“It quickly became obvious that Jane [Austen] had laid down the blueprint for a zombie novel [with Pride and Prejudice],” said Grahame-Smith “Why else in the original should a regiment arrive on Lizzie Bennet’s doorstep when they should have been off fighting Napoleon? It was to protect the family from an invasion of brain-eaters, obviously.”

This is sheer brilliance. Grahame-Smith took a well-known novel about the romantic antics of several young ladies, the Bennet sisters, and tweaked it into a zombie story.

Grahame-Smith says that 85% of the story is Jane Austen – he just changed enough to make it a zombie story.

He was able to do it because Pride and Prejudice has entered public domain.

This thing has garnered national interest, and as I write – several movie studios are in a bidding war for the movie rights.

Leaving zombies aside for a moment (gasp!), I think this is something that we can expect to see a lot more of – reworkings of existing scripts and stories. And, if it means more people are reading, I welcome it with open arms.

Now, what public domain story can I rewrite…

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
Times Online

Over at the Dapperstache they recently posted the Periodic table of Awesoments.  It is what “all things good are made of.”

The best one of all, of course, is number 17: zombies.

Something that has consistently bothered me about zombies is why they are so interesting.

As a story-telling device they exist only as a setting, never a character.  They’re the setting in which a human story unfolds.  Every zombie story is about the survivors.  As a result, zombies never have the personification that makes human characters interesting.

When you throw in my ongoing fascination with End-of-Times stories, and a little Uncanny Valley, you almost have an answer. But not quite.

The Gospel of Reason blog has an interesting theory. He riffs off of Yom Kippur, The rise of Jesus, and of course the voodoo zombies in Haiti, and concludes that zombies represent a failed sacrificial lamb of sorts for mankind.

The dead hold, within them, a representation of the past and a representation of the sins of their living brothers and sisters and, as a result, their return to our world represents a moving, walking, killing return of our own past sins.

Looking into the eyes of a zombie is like looking into the eyes of the worst part of yourself.

It’s a slightly long read but it’s fascinating, if you have the time, and it makes me fear zombie Jesus even more.

Even I question the usefulness of a zombies board game.  The whole point of zombies as an environment is the frantic anxiety that is created in the survivors as well as the people watching – and, let’s be honest, I’ve never felt frantic anxiety while playing a board game.

But, it’s zombies and it has the potential to be better than it sounds – so, without further ado, I give you Zombies!!! the board game.

The goal of the game is to either kill 25 zombies or make it to the helipad and escape the town that is represented by the board.

From Wikipedia:

Players must decide whether to avoid combat and allow the other players to dispose of the zombies for them, or to strike out and collect the various items that the board and event cards provide. Once the Helipad tile is placed, the players can choose between racing to the helicopter (which will often result in death); holding back and hoping to rush in when another player dies; or ignoring the helipad entirely and trying to kill 25 zombies.

You’ve seen them shuffling their feet and stumbling from one store to the next in your nearest shopping mall. Their blank faces the only testament to the fact that they may be about to run over that little kid crossing their path.

They’re called Christmas Zombies.  And they ruin your Christmas shopping experience by lurching, over and over again, into your path and snatching up that perfect gift you were about to pick up.  They usually look at it, sniff it, then put it back down – having only snatched at it “in case” they wanted it – but, it’s annoying nevertheless.

One person designed a party around these soul less shoppers. Through a Glass Brightly talks about a party he was invited to:

As yoinked from Urban Dictionary:

1. Christmas zombie
Days before Christmas, people become blind and get tunnel vision, causing them to only see what is in front of them, putting them into a trance like state while looking for the perfect gift. This effect usually happens two days before Christmas.

Guy: Dude, what was up with that chick driving the Escalade, she almost hit you.

Guy 2: Forget her, she was a Christmas zombie.

Please join us in the celebration/degredation of this phenomenon in a much more enjoyable version:

What: Christmas Zombie Pub Crawl
When: Tuesday, December 23 (Christmas Eve Eve) at 8:30 PM
WTB: We will don the most hideous Christmas garb we can find (think puffy paint and bells on candy cane sweaters) and zombify ourselves. Then the gaggle of zombies will tour the Corner area in search of the brains of any lingering students. If all goes well, we may end up singing zombie karaoke at Baja Bean or going zombie carrolling around town. Practice up since some of us discovered that it’s very difficult to sing like a zombie.

Last Sunday about 100 people dressed as zombies showed up at Millenium park in Chicago for some good old fashioned ice skating.

One woman complained that the zombies scared her daughter, but the zombies seem much less of a menace than the drunken, puking, snogging Santa Claus’ – which seems to be the real story.

Who are these people? And shouldn’t there be a licensing process to get a Santa suit?

Zombies were people once too.  They had feelings and beliefs and love and respect and families.  They lived their lives just like you and me.

It’s easy to forget that very simple fact as you kill or be killed by our evil kin.

Zombie Haiku is here to help us keep the humanity of zombies in our minds.  Just don’t get too attached to how cute they are – they still eat human flesh.

If you’ve never heard the program before, the episode of “Talk of the Nation” on NPR that features Max Brooks, author of The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z, is a great listen.

Brooks addresses some of his ideas about the origin of zombies, their nature, and surviving the invasion.

He then does a question and answer session with callers and emailers.

Listen to the program at the NPR website.

It’s important to round out all of that zombie watching and thinking about zombies and considering the biological and moral ramifications of zombies and what makes zombies, zombie flirting, zombie juggling and zombie fighting with the pleasant sounds of zombie music.

And, outside of Metallica with their dulcet melodies, who could be a better zombie song writer than the internet music sensation, Jonathan Coulton?

So, without further ado, please enjoy "re: Your Brains."

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Metallica has created a zombie movie in their music video "All Nightmare Long."

It’s the story of an alternate history where Soviet Union Russia discovers an alien spore that reanimates the dead.  The soviets then use the spore as a weapon against the United States by raising the dead behind enemy lines.

In the end everything seems to unravel for those pesky communists, and their own monster turns on them.

It’s great fun even though, as strange as it may sound, Metallica’s death metal doesn’t seem to sync up with the video.

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