Dawn of the Dead Cupcakes

The Mrs. and I were visiting family over the weekend when one of the young geeks-in-training surprised us with a terrific Halloween treat: zombie cupcakes.

It's rare that a food item combines two things that I really love--zombies and pastry--but these cupcakes had it all. With pretzel sticks for arms, Tic Tacs for fingers, marshmallows for heads, and thick icing for skin, eyes, mouths and hair, these desserts of the damned can cause an epic sugar high that any horror fan would love. All that was missing were a few hapless gingerbread men (with sweet gumdrop brains) for these carnivorous confectionaries to terrorize.

Click below to see more pictures of this horde of undead delights.

The Walking Dead and the Challenges of Cross-Media Adaptations

When it comes to movies that are adaptations of novels, everyone knows the drill by now: the book is usually better than the movie. It's a fair criticism, since the printed page is a very different medium than the moving image. But what happens when a TV show attempts to adapt a serialized--and unfinished--comic book series? With AMC's The Walking Dead, we're watching such an attempt play out now on prime time.

I've read through the first 70 issues of the Walking Dead comic book, which was created and written by Robert Kirkman, so I have ample amounts of source information to draw from when comparing it to its televised counterpart. I enjoy the TV show's ample amounts of zombie gore, and I thought that it got off to a great start in its first six-episode season. But after watching the meandering second season and seeing the third season end so poorly last week, I'm beginning to wonder how much longer this show can go with its rapidly rotting legs in spite of its high ratings. Read on for my analysis of the show, and why adapting an ongoing comic book series into a different medium requires much more planning and foresight than adapting a single novel.

NOTE: This post makes many references to events in both versions of The Walking Dead. Thus, if you aren't familiar with either of them but want to read/see them later, you might want to skip this post to avoid spoilers.

When The Walking Dead first appeared in comic book stores back in 2003, I was impressed at how it took an idea that's been around since George Romero's Night of the Living Dead--a global zombie epidemic--and turned it into a serialized narrative. Essentially, The Walking Dead is Night of the Living Dead: The Series; why nobody through to do this before Kirkman still astonishes me. Unlike Living Dead's sequels, which jumped to different sets of characters at different locations during the epidemic, The Walking Dead stuck with a group of characters during society's collapse in the wake of the epidemic and how they try to bring stability back into their lives while stuck in a world overrun by reanimated, flesh-eating corpses. Because the story was told through the pages of a comic book, the narrative possibilities were limited only by the imagination and talent of the comic's writer and artist.

The TV version of Walking Dead started in 2010 and it has tried to recreate the comic in many aspects. Most of the central characters and story arcs that appear in the comic are also in the TV show, with varying degrees of accuracy. However, due to the complications that come with TV production (in this case, AMC cutting the show's production budget and then ordering a larger number of episodes per season, as well as a seasonal succession of showrunners), the TV Walking Dead runs at a much different pace than the comic, which has resulted in some peculiar and counter-intuitive creative choices.

I've read many complaints (many of which I think are spot-on) about the Walking Dead TV show in how it handles its female and non-white characters. Here are some of the complaints that I have:

* The farmhouse story arc that only lasted for six issues in the comic was stretched for the entirety of season two, which ran for thirteen episodes. To me, it felt like a five-episode arc that was padded into a thirteen-episode season.

* The prison vs. Woodbury story in the comic was very simple: Rick, Michonne and Glenn are held prisoner by the Governor in Woodsbury, they escape back to the prison, and then there's a fight between Rick's group and the Governor's personal army at the prison, which results in massive casualties. This same story arc was the basis of season three and it felt like many details and subplots were added to simply to meet the sixteen episode requirement for the season, not to push the show in an interesting new direction. In the TV show, not only did the Governor survive the final confrontation at the prison, he also survived several other instances throughout the season where he should have logically died.

In spite of the differences between the details and pacing of the story arcs between the comic book and the TV show, it seems that the show's producers want the TV characters to develop the same way as their comic book counterparts do and when they don’t, another character is swapped in to take his/her place. When Dale was killed in season two at the farmhouse because the actor who played him quit, Herschel takes his place in season three (complete with losing a leg due to a zombie bite in the prison, just like Dale) even though he was the one who died at the farmhouse in the comic. I've also noticed that when the narrative trajectories of the TV characters stray very far from their comic book counterparts (specifically Andrea and Carol) the TV show doesn't know what to do with them. In contrast, I can see why Daryl is the most popular character in the show: Because he appeared briefly in the comic early in its run, the TV writers had many more opportunities to develop Daryl without having to meet any narrative requirement from the comic or use him as a replacement for a prematurely dispatched character.

When adapting a novel into a movie, the filmmakers naturally have to choose what can be translated from the printed page to film, and what cannot be translated due to budgetary and/or running time restrictions. In the case of The Walking Dead, the demands of AMC and TV production in production in general prohibit the series from being a faithful adaptation of the comic, yet it nevertheless remains dedicated to keeping the same characters and stories from the comic even past the point of its own internal logic.

Looking back, it may have been better for AMC to produce a Walking Dead TV series as a spinoff to the comic book that takes place in the same universe. That would've given the show's creative team more freedom to develop characters, settings and story arcs that are much more complementary with the show's budget and production schedule. In fact, a spinoff might have even been better than The Walking Dead comic itself. Despite the freedoms that the print medium allows, the comic hasn't moved past the main theme of every George Romero zombie movie: no matter how grotesque and dangerous the reanimated dead are, the living can and will be much, much worse. It's a compelling theme, but at over 100 issues and counting you'd think that a zombie comic book would have something else to say by now.

The Governor (David Morrissey) and Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln):

Gunfight at the Zombie Corral?

This wouldn't be the first time that a TV network would impose difficult and counterproductive demands on a genre TV show. The original Battlestar Galactica was supposed to be a series of made-for-TV movies, but ABC demanded that it be made into a TV series instead--a series that was later cancelled because the declining ratings weren't enough to justify the series’ large production budget, a problem that probably wouldn't have happened if ABC hadn't rejected the original plan of TV movies. Likewise, the original 1983 miniseries V was made on a very small budget, but that didn't keep NBC from deciding to continue the V story as a weekly TV series the following year. It too was cancelled after one season, and for the same reasons as Galactica's cancellation.

The Walking Dead doesn't appear to have the same problems as Galactica or V because it keeps setting ratings records and has been renewed for a fourth season. Yet if it doesn't do something to set itself apart as a TV series with its own dramatic momentum apart from the source comic, this zombie show could wind up dropping dead in the ratings before it sees a fifth season.

Nine Horror Titles that Have Many Film Adaptations but Remain Sequel-Less

The Woman in Black, a ghost story that takes place during the Victorian era in England, made its debut in theaters across the US this weekend. While it's the first horror film from Hammer Films in decades, it's hardly a new tale. The Woman in Black started as a 1983 novel by Susan Hill, and it was later adapted for the theater, radio, and television.

With that in mind, I've assembled a list of nine horror stories that have three or more film adaptations under their belts. What these stories all have in common is that they started out on the printed page, either as books, novellas or play scripts. Yet unlike Dracula or Frankenstein--two of the most adapted horror novels in film history--none of the stories on this list ever got around to spawning a single film sequel or spinoff.

Click below to see these nine terror tales, which I've arranged according to the number of film adaptations that have been made for each title. Please note that some totals are estimated, because the more popular titles have been adapted so many times with varying degrees of faithfulness to the source material that it's difficult to determine which adaptations qualify as such. For example, the unpublished short story entitled "The Wax Works" by Charles Spencer Belden was adapted twice, once in 1933 and then in 3D in 1953. A third film in 2005 bears the same title as the 1953 version, House of Wax, but it is not based on the same source. Read on....

1. Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber

Number of Movie Adaptations: 3, Weird Woman (1944), Night of the Eagle (a.k.a. Burn, Witch, Burn!) (1962), and Witches' Brew (a.k.a. Which Witch is Which?) (1980)

Skeptics hold a special place in the horror genre. By the end of the novel, TV show or movie, the skeptic usually becomes either a true believer or monster chow (or both)--no exceptions. Leiber took that character type one step further with his Conjure Wife novel, where the skeptic in the story discovers not only that his wife is using witchcraft to advance his career, but that the wife of one of his professional rivals is out to sabotage his career by the same means. No other skeptic in horror ever had it so bad, so much so that this novel has been adapted for the movies three times. Trivia bonus: The second adaptation was co-scripted by horror legend Richard Matheson.

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2. Donovan's Brain by Curt Siodmak

Number of Movie Adaptations: 3, The Lady and the Monster (1944), Donovan's Brain (1953), and The Brain (1962)

A human brain kept alive in a jar is one of the many go-to concepts that writers use as shorthand for science run amok, and it can serve as either a main plot point in story or simply a background decoration in a mad scientist’s lab. Donovan’s Brain was the first story to popularize this idea among horror and sci-fi filmmakers, and it has three film adaptations to its name to prove it. Of course, this doesn’t begin to cover the countless Donovan’s Brain rip-offs that have been released since the first adaptation of Siodmak’s novel, rip-offs such as The Brain from Planet Arous, The Brain That Wouldn't Die, and They Saved Hitler’s Brain.

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3. I Am Legend by Richard Matheson

Number of Movie Adaptations: 3, The Last Man on Earth (1964), The Omega Man (1971), and I Am Legend (2007)

It’s easy to lose count of the number of films and TV shows that have been adapted from Richard Matheson’s novels and/or from screenplays he’s written, but I Am Legend is the one that has been adapted the most times. What’s particularly noteworthy about this trilogy of adaptations are the diversity of actors who have starred as the main character (Vincent Price, Charlton Heston and Will Smith), none of the adaptations have the same ending as the novel, and that I Am Legend served as an inspiration of one of the most imitated horror films of all time: George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.

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4. The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Welles

Number of Movie Adaptations: 3, Island of Lost Souls (1933), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996)

Like Richard Matheson, H.G. Welles has provided plenty of material for movies; in Welles’ case, movie adaptations of his work date as far back as the silent era. While The Invisible Man and War of the Worlds may be two of his most well-known novels due to the popularity of their film adaptations and sequels, The Island of Dr. Moreau remains one of Welles’ most adapted works that has yet to produce a single sequel--plenty of rip-offs, but not a sequel.

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5. The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney

Number of Movie Adaptations: 4

If the 1950s are to be a guide about understanding alien invasions to Earth, then we can expect the invaders to attack in one of two ways: They’ll either vaporize us with their high-tech weaponry as they did in War of the Worlds, or they’ll overrun us with human duplicates as in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Jack Finney struck a significant chord in the collective human psyche when he envisioned an invasive alien race that did not need any form of advanced weaponry to conquer the human race; instead, they rapidly reproduced like hyper-fertile plants and effortlessly assumed the identities of people while they slept. Such a terrifying idea resulted in four adaptations and countless imitators, but not a single continuation of the original story.

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6. The Cat and the Canary by John Willard

Number of Movie Adaptations: 6

The Cat and the Canary is the only title on this list that started as a stage play, which premiered in 1922. It’s also one of the few listed here that has been adapted either as a horror story or as a dark comedy. Nevertheless, its central plot--a group of people who come to a gloomy, secluded mansion for the reading of a will and find themselves stalked by a mysterious killer--was quite influential and has a inspired other titles in the horror genre, particularly in the giallo/slasher subgenre. It should also be noted that a similar play from the same era called The Bat was adapted for film three times, and that The Bat is credited by comic book writer Bob Kane as the inspiration for his most popular character, Batman.

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7. Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Number of Movie Adaptations: 10+

Horror and sci-fi characters who develop split personalities through mad science all have a common ancestor in Robert Louis Stevenson’s notorious Dr. Jekyll. Stevenson’s novella has been adapted so many times that it’s hard to get an exact count of what can be considered an actual adaptation. Further muddling the exact total are adaptations of this tale that add an element of gender bending, as was the case in Hammer’s Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde.

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8. The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux

Number of Movie Adaptations: 10+

Gaston Leroux wrote many detective novels throughout his career, but his most popular story involves a vengeful, disfigured maniac who lurks behind the scenes at an opera house. Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Phantom of the Opera has been adapted so many times and in so many formats (it was adapted into a musical twice) that the exact total of adaptations remains unclear. It has also been adapted to fit more contemporary settings, as in the case of Phantom of the Paradise and Phantom of the Mall.

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9. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Number of Movie Adaptations: 10+

Curiously, the only published novel by Oscar Wilde also became one of the most adapted stories in horror cinema.  Even though The Picture of Dorian Gray is a variation of sorts on the themes explored in Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (which was published four years prior to Dorian Gray), Wilde’s book takes the old adage of how beauty is only skin deep to such sinister depths that filmmakers found it too irresistible to avoid adaptation.

A Look at Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop

With Nintendo closing shop on Wii game development and focusing its attention on the upcoming Wii U system, I've decided to catch up on games that I missed earlier in Wii's run, particularly horror games. With other planned Wii horror games such as Last Flight and The Grinder stuck in development hell, it seems that the older Wii horror games are the only options I have until the Wii U arrives. During the recent holiday season, I got a copy of Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop, which was released by Capcom in 2009.

I initially avoided Capcom's remake of their first Dead Rising game for the Wii because it seemed like a lesser version of something that was already done better on the Xbox 360. Yet as an avid zombie fan, I found it too irresistible to avoid playing a game that's so similar to George Romero's original Dawn of the Dead (more about that later). It turned out that my initial impressions were wrong, and that Chop Till You Drop is a satisfying and addictive game in its own right. Read on for my complete review.

For those of you who know absolutely nothing about the original Dead Rising game, here's the basic plot: Freelance photojournalist Frank West goes to Willamette, Colorado to investigate why the town has been sealed off by the National Guard. His search leads him to the gigantic Willamette Parkview Mall, where he becomes trapped inside with a horde of flesh-eating zombies. While West waits for a helicopter that will pick him up from the mall within 72 hours after his arrival, West fights off zombies, rescue survivors, battle a variety of non-undead psychopaths, and search for the truth behind the zombie outbreak.

What surprised me the most about Chop Till You Drop was how Romero-esque this game is. It has many of the narrative beats that I've come to expect from a Romero zombie movie--in particular, a dwindling number of surviving main characters throughout the course of the story and the appearance of human adversaries who are as bad as or worse than the zombie menace. Throw in a shopping mall setting where survivors take shelter in an area that the zombies can't access and then go on treks into the mall to find supplies in the various stores--as well as a comic book visual style and an anti-consumerism subtext--and Dead Rising is near-perfect video game version of Dawn of the Dead. The similarities are so close that the MKR Group, which holds the copyright to Dawn of the Dead and its 2004 remake, filed a lawsuit against Capcom in 2008. The lawsuit was dismissed, although I'm somewhat baffled as to how that happened.

(Here's another interesting Dead Rising/Dawn of the Dead comparison: The gun shop in the game appears to occupy its own corner of the mall, in an area that's mostly under construction. In Dawn of the Dead, the weapon store scenes were shot at a location outside of the mall, but were edited into the film to look like it was a store in the mall. A similar comparison can be made to where the survivors take shelter in the mall.)

Capcom's decision to release a horror survival game that closely follows the narrative style of Romero's zombie movies is a sharp contrast to its Resident Evil games, which use the Umbrella Corporation and its ever-changing T-Virus conspiracy to keep their stories distinct from Romero's work. (Ironically, Romero was on board at one point to write and direct the first Resident Evil movie, and you can read his unproduced script here.) Even though Dead Rising is not like Resident Evil in terms of atmosphere and narrative, the game engine from the Wii edition of Resident Evil 4 was used to adapt Dead Rising for the Wii; as a result, there is much more gun-based zombie killing in Chop Till You Drop than in the original game.

As if last-minute Christmas shopping wasn't bad enough ....

For as much as I hate seeing Romero get cheated, it would've been a shame if Dead Rising never reached the store shelves. Capcom hyped Dead Rising as the horror survival game where players could use anything they can find in the mall--an open world sandbox environment--to bludgeon, stab, burn, shred and/or decapitate as many zombies as they can. That feature is still present in the Wii version, albeit with some limitations in terms of weapon variety. This isn't to say that there isn't a central narrative thread in the game, but the utilization of an open environment where everyday objects can be utilized as weapons gets closer to the frantic, chaotic mood present in many monster movies. Such a setup encourages you to get creative in how to survive and save others, an element that's missing from many first-person horror shooters due to the overabundance of firearms. That said, I would encourage you to look up a walkthrough of Chop Till You Drop before playing it so you can familiarize yourself with all of the items, attacks, and special features you can use to make the most of you gaming experience.

Creative zombie killing isn't the only thing that this Capcom game has to offer. If the various survivor-rescuing missions get a bit boring, you inner anarchist will be entertained by the mall environment itself. You can take whatever you want from the stores (clothes, books, weapons, power tools, cosmetics, money, food, etc.) and if a store is locked, you can smash one of its windows to gain access. You can even ride the roller coaster in one of the mall areas. Indeed, vandalizing the mall was almost as fun as killing the zombies; in that sense, the game could've been re-titled Grand Theft Zombie Mall.

Curiously, even though the game's expansive mall setting was not modeled after any particular shopping mall, it reminded me so much of the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota. In fact, I'm kind of miffed that Capcom didn't design the Willamette Parkview Mall directly in the image of Mall of America. Such a design would've offered a wider range of zombie killing environments, including a complete amusement park, a water park (zombies on a water slide!), a miniature golf course, an aquarium (zombie fish!), and four floors worth of stores and restaurants to pillage.

If you ever had the overwhelming desire to kill hordes of zombies while wearing

a goblin mask and a summer dress, Dead Rising is the game for you!

Whatever technical limitations are present in the Wii version of this Xbox 360, it didn't keep the game from being fun or telling an interesting zombie story. (Click here to see a complete overview of differences between the Xbox 360 and Wii versions of Dead Rising.) Because the Wii's processing capabilities only allow for up to 100 zombies to appear on the screen at once (as opposed to the Xbox 360, which allowed for up to 800 zombies), zombies have a tendency to suddenly appear in front of you as you proceed through the mall. This feature never bothered me because it played much like the randomly appearing zombies that populated Hunter: The Reckoning, another horror game that the Mrs. and I used to play on the GameCube. I also thought that the controls were easy to use, and I much prefer the multi-file save feature available in the Wii version than the game save feature in the Xbox 360 version.

Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop ranks alongside Dead Space: Extraction, House of the Dead: Overkill and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories as one of the best horror games for the Wii. Furthermore, if it isn't mandatory that all die-hard George Romero fans must play this game at least once, it should be.

Build a Horde of the Undead with EMCE's Make Your Own Zombie Kit

As far as I know, action figure customization is a hobby that ranks high in both practice and prestige among die-hard fantasy, horror and sci-fi geeks. The more customizable types of action figure were those made by the now-defunct Mego Corporation. Mego's action figures had such a basic design that with the addition of customized costumes, accessories and head sculpts, they could be adapted for just about any fantasy, horror or sci-fi license. So, leave it up to EMCE Toys, the company that's determined to continue Mego's legacy, to release its own action figure customization kit ... with zombies!

During last February's Toy Fair 2011, EMCE displayed its "Make Your Own Zombie" Action Figure Customizing Kit as part of their Zombie Survival Headquarters booth. Scheduled to be released in the fall at the price of $49.99, this kit includes five heads and multiple torso and limb parts--each in varying states of decay, from freshly deceased to almost skinless--two clothing sets and three 8-inch action figure bodies. For budding action figure customizers, the kit also includes and instructional DVD that provides demonstrations by EMCE's own art staff on how to customize your do-it-yourself zombies. From what I've read about the kit, paints and other modeling supplies you will need to complete the customization process are not included.

EMCE's "Make Your Own Zombie" kit looks like a great addition to the collection of any action figure customizer, both beginner and advanced, and it will be available for purchase through Mego-style figure resellers or directly from EMCE Toys. Furthermore, the parts that come in the kit can be used with any other Mego-style action figure, so you can use them to zombie-fy any other Mego figure of your choice.

Additional coverage of EMCE's "Make Your Own Zombie" kit can be found at the Collection DX and Dread Central sites. Click below to see more pictures of this kit, as well as pictures of EMCE zombie merchandise for the more casual, less-customization-inclined zombie fan (read: me). The mechandise include Mego-style action figures based on the original classic zombie film Night of the Living Dead, as well as a new line of toys called "War of the Dead" that includes a "Zombie Containment Unit" and bags of classic miniature army men with equally miniature zombies. Let the battle begin!

Write of the Living Dead

It's official: I'm now a published author. Centipede Press has published a large book of essays about Night of the Living Dead as part of their "Studies in the Horror Film" series of books and my essay, "Cannibalizing Consumers", is in it. You can read more about the book here.

"Cannibalizing Consumers" was originally part of a series of essays that was included in a 40th anniversary retrospective of Night of the Living Dead on the PopMatters site back in 2008, and it was picked up to be part of the book. If you are so inclined, you can read my original essay here. I'm giddy that my first shot at recognition in an academic publication happens to revolve around the genre-defining film that introduced the world to unstoppable, epidemic, undead cannibalism. Then again, this is isn't just an article publication for me: 1) It's an article published in a series of books about studying horror films, 2) it's an article largely devoted to Night of the Living Dead, and 3) it's an article where I was also able to spend some time discussing Invasion of the Body Snatchers. That's triple nerd score for me!

In case you're interested in reading more of my written works, which are nerd-devotion-thinly-disguised-as-academic-thinking, check out these articles:

• A Look at Iconic Versus: The Post-9/11 Significance of the Freddy vs. Jason and Alien vs. Predator Movies
• Pictures of Insect Men: A Retrospective Analysis of the “Mimic” Trilogy
• Man, Machine, Memory and Movies: A Critical Look at “Dark City”