During the height of the British invasion The Zombies made a minor, but memorable impact both the U.K. and the U.S.  Led by Rod Argent and Colin Blunstone the group formed in 1962 and disbanded only five years in 1967.

• Their biggest hit, “She’s Not There“, was released in 1964 and launched their U.S. tour.  The haunting, minor-key, genre-bending piece reached number two on the Billboard Top 100 and number 12 on the U.K. charts.  It was named 297 on Rolling Stone Magazines list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.
• They had a second U.S. hit with “Tell her No“.  This was derided by some as being to similar to the Beatles but most critics agreed that it was thematically more complex than most bubblegum tracks.
• They’re final hit, 1968’s “Time of the Season“, wasn’t their biggest hit but has come to define their legacy.  The song has come to represent the late 1960’s counter-culture and has been used in dozens of related media.

According to band members the name “The Zombies” was begrudging accepted by  the group after rejecting second choice “Chatterley and the Gamekeepers”.  We applaud their decision!

The 1968 classic ”Night of the Living Dead“ has a lot of zombies (although, fun fact!, the word “zombie” was never used in the film). We spend most of the movie stuck in the farmhouse surrounded by a throng of milling zombies of all sorts. There are fat zombies and old zombies and businessman zombies and even a little girl zombie.

Then there’s inexplicably-naked zombie.

There the audience is sitting, all scared and tense, and then, for no reason, we just see a hot, naked zombie butt float slowly across the screen. The optimists may assume that this was an intentional commentary on the state of American society at the time. At the continuing transition from sexual repression to sexual acceptance presented in a metaphor for life, death and undeath. The pessimists may assume that the guys making the movie really wanted to have a naked woman walking around.

Whichever the case – and with apologies since I couldn’t discover the identity of the actress – we celebrate inexplicably naked (but still, we must remember: deceased) zombie!

“Paranorman” [Our Review] is an amazing film that sneaked a smart, sophisticated, emotionally charged horror  story into a kids movie.  It deftly deals with the fear of the unknown, the cost of bullying and isolation and the ever-widening impact of prejudice and narrow-mindedness.  It’s a surprisingly complex story that matures seamlessly as it’s told.

The zombies of Blithe Hollow are the original townsfolk responsible for condemning the now fabled “Witch of Blithe Hollow” hundreds of year earlier.  They are absolutely dead and absolutely zombies but, other than that, not a bad bunch when you slow down and get to know them.  In fact, they spend most of their time trying to help out and being attacked in the process.

Zombies may not be the most obvious of allies but in this case an exception must be made.  Seeing this bunch of regret-filled groaners peacefully back to their graves is satisfying for all parties involved.  The climax of the movie – powerful, touching and unforgettable as it is – is accomplished in no small part to their assistance.  For this we salute the misunderstood zombies of Blithe Hollow!

The Walking Dead season four premier was relatively quiet, but it did have its moments as when the survivors make a supply run to a grocery store.  They set themselves up for hilarity (and, yes, horror) when they fail to notice that the roof was the both the site of a helicopter crash and home to a gaggle of  walkers.

Attracted to the noise of the scavenging the formerly dormant walkers converge on a weak point of the roof and our friend pictured does a little trapeze act with his entrails.  He swings, he groans, he spins and twirls… until the rotting tripe hold him aloft tears and he plummets the remaining distance with a “splat”.  Swinger Zombie never works with a net, folks!

For zombies there’s only one answer to “would you jump off the roof just because your friend did it?”  That answer is a strangled moan as they jump off the roof.  That’s exactly what we get as all of Swinger Zombie’s buddies follow his lead (at least the “splat” part of it).

We continue to expand our ever loosening definition of “Zombie” with this week’s entry.  Rob Zombie is the writer/director of the cult-classic, “House of a Thousand Corpses“,  a founding member of the legendary heavy-metal band, “White Zombie” and resident of Woodbury, CT!

(That last one may not, in fact, be as kick-ass-death-metal as it sounds.)

Zombie has been a melting pot of horror, stagemanship and insanity his entire career.  Oddly enough he has yet to take on an actual zombie project (although several come damn close).  His experience with horror movies mirrors my own (and is one of the reasons that, in my old age, I tend to watch them at home):

“For some reason, horror movies, they seem like good date movies. When you go to them it’s all high school kids, all over each other, running up and down the isles, no one is even looking at the screen anyways, they figure they don’t have to pay attention to the story anyways. We scream and yell… it’s like mayhem.”

So, Rob Zombie, for continuing to the blur lines of horror in film and music and, not so incidentally, having the last name “Zombie”: we salute you!

We’ve made no secret of the fact that “Shaun of the Dead” is a practically perfect movie.  Practically perfect in every way possible.  Mary Poppins can only wish to be this damn perfect is basically what we’re saying.

One of the defining moments is Shaun and Ed’s first encounter with zombies (before they even agreed to start using the zed-word, in fact).  The girl in the garden and her hulking friend.

Played by Mark Donovan and Nicola Cunningham the garden zombies provide us our first insight of the absurdity that define Shaun and Ed’s problem solving process.  What do you when faced with zombies?  Well, if you’re Shaun and Ed, you collect a laundry basket full of bits and bobs to fling at them gleefully.

This week’s for you, Garden Zombies!  You may be moaning, shambling death machines but you’re also a blast at parties and sure do make a cute couple.

Ghouls are one of the most interesting and complex group in the amazingly interesting and complex “Fallout” universe.  Like most of our choices lately there is a good argument that ghouls are not, in fact, zombies, but as always these are our rules to make.  It’s not really clear if they’re the risen dead (as is sometimes intimated) or just lucky individuals mutated by radiation.  The word “lucky”, of course, being questionable for somebody that’s given a vastly extended lifespan in exchange for their skin and much of their flesh.

In the game’s mythology most ghouls were created on the day of the great war in 2077 and many are still kicking as of 2281 when “Fallout: New Vegas” is set.  Many ghouls have gone feral, mindless and permanently aggressive, and roam the wastes attacking anything they come across.  A significant minority have retained their intellect and seek, often in vain, to coexist peacefully with normal humans.

Considering the delicate balance of decay and regeneration that maintains their existence it’s likely that all ghouls will ultimately turn feral.  It’s unclear exactly how long ghouls can live or how long they can possibly live without turning feral.  Ghouls are completely sterile and while isolated instances of new ghoulification exist it’s clear that ghouls are a dying breed.  As eloquently put by the ghoul Typhon in one of “Fallout 2’s” more famous lines:

There ain’t any ghouls but old ghouls. We’re all sterile, see, but we’re incredibly long-lived. We’re the first and last generation of ghouls.

Ghouls have provided many of the best moments in the series.  In “Fallout 3” some of the scariest moments are found investigating the feral ghoul-infested Dunwich Building while some of the most memorable characters and interactions are found in the ghoul “city” of “Underworld“.  In “Fallout: New Vegas” you can convince ghoul cowgirl Beatrix Russell to take up a life of prostitution to service customers with “special tastes”.  There are literally hundreds of other characters, situations and moments across the series and for that we dedicate this week to our misunderstood, and often decapitated, friends, the ghouls.

Lenore is a cute, precocious, curious little girl.  She loves cats and other animals (even if she often, presumably accidentally, kills them).   She’s also, quite doubtlessly, dead.  It’s really not clear whether or not Lenore is a zombie.  What we do know is that she’s dead but she’s still wiggling so let’s induct her, at least provisionally, into the zed-word wing for now.

Lenore is the comic creation of artist Roman Dirge and was the star of a series of web shorts still available on YouTube.  First appearing in 1998 in an all too brief comic series, now available as collected graphic novels, published by Slave Labor Graphics the character got a second wind in 2009 with a new series published by Titan Books.  Although news has been quiet for some time the character so impressed Neil Gaiman that he attached himself to a planned film version of the story as executive producer.

The comic was dark and goth before dark and goth got popular and then cliché.  It’s hilarious in that perfect way that makes you feel the tiniest bit guilty about laughing your ass off at a little dead girl.

Valve Corporation’s cooperative masterpiece, “Left 4 Dead“, features a horrific selection of “special infected” to destroy even the most competent team’s sense of control.  One of the most recognizable, and to the suffering team one of the most feared, is the bloated, bile-soaked Boomer.

The Boomer is a meddlesome enemy designed to confuse and weaken your group.  It calls other infected to you while lowering your defenses with its blinding bile.  While easy enough to handle at long range Boomers have the uncomfortable habit of getting close at the most inopportune times.

Boomer’s are also, for lack of a better word, just plain “icky”. They’re a ponderous, roiling, pulsating sac of zombie-attracting bile.  They gurgle and belch constantly in a way that will haunt your dreams.  Here’s to you, Boomer!  Please stay way (way) over there.

As we’ve made clear in the past, we gleefully consider anybody that’s been resuscitated by medical science to be at least an honorary zombie.  Unfortunately we were able to witness this first-hand recently when grandpa up and decided to have himself a heart-attack.

Luckily he made it to the hospital on time. Unluckily he ended up requiring a triple coronary artery bypass graft.  Doctor’s opened him from neck to navel, stopped his heart, pulled some spare parts from his leg, bolted them on and then closed him up.  All of this (plus, as you can see, the tubes, electrodes and monitors) push him handily into the prestigious cyborg-zombie category.

That was three days ago.  He’s doing great, has been moved out of the ICU and is currently free of all visible cybernetic enhancement (but we know they’re in there).  Barring complications he’ll be home in a day or two.  My mother promises to watch closely for any tell-tale moaning, shambling or odd-cortex-shaped-cravings.

Sure, someday science may cover the globe in ravenous, cannibalistic, reanimated corpses.  We’ll probably be a little annoyed with it then.  Right now it saved my dad and my kid’s grandpa.  Right now, science is just aces with us.