have a good idea of what to expect.) Now REC 3: Genesis adds something else entirely unexpected: humor. Even weirder is that it works surprisingly well. (The rest of this review will contain the occasional spoiler for the first two films, so if you haven’t seen them and are spoiler averse, stop here).

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Greetings, undead masses! Johnathon reporting in to unveil the latest episode of the Inevitable Zombie Podcast…

Now there are several different ways to get the Inevitable Zombie Podcast.

• You can subscribe by following our RSS feed. Just follow this link to get the feed.
• You can also now subscribe through iTunes. Just click here to make the podcast ipod friendly.
• Finally, you can just download the file directly from us by clicking here.
  

Episode 007 – Zombie Movie Marathon Month: Part 2

Hosts – Cory Casciato and Johnathon Brock

Run Time: 1 Hour 5 Minutes 42 Seconds

Show Notes

Week 2(and a half-ish) of Zombie Movie Marathon Month is complete, and we’re starting to feel the pull of the undead in our daily lives.

So come listen in to our reviews on the movies we’ve watched so far, and make sure to weigh in with any questions or comments for next weeks show.

One final note… This podcast isn’t too graphic, but it is labeled Not Safe For Work. We drop the f-bomb on more than one occasion and talk about some of the more graphic images of shows like The Walking Dead, as well as numerous other grotesque scenes from all forms of zombie media. Just a heads up for those of you listening at your work cubes—wear headphones.

Alright, that’s it, go listen to it and let us know what you think in the comments. Tell us what you’d like to see from us on future shows, make fun of my impressions, or ask some questions for next week’s show.

~Johnathon

It’s hard to believe it’s been a year since last year’s Zombie Movie Marathon month, but here we are, with June just days away. Due to a lack of time I had considered skipping the marathon this year, until I realized, that’s just crazy talk. So, as it has been the past three years, June will be a month of undead action: 30 days, 30 movies, countless undead. Let the rejoicing commence.

This year, my Inevitable Zombie Apocalypse co-pilot Johnathon Brock will be joining me. We’ll be watching the same movie, on the same days, sometime even at the same time (maybe). Instead of last year’s daily updates (definitely no time for that), we’ll be doing a once-a-week podcast wrap up of that week’s zombie films. We may also live blog or live tweet some of them, if there’s interest and we can work out the logistics.

We’re also forgoing the themes of the last two years, apart from a general theme of “Johnathon catches up on the classics,” since he’s somehow missed seeing a number of all-time greats (such as the original Dawn of the Dead—for shame, Johnathon, for shame). This will mean a lot of repeats from past years and other, non-marathon viewing times for me, but I’m down with that. A lot of these are, after all, classics, totally worth seeing again. And I’ll also be catching up on some recent stuff that I missed out on (such as Resident Evil: Afterlife—for shame, Cory, for shame). And we’ll be filling in the cracks with stuff that’s available on Netflix Instant Watch, stuff from my voluminous catalog, and stuff recommended by you, our faithful readers. After the break, you can find the list of this year’s movies, both those that we’ve settled on and those still in the “maybe” pile. And please, leave us a comment about what else we should watch this year.
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Quarantined is a complicated book—it’s definitely not for your average Marvel fanboy who enjoys flipping through the pages. It played out in my head like a classic Romero film with a touch of Danny Boyle thrown in and I had to stop after the first thirty pages to get a feel for what was happening in front of me. There’s a lot of depth to the characters here and often I found myself stopping to yell at them aloud for their decisions throughout the course of the book.

The story centers around a viral outbreak in a small town. A lot of people turn away at that idea because it’s been used so much in the past. Personally I’m a fan of the setting because it’s one of those glorious scenarios that can play out in so many different directions. I mean, you put zombies on a plane or a Greyhound bus and your options are pretty limited, but a small town often opens up into a much larger stage in which its characters can play their part.
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At long last, The Inevitable Zombie Apocalypse is available in T-shirt form! Thanks to the excellent Alert/Sigilantes Design, you can now show your love for the website in convenient shirt form! This is a very limited edition — less than twenty of these suckers exist, basically two in the common sizes, small through Xl, in both male and female. And I am offering them up to you, the readers of the site, for $20, shipped ($15 for the shirt, $5 to ship). For more details, a look at the back and some photos of the actual shirt, venture below…

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Kind of hard to believe, but the site’s been around for just a touch more than eighteen months now. In that time, I’ve amassed more than 600 posts and almost a thousand comments on said posts (thanks for the feedback!), all of which means, if you’re new, or don’t visit the site on a regular basis, you might have missed some cool stuff. And the last thing I would want is for you to miss some cool stuff, especially if it was cool stuff I wrote, so I’ve gone back and compiled a list of the top ten posts on the site since its humble beginnings in February 2009. Without further ado, here are those posts…

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Original photo by Clark Mackey

It’s time for poll results. Actually, it’s well past time, because the two open polls have been running for quite a while now — one since last November! Sorry about that — I get busy. Freelance writing isn’t really a terribly lucrative profession — in order to keep the bills paid, I have to work a lot. Anyway, enough about my poor, suffering existence. Let’s talk about zombies! More to the point, let’s talk about what you fine people like best about the zombies and are looking forward to in the zombie realm.

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