This weekend, the third installment in the Paranormal Activity franchise — a supernatural sensation since Oren Peli’s original film debuted in 2009 — rocked the box office, taking in $54 million for its opening weekend. The film also holds rank as the highest grossing movie for any October opening in history. While Paranormal Activity’s victory can be largely attributed to its successful grassroots marketing campaign and Halloween slot (it replaced popular spooky long-runner Saw), it’s still quite the feat for a part three film. Most threequels fizzle out by the third go-round, leaving their characters to dully ride the coattails of previous successes — but clearly that isn’t always the case. And with news about Sherlock Holmes securing a writer for its third installment, perhaps the action-mystery movie can follow suit. After the break, we took a look at several trilogies that buck the trend of bad things coming in threes — some third features even managing to outdo the films that started their respective series.
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Every day is Halloween according to amusing infographic, The United States of Scary Things. Between the devastating effects of Mother Nature, zombies, and serial killers, American citizens have a lot to worry about year-round. If the zombie apocalypse ever truly breaks out, it looks like the east coast is totally screwed. Meanwhile, falling rocks, tornadoes, and ghosts will plague the central portions of the state. We wonder if Wisconsin should share calamities with Ohio since Dahmer was born in the Buckeye state, but killed his victims almost entirely in Wisconsin. Hit the jump to check out the infograph in full, and debate your home state’s misfortune.
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Zombies, somewhat inexplicably, have captured the attentions of American culture and don’t seem to be letting go anytime soon. Most representations, however, as perhaps best befits the shambling, brain eating, flailing creatures, are deliciously low-brow, from low budget horror films to trashy fright night novels — that is, until this week, when Colson Whitehead’s Zone One hit the shelves, reminding us all that zombies can be intellectual too. His literary use of the undead walkers in his post-apocalyptic vision of New York has led us to consider other high-brow treatments of zombies in pop culture, which have slowly been emerging to varying degrees of success as the gross-out creatures continue to gain popularity. Click through to see a few of our favorite highbrow zombies across the board, and let us know if we’ve missed any in the comments.
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Andre De Freitas meshes his photography background with illustration by creating crystal clear, realistic drawings. The technique is well-suited to his Zombie Portraits series, in which he transforms adored cartoons and classic comic-book characters into grim, white-eyed zombies with menacing expressions and festering wounds. Although the eerie collection is the epitome of unsettling — it showcases a demonic Donald Duck and a desolate Charlie Brown — the detailing and color palette De Freitas employs is perfectly apropos for Halloween. See your favorite cartoon metamorphosed into an undead monster after the cut.
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Vintage pictures are interesting on their own, but they’re even better with monsters. Taking found photographs, old-timey maps, and other paper goods from the past, Matthew Buchholz customizes ephemeral images by adding delightfully frightful monsters, zombies, and other scary creatures, creating entirely new compositions called Alternate Histories.
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In case you were one of the dangerously unaware, May is Zombie Awareness Month, as designated by the Zombie Research Society. While many would probably cite October as the more apt choice, it’s apparently a mistake to lump flesh-eating zombies together with the usual Halloween staples like vampires and sexy Spongebob Squarepants. According to the ZRS, “[m]any films important to the evolution of the modern zombie are set in the month of May, from the original Night of the Living Dead, 1968, to the well received Dawn of the Dead remake of 2004.” In order to promote awareness of the coming undead apocalypse and to share some knowledge that might come in handy when you are facing your own brain-hungry hoard, we’ve compiled the five best death scenes in zombie movie history. Perhaps you will learn from these fallen comrades’ fatal mistakes.
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Well, it’s official: zombies are the new vampires. Entertainment Weekly reports that both the CW and NBC are developing zombie-based primetime shows, a trend that surely has nothing to do with AMC’s successful first season of The Walking Dead last fall. So you know what this means: soon there will be sparkly zombie romance books and movies for the tweens, and a T&A-heavy HBO zombie series, and a terrible zombie spoof film by those Epic Movie dudes. We’ve already given you advice on how to brush up on your zombie history, but now you need to prep for the inevitable mainstreaming of zombie culture. And what’s the best way to do that? By familiarizing yourself with the more obscure entries in the undead canon. That’s right, you too can impress your hipster friends by scoffing that Day of the Dead is so mainstream.
And with that, we proudly present ten obscure zombie movies that are well worth your time. (HT to our buddy Jeremy Biltz for sharing some of his considerable zombie movie knowledge.)
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As an interesting post on the history of zombies in America on io9 notes, our country has given birth to some of the world’s most recognizable zombie imagery thanks to movies like Night of the Living Dead, books like World War Z, and now the incredibly popular TV series The Walking Dead (which, it’s worth noting, is based on an American comic book). But you know what we haven’t seen a lot of? Zombies in popular music — of course, we mean outside of The Zombies and Rob.
Enter Michael P. Spradlin, and his upcoming release Every Zombie Eats Somebody Sometime: A Book of Zombie Love Songs
, which landed on our desk earlier this week and hits shelves later this month. Click through to check out the songs in its Table of Contents, and see if you can figure out which classics he’s spoofing.
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If you happen to be a student at the University of Baltimore, you can now enroll in a zombie studies course that will outfit with everything you wanted to know (but were afraid to ask) about zombies. Professor Arnold Blumberg, author of Zombiemania: 80 Movies To Die For
, is offering his class in the English literature department, analyzing the zombie in culture as allegory for war, the specter of nuclear apocalypse, and the American Dream. He’s actually not the first professor to have brain-eating on the brain — Brendan Riley at Columbia College in Chicago was teaching a class on zombies in popular media all the way back in 2007.
It almost makes us long for academia again. But never fear: Just because you can’t go back to your undergraduate days doesn’t mean you should be left out of over-analyzing the undead. We’ve compiled a sample syllabus that’s got you covered, all the way from A to, um, Zombie.
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A multi-artist crowdsourced remake of the 1968 zombie classic, Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated proves that art has the power to raise the undead.
Beloved for its DIY production design and allegorical power, the original Night of the Living Dead was ready-made for interdisciplinary inspiration. NOTLD: Reanimated invited 150 artists to illustrate their favorite scenes, with the wildly eclectic results augmented by the full-length original audio. Comprising everything from photography to puppetry to painting, the project honors and builds on the dark humor, independent artistry, and enduring influence of the OG American zombie.
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