SuicideGirls Group Therapy: Zombie Hunters
by Tarion Suicide
A column which highlights Suicide Girls and their fave groups.
[Tarion Suicide in Kiss the Machine]
This week, in preparation for the coming apocalypse, Tarion Suicide gives us the 411 on SG's Zombie Hunters Group.
Members: 2,824 / Comments: 20,073
- WHY DO YOU LOVE IT?: This group has threads covering everything you need to know about zombies and the impending apocalypse. It ensures that every member has a "zombie plan" and the best possible chance of survival. Members discuss everything from the best choice of weapons to the most effective safe house. If you're into zombies you will find info on the best books, games, movies, and TV shows right here!
- DISCUSSION TIP: This is a fun group, so don't be too serious.
- BEST RANDOM QUOTE: “Do not set zombies on fire! They will run around and catch everything else on fire!”
- MOST HEATED DISCUSSION THREAD: The Walking Dead! Official TV Thread - everyone has an opinion on this show!
- WHO’S WELCOME TO JOIN?: All those who want to survive the zombie apocalypse.
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5 Minute Fiction: Ice Cream Trucks And Zombie Clowns
by Brandon Perkins
It probably wasn’t the smartest move to get in the ice cream truck and go — especially with the needle nearing “E”— sometimes though waiting just don’t cut it. We may have been safe inside that garage, but that safety only felt temporary: the zombie clowns kept gathering and it was only a matter of time before they found a way in. Once we broke through the garage door, it took approximately 2.5 seconds for us to run over the first of those smiling undead, red-nosed motherfuckers. This one’s hair had sprouted into an orange frizz that splattered on the ice cream truck’s windshield and his stretched-long floppy foot snapped off at the ankle under our back right wheel, steaming a fuscia-colored mist in the rear view mirror. My day had already gotten better.
“They’re everywhere!” my girlfriend screamed. “Do we have enough gas to outrun them? What if we get a flat tire? Can they get in here? Do these doors lock? What happens if they get in here?”
I didn’t answer, instead choosing just to drive and maim as many zombie clowns as I could. Their disease-stuck smiles infuriated me. The way their pigment-sucked skin flaked into a powder and clashed with swollen red lips, it mocked humanity. It mocked the very characteristic that the disease had stolen from them. I was too angry to worry. My girlfriend was right about one thing though, the possibility of a flat tire made me a little nervous. At the rate their swollen heads, hands, feet, and bellies were bursting below the ice cream truck, something was bound to blow. With each jarring jolt that lurched the truck and its contents—namely my girlfriend, her daughter and myself—I hoped with all my still-beating heart that each pop wasn’t rubber but the explosion of zombie clown flesh. So far so good.
[Pill in Hunger]
So far so good, until a clown jumped up on the passenger side footing and my girlfriend shrieked while shielding little June Bug. Somewhere in the middle of her piercing monosyllable, she asked me what to do. The clown shined his sharp teeth and violently bit into the window repeatedly, fortunately to no avail but the streaks of undead blood and the rhythm of loud, knocking thuds were alarming. Reaching behind my seat for anything long and hard, I laughed at myself after saying “pause.”
“Pause, what?”
“Nevermind,” I said. “Here, take this and roll down the window a bit. Then jab the fucker right in the throat.”
They were weak in the throat and she took the broken broom handle and did just as I suggested. It was the first time I remembered her complying without the slightest of lip. I enjoyed it, but not nearly as much as the family of three clowns my ice cream truck ran down. I had a kill count of 25 and that plateau (which was surely going to be a mountain before the end of the road) officially made the truck mine. That I looted it from the economy’s suicide and society’s collapse no longer mattered. Killing clowns did and killing clowns is what I was doing. And Saffron got her first kill after the one she jabbed in the throat fell under our wheel.
“We need some killing music!” I shouted. “I gotta have something better on my iPod. I don’t need Rage Against the Machine or anything, but I’m not sure that François Hardy is gonna do it either. Oh! Unless you can find that one song with Jimmy Page, I can’t pronounce it — oh shit, did you see that clown’s head fall off on that mirror?— but baby, you know what song I’m talking about.”
“You really need that song right now?”
“I don’t need any specific song, I need to hear something that isn’t these clown heads under our tires. Well, I want to hear that, just not without some accompaniment.”
“I need something relaxing, all you have is fucking rap on this iPod. What’s wrong with you? June Bug is scared, she doesn’t need that street shit making her anymore anxious.”
“Mommy! My ears,” June Bug said, pointing to her ears.
“Yeah, see? June Bug is more worried about your language and argumentative nature than these silly circus freaks. She could take on 150 of them and live to tell the tale.”
“Hundred-fifty and live to tell the tale, Mommy.”
“Sorry about my potty mouth, June Bug,” she said before turning back to me. “But I’m not argumentative…whatever…how dare you. Just listen to your rap and get us out of here.”
That’s when the gas light turned on. I had never driven this particular ice cream truck before, or any commercial vehicle at all, but we were depending on its fuel to last the four remaining miles that were needed to get out of dodge. It was only a guess that those effected by the disease would be fewer and farther between outside of the city limits, but moving felt a whole hell of a lot better than just sitting there. Especially when movement included a whole trail of dead clowns.
The trail was piling higher every few seconds and all the smiling faces, decorated in disease and death, were starting to blend together. The occasional fat clown provided a noticeable change of events, rocking the ice cream truck with significantly more violence, and the child clowns momentarily reminded us of their former humanity, but the miles of unnatural skin color and deceiving laughter became nothing more than another patch of empty suburban houses. One foreclosed complex was just as impressionable as one giggling zombie, while I just tried to avoid the former and destroy the latter. While we were trapped in that garage and could hear their taunts from outside, I never thought that running over those clown motherfuckers with an ice cream truck could be boring — but it was starting to get that way.
At least until we hit the city center, where the clowns suddenly seemed to possess an increased ingenuity. I quickly started to miss that boredom. Somewhere between the Wal-Mart and the City Hall, they began attaching themselves to and then attacking the ice cream truck at an exponentially frenzied rate. I could see their fat hands and rosy noses in every piece of glass and hear their banging on every side of aluminum. It easily drowned out whatever rap song I wished wasn’t on my playlist.
“Well, June Bug,” I shouted and strained, “are you ready to take out your 150? Why don’t you guys find some weapons back there? Popsicles probably aren’t going to cut it.”
[Pill in Hunger]
I quickly swerved the truck and felt it go up on two wheels before skidding back to the asphalt and shaking off a half dozen zombie clowns. The remaining bastards that managed to keep their hold on the ice cream truck were howling with laughter, maniacally escalating like a clan of underfed hyenas. That’s when the sliding window was finally smashed. Clad in a purple spotted shirt, I caught a glimpse of the clown wiggling his way inside the truck while my girlfriend and little June Bug wailed on him with broom sticks. He just kept laughing and I wondered if his silly shirt was donned before or after he came down with the disease that had brought upon this apocalypse.
“This isn’t working, can’t you do something? Hurry, he’s getting inside!”
“I’m driving, what do you want me to do? If we stop it’ll only get worse,” I gasped. “Aim for his throat.”
The clown then fell onto the floor, his laughter echoing inside the empty ice cream cabinets. His squeal continued even as my girlfriend was twisting the broken broom handle as it pierced his neck. The fuscia mist that used to be human blood was filling the ice cream truck. Within 90 seconds, I couldn’t see through the mist and realized that breathing it in was probably enough to finally catch the highly contagious disease. It’d take a few days before we knew for sure, so the more immediate problem was not being able to see the road. Opening the windows wasn’t an option, as the banging and knocking never ceased, and one “bleeding” clown was better than a handful of hungry ones.
“He’s dead—”
“Again?”
“Yeah, smart ass, this time for real, but I can’t see anything back here. June Bug, are you okay?”
“I’m scared, Mommy.”
“I know, baby. We’ll be okay.”
And then we weren’t. I’m not sure that we had hit a corpulent clown or some other road block, but the ice cream truck flipped and skidded on its side. When we came to a stop, everything was eerily silent for a few seconds. It was like no one involved in this dangerous farce could believe their luck or our lack of it. June Bug started to cry. And then her mother. The laughing got louder and some of the fuscia mist had dispersed through the broken windows. A zombie clown whose head looked bigger than my torso was on top of me before I had a chance to orient myself and unbuckle my seat belt. I guess we never really had chance to make it out of dodge.
Where have all the The Junkies gone?
by Eric Levy
A few years back, the world was fascinated with zombies. You saw zombies everywhere… hell, even Comic heroes were zombiefied and left to prowl on the meek and innocent. Zombie this, zombie that and then have some more Zombie sprinkled all over your morning coffee. You know what they say, a Zombie a day, keeps the necrophiliacs away!
Anyhow, this undead craze came up to a point where i began to hate zombies for a while. I am an avid zombie fan, collecting even the most lamest of zed’s movies i can get my hands on. I’ve also sat down and written down some outbreak stories here and there, all based here in my hometown. Maybe someday, i will tell you about them.
Zombies are my favorite monster of the lot out there. I’m tempted to say my favorite modern monster… in the same bag as genetic altered creatures/mutants, robots, aliens and so on and so forth. The classical roster, Dracula, The Wolfman, The Frankenstein monster, The Mummy, etc. are not that dear to me, maybe because i did not grow up with those monsters on the screens of the movie theater. I do like werewolves a lot too, and on several occasions have found myself arguing that there is indeed a difference between The Wolfman and a werewolf.
But what i can’t really stomach is the way the media has a feeding frenzy on everything that has to do with those blood sucking freaks, The Vampires.
Back in the 90s, like a lot of you out there, thought that the humanized, romanticized and elegant characterization of the Anne Rice vampire was cool. The classical vampire -Count Dracula, not Nosferatu- was nothing more than a Halloween joke. But nowadays, i see vampires sink even lower than that Hallmark version we hang out on our doors on October 31st.
What happened to the view of the Vampire as a junkie? That is what vampires are, junkies, who need to feed/injest their substance of choise/blood in order to function on the world out there. Given this status quo, and amplified by ancient folklore, they stick to the dark… and seldom venture out during daylight; they are ashamed of what they are, and it is due to this prolonged exposure to the darkness -internal and external- that the sun hurts ‘em.
I wanted to be a vampire when i was a teenager. All my teen angst found a kindred spirit in the Anne Rice version of the vampire. I wanted to be like Louis, who was a reluctant vampire… way too human for his own good. But then i grew up, and realized that all that vampiristic wanabeism was nothing more than my teen hormones speaking.
I really hope to Chtulhu, that this new breed of glow in the dark, sparkling, strawberry scented version of the undead goes the way of the dodo as well, following in the steps of the Rice Vamp.
If you wanna see a really kick ass vampire, go and rent Joel Schumacker’s The Lost Boys (1987) or that other one with David Bowie, The Hunger (1983). Now, THOSE are kick ass Vampires, and a true testament to the thought current/parallelism of the Vamp as a Junkie.
Maybe even pop in the classic Nosferatu (1922) or Coppola’s Bram Stocker’s DRACULA (1922)…
You wanna know what is the sad thing about this? I don’t even like Vampires at all! I just find this trend we are going trough really ridiculous! I’m gonna have to get my hands on a couple of seasons of The Vampire Diaries and True Blood and see what’s that about, as i have not seen one episode of either.
Then again, I might just stick to my Zombies, and my Werwolves… and let this thing be. what do you think ah?
More Zombies! Dia de los Muertos Newsflash
Hey there, zombie fans!
As Romero's Dead trilogy was (and is) one of the great landmarks of horror film, I'm sure y'all were as excited as I was when you first heard about Land of the Dead, the fourth installment in the great zombie master's oeuvre a few years back. One of my top ten favorite things about the new millennium, in fact, has been George Romero's return to the glorious and moving subject of the living dead.
Moving... get it? I kill me!
So now we're twiddling our thumbs in anticipation of Diary of the Dead which is set to come out some time next year. The plot?
A group of young film students run into real-life zombies while filming a horror movie of their own.
That's some meta-horror right there. Could we expect anything less from the man who essentially invented the modern zombie, though? Even better, it's going to be independently financed, just like in the halcyon days of Romero zombies.
Well, there's more. Turns out a sequel to Diary of the Dead has already been greenlighted. Awesome. The plot concept?
Fighting their way out of a mansion through a horde of ravenous zombies, the survivors of "Diary" escape to a remote island only to be plunged into another battle with the dead.
So, basically, if you, like me, enjoy little more than fantasizing about hacking off the heads of the undead with a machete while searching for other survivors of the zombie apocalypse through a ravaged countryside and/or cityscape, you've got some more masturbation fodder coming.
Flux longs for delicious brains.
Wil Wheaton's Geek in Review: It's the End of the World As We Know it, and I Feel Fine
I was in fourth or fifth grade when I was introduced to post-apocalypic science fiction.
Once a month, our class went to the local public library, where a librarian would read to us from a book, followed by a discussion. When the discussion was over, we were allowed to check out up to two different books, with the understanding that we'd write a book report on one of them. Each month had a different theme, and it's not surprising to me that the only one I clearly remember was science fiction.
The librarian read from a book called Z for Zachariah, which tells the story of a young girl who survives a nuclear holocaust. She lived in a valley that was protected from fallout, with her father and brothers. One day, they leave her and the valley to seek food or other survivors or something, and never come back. She thinks she's all alone in the world until she sees smoke on the horizon that gets closer each day. After watching it for a week or so, a man wearing a survival suit and pulling a wagon comes into her valley. Pretty quickly, it turns out that she was much better off without him, and he's in-fucking-sane.
(I wrote that plot summary from memory, and just checked it against Wikipedia; as far as I can tell, the impression that book made on me when I was 9 was pretty strong, because I pretty much nailed it. Sweet. Go me.)
After I finished Z, I hungered for more post-apocalyptic science fiction, but there wasn't that much literature geared toward kids my age that wasn't just silly. I turned my attention to television and movies, where I found an embarrassment of riches: The Twilight Zone gave us stories like Time Enough at Last and The Old Man in the Cave. Before it was a craptastic series, NBC's V was a full-on television event. Video stores were filled with VHS and Beta copies of films like The Road Warrior and Damnation Alley. Saturday mornings would find me glued Thundarr The Barbarian, which combined the sorcery I loved from D&D with my fledgling interest in post-apocalyptic fiction. That it didn't seem to be a transparent advertisement for toys like Transformers or He-Man was a bonus.
I was drawn to these stories because they were more serious than Star Wars and seemed more plausible than Star Trek. In many ways, the dystopian world they portrayed was more believable and relevant to me than the fantasy worlds I'd been exposed to. They were all scary-but-cool and felt sort of cautionary to me, which I suppose is a hallmark of all apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction, but they did it in a way that wasn't as over the top as The Day After (also a favorite of mine that scared my mother shitless, mostly because she'd lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis and knew what it meant to truly fear a nuclear armageddon.) Because I was a geeky kid who was constantly picked on, I relished any opportunity I could find to trade the boring and shitty real world I lived in for something more exciting, and these stories intelligent, compelling, and rewarding.
Around sixth or seventh grade, I was introduced to the zombie apocalypse when this kid I knew had a sleepover. His dad worked at a studio - Warners, I think - and we watched one of his screeners of Heavy Metal on Betamax while we drank Jolt and stayed up all night long. I recall all the other 12 and 13 year-old boys wanting to rewind the tape over and over again to watch the animated naked ladies, but I was fixated on B-17 Flying Fortress with its zombies and juxtaposition of WWII technology with futuristic horror, and Den, which felt like Thundarr for grown-ups. After Heavy Metal, we all watched the original Night of the Living Dead. This was B-17 Flying Fortress in terror-vision. It was the apocalyptic fiction I already enjoyed taken in an entirely different direction, and it was scary. I loved it, and I devoured as much zombie-related fiction as I could get my hands on. In the early 80s, that pretty much meant Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, (which was damn close to being too gory for me) and Return of the Living Dead which wasn't scary, but had Jewel Shepard boobies, which more than made up for its other failings.
In even wrote a zombie apocalypse short story of my own in seventh grade. This is how I described it in Just A Geek:
As a creative writing assignment around Halloween in 1985, all the seventh graders wrote horror stories. Inspired by "Night of the Living Dead," D&D, and a family trip to San Francisco, I wrote a story about a man and his wife, fleeing from the terror of zombies who had escaped an army research base, and were slowly taking over the country. They discover that water can force the zombie-causing chemicals out of the living dead, so they end up on Alcatraz island, which I had decided was the only safe place left in America. I remember the story ended with something like, "Alcatraz was once a federal prison for killers. Now it's the prison that's saving our lives. We even sleep in the Birdman's old cell.
"As the sun set over the Golden Gate Bridge, I looked out onto America: once, the land of the free. Now, the land of the zombies."
It's not Hemmingway, but it's pretty good for a 12 year old. It was voted scariest and goriest story by the seventh and eighth graders, and I proudly photocopied it, and sent it to all my relatives. They were all horrified and told my parents that I should get professional help.
As I grew older, my affinity for post-apocalyptic science fiction never waned, but I ran through just about everything in the zombie apocalyps pretty quickly. I mean, in popular fiction, the standard zombie story is pretty simple:
1. Oh my god, there are zombies everywhere.
2. Let's hide in this place where we'll be safe.
3. Oh shit, some of us just got eaten.
4. Hey, there's a helicopter!
5. Let's fly away without any real closure for the audience.
It's awesome the first couple of times, but after awhile it's a little . . . derivative. I still loved the classics, but by 1986 or so, I was getting tired of the genre, and slowly lost interest in the ongoing saga of the undead.
Then the zombie revival happened a few years ago, and it took this genre out of the realm of geeks and hardcore splatterheads into the mainstream, lead by films like 28 Days Later which brought something new to the genre: zombies who run real fucking fast. It was scary as hell, but in the great "fast vs. slow" zombie debate, I'm a purist, and I like them slow.
After 28 Days Later we got Shaun of the Dead. (If you haven't seen Shaun, please punch yourself in the back of the head, and stop everything, including that life-saving transplant you had scheduled for tomorrow, and watch it, so that you can declare yourself to be a huge zombie geek.) Then they remade Dawn of the Dead, which was also cool and scary, but with the damn fast zombies. The grand master of zombie fiction, George A. Romero, even returned to the land of the dead with, well, Land of the Dead in 2005.
I was totally infected by the revival, though, with the release of David Wellington's Monster Island. This was the first zombie novel I'd ever read, and it was the first bit of zombie fiction to tell much of the story from the zombie's point of view. Wellington followed it up with Monster Nation, which is an incredibly satisfying prequel. Around this time, Stephen King returned to the storytelling that made him eleventy bajillion dollars with Cell, and my love of the post-apocalyptic horror genre was reawakened with a vengeance . . . you could even say it was raised from the dead, if you were trying to be clever.
Earlier this week, on the advice of seanbonner, I picked up the audio book of Max Brooks' World War Z, and I've been riveted. It's a full cast performance of interviews with people who survived the zombie war that nearly destroyed humanity. Yeah, that's right: this is all about what happens when you don't just survive a zombie apocalypse, but you win. If you're even a casual fan of the undead, you've got to pick this up. Hell, it's almost inspired me to participate in one of those zombie walks the damn kids today do.
As a longtime fan of these genres, I'm happy, but not thrilled, that we're starting to see apocalyptic fiction hit the mainstream. I say "not thrilled" because when things like this hit the mainstream, the good stuff gets marginalized, while the majority tends to become guilty pleasures like The Omega Man, moderately entertaining efforts like Jericho, or full-on suckfests like the Resident Evil movie (that one shot -- you know the one -- notwithstanding, of course.)
Currently, graphic novels like Walking Dead do what the movies could never do: continue forever, examining all the situations that would realistically come up if the zombies ever did begin their insatiable feast on humanity. (Yes, I am aware of how silly it sounds to use "realistically" that close to "insatiable feast on humanity." Shut up. Zombies are cool.) And there is, of course, much, much more for the fan of apocalyptic science fiction and horror. I haven't even mentioned games like Car Wars, pretty much everything White Wolf puts out, and Twilight Creations' awesomely fun Zombies!!!. There's anime and manga, like Akira and NOiSE. There are video games like Dead Rising and the Fallout series of PC RPGs. There's also a ton of original stuff online, created by guys like me who just love zombies and want to have as much fun with the it as we can before someone comes along and hits us in the head with a shovel.
So why is the revival in full swing now? I think it's because a lot of the same fears and geopolitical conflicts that dominated the post-WWII era when apocalyptic fiction really got started are alive and well today. We don't have the Cold War, but we have terrorism, global warming, and a government that does everything it can to keep us in a constant state of fear and uncertainty. When we feel like this, one way we cope is by creating worlds where the worst of our fear have been realized, worlds where we can walk away if it gets too scary, and maybe it prepares us to deal with that world, should we create it for real.
Of course, we don't have to read too much into it if we don't want to. These stories are fun, and entertaining, and sometimes a shambling mob of rotting undead corpses lurching toward you with insatiable hunger and murderous intent is just a shambling mob of rotting undead corpses lurching toward you with insatiable hunger and murderous intent.
Pleasant dreams . . .
Wil Wheaton was an undead celebrity in Dead Eyes Open. He's not really dead, and doesn't want to go on the cart.
Dead Rising Round Up
After not-so-recent releases of Stubbs The Zombie and Infected, it's about time for a true blood and gore zombie-slaying game--specifically one that I actually want to play for more than 10 minutes, but doesn't leave me in need of a nightlight and change of pants. Developed by Capcom--who pretty much perfected the zombie genre with the Resident Evil series--my fingers are crossed that Dead Rising will delivers. The game follows Frank West, an overeager journalist looking for a story. As all zombie related things inevitably involve a mall of some kind, Frank finds himself combatting the living dead in the land of sales, muzak and loitering. Armed with a barrage of miscellaneous and certainly creative weaponry, it is non-stop zombie combat from the get-go.
Due for release August 8th (though apparently our playable demo is coming to the Xbox Live Marketplace any day now), I've got a bunch of Dead Rising related material for all of your needs. Starting with Xbox Live Achievements! It seems Capcom got creative in this area as well with curious achivements such as "Gourmet: Eat all types of food available in the mall" and "Costume Party: Place novelty masks on at least 10 zombies".
Next up is an interview over at Firing Squad with producer Yutaka Haruki.
And lastly, but best of all, is a new extended trailer full of glorious zombie killing. My favorite part, of course, is the the zoom in and focus on the orange juice rack, followed by our friend Frank running through the mall with his orange jug of hurt. Fear the vitamin C, brain eaters!