In our continued celebration of the upcoming Halloween premier of Ash vs Evil Dead, Zombie of the Week has been overrun by Deadites! We’re bringing you our favorite Deadites from across the franchise!

Featured in both the original The Evil Dead and the sequel, Evil Dead 2, Linda accompanied the group to the cabin as Ash’s girlfriend, the trip wasn’t kind to her. She did score a nice necklace from Ash, but it was a steep downhill slide from there. She was stabbed in the ankle with a pencil, buried (somewhat) alive, popped out to say “Hi!” and was decapitated with a shovel. Normally, this might slow a girl down, but Linda’s head and Linda’s body were able to tag-team our hero for quite some time before finally getting put down for good with a chainsaw.

To celebrate the imminent arrival of Ash vs Evil Dead, Zombie of the Week has been overrun by Deadites! We’re going to bring you our favorite Deadites from across the franchise running up to the Halloween premier!

First up, naturally, is the first up; the first Deadite we ever see in the original The Evil Dead. Cheryl is Ash’s sister and the only family of his we’ve seen. She was a shy artist going to Michigan State and was hoping for a quiet weekend in the country. That hope was dashed by a malevolent force that drew her out, raped her with possessed shrubbery and turned her into a demon zombie.

The actress who played Cheryl, Ellen Sandweiss, had to put up with a lot on set. Most of her non-demonic lines were cut, she spent much of her time in painful contact lenses squatting in a freezing hole (the cabin where filming took place didn’t have a cellar, so a trapdoor was installed over a hole in the ground) or getting mauled by twigs. Reportedly she earned $800 for the role.

As we’ve been saying, finding new zombies for this feature is becoming more and more difficult as time goes on. We’ve been leaning heavily on themed series to carry us through.

We thought that we’d be able to find plenty of LEGO zombie creations and while there are a ton of minifig-based dioramas, we were surprised that the only real zombie sculpture we were able to find was this example from Chris Maddison (more shots on his Flickr page). In the words of the artist:

This past summer I got into The Walking Dead, and played through the game this past week. I figured I’d see what a walker looked like in Lego form. I learned that I have a lot to learn about sculpting the human head. I used “well, it’s dead and rotting” as an excuse way too much for weaker areas.

Don’t worry, Chris: we love your work! It’s the best LEGO zombie that we’ve ever seen (despite being, you know, the only one).

In 1981 the world was given a gift. A gift that took the form of a bunch of crappy cartoons! Some had boobs! Boobs and robots and barbarians and weird bird things and more boobs! Yes, I’m taking about that classic something-or-other, Heavy Metal!

The movie was produced by the folks that made Heavy Metal Magazine. It was an anthology of stories loosely based on features in the magazine featuring blood, violence, sex and music. The stories are linked by a strange green orb, the “Loc-Nar”, which introduces itself as the embodied “sum of all evils”.

In one of the better, but shorter and least memorable, segments, “B-17”, the orb invades a World War II bomber – the “Pacific Pearl” – limping home after a disastrous bombing run cost her the entire crew. As the co-pilot explores the cabin for survivors, the Loc-Nar reanimates the crew as skeletal zombies. The co-pilot is killed as the pilot abandons his craft to land within a graveyard of derelict planes and their zombie crews.

In the next segment, a buxom, red-headed stenographer is kidnapped by aliens and then has sex with their robot, voiced by John Candy. So… there’s that.

Of course we’re celebrating the series premier of “Fear the Walking Dead” this week! Not just because we’re desperate for new ideas, but also because this is a legitimate zombie event! That kind of thing, you see, is right up our alley. You might even see more examples from the show in the coming weeks.

It may be predictable, but we’ve decided to use the first zombie we see in the show: Gloria the Junkie. Upon awaking from a deep heroin  trip, Nick shambles through the abandoned church that he and his friends have been crashing in. He’s looking for his friend Gloria, but instead he finds blood and gore. Worriedly he continues his search only to find “90 pounds soaking wet” Gloria intently feasting on her pile of victims.

Gloria may not have been quite as impactful as The Walking Dead’s first zombie, the infamous Bunny Slipper Girl, but was effective enough to get things moving in style.

We’re wrapping up our summer celebration of zombie music with our hands-down favorite of all time: Jonathan Coulton’s ode to office cannibalism “re: Your Brains”. This is one of Coulton’s most recognizable songs and, as it lends itself to audience participation, has become a live performance staple. We were lucky enough to see Coulton live opening for They Might Be Giants not too long ago and highly recommend the experience.

Coulton’s music is all released under the generous Creative Commons license. As such fans are encouraged to fold, spindle and mutilate the music as they like. This has resulted in a glut of amazing home-grown videos. Here’s a few of our favorites.

First up, we have the reigning champion with nearly five million views, spiffworld’s World of Warcraft machinima from way back in 2006.

Secondly, we have an animated, effects-laden version by foellmi.

Next, here’s a wonderful animatic version done as a school project by Arrem Gee.

Finally, and perhaps most impressively, is a full, live-action theatrical production slathered in blood, bile and only slightly spoiled grey matter by moontalkproductions.

Truly, this is one song that keeps giving!