8 Ways To Prepare For AMC's New Year's Walking Dead Marathon

AMC is ringing in the new year with a full-series marathon of The Walking Dead. Beginning with the Pilot, "Days Gone Bye" on Tue., Dec. 31, at 9AM/8c, episodes will air back-to-back in chronological order leading up to the Season 4 Mid-Season Finale, "Too Far Gone" at 5AM/4c on Thu., Jan. 2, 2014. Can't wait? Here are eight ways to get ready...

1. Play the NEW The Walking Dead personality test to find out how long you'd survive in a zombie apocalypse.

2. Watch The Walking Dead webisodes directed by Greg Nicotero: "Torn Apart," which tells the back story of Bicycle Girl; "Cold Storage," which follows a group of survivors at a storage facility; and "The Oath," the story of two survivors fleeing an overrun camp in search of a medical facility.

3. Go behind-the-scenes of Season 4 with photos of the cast and crew filming on location in Georgia.

4. Prove your devotion to the show with The Walking Dead Ultimate Fan Games which quiz you on seasons, episodes and even walkers from the series.

5. Turn yourself into a zombie with the Dead Yourself App then transform your friends into the undead with Dead Yourself's Bite Me feature.

6. Play The Walking Dead: Dead Reckoning, an adventure game that casts you as officer Shane Walsh at the outset of the apocalypse.

7. Check out interviews with Andrew Lincoln, Norman Reedus, Robert Kirkman and the rest of the cast and crew to find out how The Walking Dead comes to life each season. (Behind-the-scenes videos accompany each Q&A.)

8. Sign up for Dead Alert: The Walking Dead Newsletter to keep up-to-date on the latest features about the show (and possibly win some cool swag).

Want more? Then click here.

Resident Evil Coming To Halloween Horror Night

This fall, Universal Orlando Resort will transform reality into a surreal fight for survival as the critically acclaimed survival horror video game series “Resident Evil” becomes a haunted house at Halloween Horror Nights 23!

This completes this year’s lineup for Universal Orlando’s Halloween Horror Nights 23, which will feature some of the most outrageously terrifying, highly recognizable names in entertainment and pop culture. In addition to Resident Evil, the event will also include haunted houses based on AMC’s “The Walking Dead,” Mexican urban legend La Llorona and critically acclaimed horror films “Evil Dead,” “An American Werewolf in London” and “The Cabin in the Woods.” Universal Orlando is also dedicating its entire Halloween Horror Nights street experience to “The Walking Dead” – making this the first time ever that all of the scare zones throughout the park will be themed after a hit television series.

For “Resident Evil,” Universal’s Entertainment team collaborated with the video game creators at Capcom to create a horrifyingly authentic haunted house based on some of the popular video games from the Resident Evil series. Guests will become desperate survivors inside the viral catastrophe, Raccoon City. As they journey through the city, they’ll encounter vicious characters from the games such as Lickers, bloodthirsty zombies, packs of Cerberuses and even Nemesis himself. Fans will be completely transported inside the video game realm – to the extent that one room in the haunted house will appear as if an action-packed fight scene is paused, as if the gamer has taken a quick break before returning to the horror of Raccoon City.

The “Resident Evil” franchise is now firmly established as a mainstay of contemporary culture with blockbuster live action movies, CG anime, manga, novels and numerous merchandising lines being produced alongside the video game series. To date, the Resident Evil series of video games has achieved global sales of more than 57 million units.

For a detailed listing of each experience featured at this year’s event, see below.

Universal Studios Hollywood’s Halloween Horror Nights To Take Over Studio Backlot With ‘The Walking Dead’

From the press release:

This year the contemporary urban city streets, towering skyscraper, brick-faced facades and industrial exteriors that make up Universal Studios’ world-famous production facilities will serve as a backdrop location for “Halloween Horror Nights” at Universal Studios Hollywood as Southern California’s premier Halloween experience creates maze settings from iconic movie sets and soundstages never before used in this popular, award-winning event. “Halloween Horror Nights” begins on Friday, September 20, 2013.

Taking its cue from Universal Pictures—the movie studio that invented the horror film genre—Universal Studios Hollywood is intensifying its “Halloween Horror Nights” event by bringing guests to isolated production movie and television sets located on the famed Universal backlot to experience two new and highly disturbing enclosed mazes.

“Since the early 1920s, Universal Studios’ most infamous monsters took their first breath right here on the Universal backlot,” said Larry Kurzweil, President, Universal Studios Hollywood. This very studio that invented the horror film genre traumatized movie-goers with some of the silver screen's most indelible characters. Years later, it seems only fitting that the studio is making its urban production sets accessible to ‘Halloween Horror Nights’ guests as we bring nightmares to life with contemporary horror properties.”

“Universal’s backlot was deliberately created to mirror real life urban streets, metropolitan cityscapes and intimate European settings,” said Steven Spielberg. “As filmmakers, we strive to find the ideal, most authentic filming locations to legitimize our productions and make every scene as realistic as possible, which is why Universal Studios Hollywood continues to take creative risks by extending ‘Halloween Horror Nights’ to include the studios’ backlot. Theme park guests will be in awe when they have this rare opportunity to walk through the backlot's definitive Hollywood movie-making sets.”

“The Walking Dead: No Safe Haven” maze, inspired by Season 3 of AMC’s Golden Globe-nominated, Emmy Award-winning television series, will strike at the heart of this dynamic “Halloween Horror Nights” film set location, abandoning guests in the dead of night amid hordes of morbidly decomposing, flesh-eating zombies.

With life imitating art, guests will first be tasked to brave swarms of ravenous zombies milling aggressively about the maze entry in a terrifying zombie apocalypse scare zone. A putrid infestation of predatory walkers with an unwavering appetite for humans will lurk throughout the backlot’s dark alleyways and protective doorways with only one place to escape: the maze.

If guests survive this fleet of crazed, bloodthirsty walkers, the terror begins. “The Walking Dead: No Safe Haven” haunted maze will place “Halloween Horror Nights” guests at the core of the show’s once impenetrable prison, the West Georgia Correctional Facility, now overrun by decaying walkers. The eerily authentic and disturbingly real attraction will send them cowering through the walker-infested wilderness that surrounds the prison and into the seemingly utopian town of Woodbury where gruesome secrets are concealed.

‘The Walking Dead’ maze that Universal Studios Hollywood is bringing to life at this year’s ‘Halloween Horror Nights’ event will take credibility to entirely new levels,” said Greg Nicotero, Executive Producer, Director and Special Effects Makeup Supervisor for AMC’s “The Walking Dead.” “Universal's creative team is painstakingly re-creating the world of ‘The Walking Dead’ for this year's maze, and the level of authenticity will make guests and fans feel like they’ve stepped into Season 3. Located on the production backlot area of the studio, people will be able to experience iconic moments from the show up close and personal.”

The second maze to debut in this backlot setting will be “Black Sabbath: 13 3D.” This new haunted attraction, based on the legendary multi-platinum rock band’s recently released Billboard #1 album “13,” will be located within the dark and eerie confines of a soundstage.

“Black Sabbath: 13 3D,” inspired by Black Sabbath’s biggest hit songs and the only “Halloween Horror Nights” maze to incorporate 3D video, will engulf guests in a nightmarish landscape of doom, where they will traverse horrifying graveyards, twisted madhouses and bone-chilling battlefields. Fearless guests will live the nightmare of such songs as “Luke’s Wall,” “Iron Man,” “Paranoid,” “War Pigs,” “Electric Funeral” and, of course, “Black Sabbath,” and find themselves face to face with a heart-stopping Lucifer and his bride, blood-soaked dead bodies and bubbling pools of “radioactive water.”

“Halloween Horror Nights” 2013 at Universal Studios Hollywood brings together the sickest minds in horror to immerse guests in a living, breathing, three-dimensional world of terror, and offers a slate of unrivaled film production quality mazes, Scare Zones and “Terror Tram” experience – all uniquely themed to today’s most definitive horror properties. This year’s haunted attractions will also include “Evil Dead: Book of the Dead,” inspired by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment’s chilling remake of the cult classic, and “Insidious: Into The Further,” based on the 2010 horror thriller “Insidious” and the upcoming sequel “Insidious: Chapter 2”.

A new reign of terror in all-original scare zones based on Universal Pictures’ blockbuster movie “The Purge” and Universal Studios Home Entertainment’s upcoming Blu-ray release of “Curse of Chucky,” will also come to life to taunt and terrify “Halloween Horror Nights” guests.

Happy Father's Day From The Zombie Mob!

The Walking Dead Christmas Special - What AMC Should Have Given Us This Week!

I've got the ham! Open the gate!

Halloween Treats From Permuted Press

Are you a Nook reader? Please go ahead, click through the images above, and get the books for Kindle (it helps our Amazon ranking). Then contact us and ask for our free Halloween books for Nook. Note it will take us a few days to get back with you.

Autobiography Of A Werewolf Hunter by Brian P. Easton

It takes more than silver bullets to kill a werewolf. 

Sylvester James knows what it is to be haunted. His mother died giving birth to him and his father never let him forget it; until the night he was butchered by a werewolf--the night a full moon ruined his life. 

Alone in the world, Sylvester is taken in by Michael Winterfox, a Cheyenne mystic. Winterfox, once a werewolf hunter, trains the boy to be a warrior--teaching him how to block out pain, stalk, fight, and kill. 

Bit by bit all that makes Sylvester human is sacrificed to the hunt. Now, Sylvester’s hatred has become a monster all its own, robbing him of conscience and conviction as surely as the Beast’s bite. As he follows his vendetta into the outlands of the occult, options become scarce. And he learns it takes more than silver bullets to kill a werewolf…

Winds Of Change by Jason Brannon

A shooting star marks the beginning nightmares for the small town of Crowley’s Point. Those who venture outdoors instantly transform into piles of salt. Is it the result of biological experimentation gone awry? A terrorist’s plot? Or is it the fulfillment of a horrific Biblical prophecy? 

Among those stranded in the local hardware store are a newlywed couple who may be hiding a secret, a hard-living family of four who are known primarily for their aversion to the law, and an elderly man that found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. As the carnage spreads and the mystery deepens, those trapped inside stumble across clues that hint at fallen angels, omens, and widespread bloodshed. And all signs indicate that one of the group who isn’t what they seem. 

Will the survivors root out the impostor before it’s too late? Or will they all themselves transformed into piles of salt, blown asunder by Winds of Change?

The Last Mailman: Neither Rain, Nor Sleet, Nor Zombies by Kevin L. Burke

Four-year degree in business. Trained in hand-to-hand combat.  

Works well with zombies. 

This is the resume of the last mailman on Earth. It is the near future, and the modern world we knew has been overrun and destroyed by reanimated corpses who hunt humans for food. Mankind has retreated to small pockets of civilization and practically surrendered to the walking dead. But one man routinely leaves behind the safety and comfort to find the people and things we’ve long abandoned. He battles the elements. He battles his own brewing insanity. 

But mostly, he battles zombies.

Eaters by Michelle Depaepe

Cheryl and her fiancé Mark, a soldier recently returned from Afghanistan, are on their way back to Denver after a reunion camping trip in the mountains when they receive word an epidemic is spreading like wildfire.

But this is no ordinary virus. Those infected, dubbed “Eaters,” are reanimated corpses whose lust for rotten food quickly turns to an insatiable desire for human flesh. 

When Mark becomes infected, Cheryl is forced to venture into this insane new world on her own. Hoping to find her family still living, she strikes out on a blood-soaked journey that forges her will to survive.

The Ooze Cruise

Dread Central brings us this following piece about a cruise designed for the zombie enthusiast:

Brought to you by Captain Cruella of the Carnivorous Cadavers and award-winning horror blogger Brian Spears, the Ooze Cruise looks to be a zombie fan's dream come true. Participants will be treated to costume contests, zombie crawls, zombie movie nights, a zombie variety show and plenty more excitement over the course of the seven-day event. 

The Ooze Cruise departs from Cape Liberty-Bayonne, NJ on January 6th and will shamble the seas through Orlando, Nassau and Coco Cay, returning on January 13th. What better way to beat the winter blues? Not that zombies are that susceptible to winter blues, but why take a chance? Nassau will sound damn good in January.

Happy Earth Day!