Zombie Signage Spreads

Hackers Target More Road Signs

Pranksters in at least three states are messing with electronic road signs meant to warn motorists of possible traffic problems by putting drivers on notice about Nazi zombies and raptors. And highway safety officials aren’t amused. The latest breach came on Tuesday during the morning rush hour near Collinsville, Illinois, where hackers changed a sign along southbound Interstate 255 to read: “DAILY LANE CLOSURES DUE TO ZOMBIES.”

A day earlier in Indiana’s Hamilton County, the electronic message on a board in Carmel’s construction zone warned drivers: “RAPTORS AHEAD — CAUTION.”

Signs in Austin, Texas, recently flashed: “NAZI ZOMBIES! RUN!!!” and “ZOMBIES IN AREA! RUN.”

Officials in Illinois are concerned the rewritten signs distract motorists from heeding legitimate hazards down the road. The hacked sign on Tuesday originally warned drivers of crews replacing guardrails.

“We understood it was a hoax, but at the same time those boards are there for a reason,” said Joe Gasaway, an Illinois Department of Transportation supervisory field engineer. “We don’t want [drivers] being distracted by a funny sign.”

Authorities haven’t figured out how pranksters access the signs.

Gasaway believes the Illinois sign was changed remotely and Austin Public Works spokeswoman Sara Hartley suspected the hackers there cut a padlock to get into the signs’ computers.

Some Web sites, such as Jalopnik.com, have published tutorials titled “How to Hack an Electronic Road Sign” as a way to alert security holes to traffic-safety officials. Jalopnik urges its readers not to put its lesson to practice.

“Hacking generally is about showing where there are holes in security systems and I think this is a great example of that,” the site’s editor-in-chief, Ray Wert, said by telephone on Wednesday. “I’m sure there are all sorts of ways to use that information in a way that’s inappropriate, but we’re trying to make clear this is an issue that needs to be confronted by traffic safety and transportation officials.”

Wert said he had no immediate plans to take down Jalopnik’s how-to guide.

In Illinois, tampering with an official traffic control device is a misdemeanor punishable by up to a US$250 fine — half what a culprit might have to pay in Texas if caught. If convicted in Indiana, a culprit faces up to a year in jail and US$5,000 in fines.

Source: Taipei Times, February 6, 2009 (Page 7)
Associated Press Article

Simon Pegg on Zombie Speed

THE DEAD AND THE QUICK

Everyone knows the undead don't run - so how come they were sprinting about in Charlie Brooker's recent TV drama? Simon Pegg argues for a return to traditional zombie values

By Simon Pegg

Published online by The Guardian, Tuesday 4 November 2008

As an avid horror fan, I found the prospect of last week's five-night TV zombie spectacular rather exciting. Admittedly, the trailer for E4's Dead Set made me somewhat uneasy. The sight of newsreader Krishnan Guru-Murthy warning the populace of an impending zombie apocalypse induced a sickening sense of indignation. Only five years previously, Edgar Wright and I had hired Krishnan to do the very same thing in our own zombie opus, Shaun of the Dead. It was a bit like seeing an ex-lover walking down the street pushing a pram. Of course, this was a knee-jerk reaction. It's not as if Edgar and I hadn't already pushed someone else's baby up the cultural high street - but that, to some extent, was the point. In Shaun of the Dead, we lifted the mythology established by George A Romero in his 1968 film Night of the Living Dead and offset it against the conventions of a romantic comedy.

Still, I had to acknowledge Dead Set's impressive credentials. The concept was clever in its simplicity: a full-scale zombie outbreak coincides with a Big Brother eviction night, leaving the Big Brother house as the last refuge for the survivors. Scripted by Charlie Brooker, a writer whose scalpel-sharp incisiveness I have long been a fan of, and featuring talented actors such as Jaime Winstone and the outstanding Kevin Eldon, the show heralded the arrival of genuine homegrown horror, scratching at the fringes of network television. My expectations were high, and I sat down to watch a show that proved smart, inventive and enjoyable, but for one key detail: ZOMBIES DON'T RUN!

I know it is absurd to debate the rules of a reality that does not exist, but this genuinely irks me. You cannot kill a vampire with an MDF stake; werewolves can't fly; zombies do not run. It's a misconception, a bastardization that diminishes a classic movie monster. The best phantasmagoria uses reality to render the inconceivable conceivable. The speedy zombie seems implausible to me, even within the fantastic realm it inhabits. A biological agent, I'll buy. Some sort of super-virus? Sure, why not. But death? Death is a disability, not a superpower. It's hard to run with a cold, let alone the most debilitating malady of them all.

More significantly, the fast zombie is bereft of poetic subtlety. As monsters from the id, zombies win out over vampires and werewolves when it comes to the title of Most Potent Metaphorical Monster. Where their pointy-toothed cousins are all about sex and bestial savagery, the zombie trumps all by personifying our deepest fear: death. Zombies are our destiny writ large. Slow and steady in their approach, weak, clumsy, often absurd, the zombie relentlessly closes in, unstoppable, intractable.

However (and herein lies the sublime artfulness of the slow zombie), their ineptitude actually makes them avoidable, at least for a while. If you're careful, if you keep your wits about you, you can stave them off, even outstrip them - much as we strive to outstrip death. Drink less, cut out red meat, exercise, practice safe sex; these are our shotguns, our cricket bats, our farmhouses, our shopping malls. However, none of these things fully insulates us from the creeping dread that something so witless, so elemental may yet catch us unawares - the drunk driver, the cancer sleeping in the double helix, the legless ghoul dragging itself through the darkness towards our ankles.

Another thing: speed simplifies the zombie, clarifying the threat and reducing any response to an emotional reflex. It's the difference between someone shouting "Boo!" and hearing the sound of the floorboards creaking in an upstairs room: a quick thrill at the expense of a more profound sense of dread. The absence of rage or aggression in slow zombies makes them oddly sympathetic, a detail that enabled Romero to project depth on to their blankness, to create tragic anti-heroes; his were figures to be pitied, empathized with, even rooted for. The moment they appear angry or petulant, the second they emit furious velociraptor screeches (as opposed to the correct mournful moans of longing), they cease to possess any ambiguity. They are simply mean.

So how did this break with convention come about? The process has unfolded with all the infuriating dramatic irony of an episode of Fawlty Towers. To begin at the beginning, Haitian folklore tells of voodoo shamans, or bokors, who would use digitalis, derived from the foxglove plant, to induce somnambulant trances in individuals who would subsequently appear dead. Weeks later, relatives of the supposedly deceased would witness their lost loved ones in a soporific malaise, working in the fields of wealthy landowners, and assume them to be nzambi (a west African word for "spirit of the dead"). From the combination of nzambi and somnambulist ("sleepwalker") we get the word zombie.

The legend was appropriated by the film industry, and for 20 or 30 years a steady flow of voodoo-based cinema emerged from the Hollywood horror factory. Then a young filmmaker from Pittsburgh by the name of George A Romero changed everything. Romero's fascination with Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend, the story of a lone survivor struggling in a world overrun by vampires, led him to fixate on an aspect of the story leapfrogged by the author: namely, the process by which humanity is subjugated by the aggressive new species. Romero adopted the Haitian zombie and combined it with notions of cannibalism, as well as the viral communicability characterized by the vampire and werewolf myths, and so created the modern zombie.

After three films spanning three decades, and much imitation from film-makers such as Lucio Fulci and Dan O'Bannon, the credibility of the zombie was dealt a cruel blow by the king of pop. Michael Jackson's Thriller video, directed by John Landis, was entertaining but made it rather difficult for us to take zombies seriously, having witnessed them body-popping. The blushing dead went quiet for a while, until the Japanese video game company Capcom developed the game Resident Evil, which brilliantly captured the spirit of Romero's shambling antagonists (Romero even directed a trailer for the second installment). Slow and steady, the zombie commenced its stumble back into our collective subconscious.

Inspired by the game and a shared love of Romero, Edgar Wright and I decided to create our own black comedy. Meanwhile, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland were developing their own end-of-the-world fable, 28 Days Later, an excellent film misconstrued by the media as a zombie flick. Boyle and Garland never set out to make a zombie film per se. They drew instead on John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids, as well as Matheson and Romero's work, to fashion a new strain of survival horror, featuring a London beset by rabid propagators of a virus known as "rage".

The success of the movie, particularly in the United States, was undoubtedly a factor in the loose remake of Romero's Dawn of the Dead in 2004. Zack Snyder's effective but pointless reboot parlayed Boyle's "infected" into the upgraded zombie 2.0, likely at the behest of some cigar-chomping, focus-group-happy movie exec desperate to satisfy the MTV generation's demand for quicker everything - quicker food, quicker downloads, quicker dead people. The zombie was ushered on to the mainstream stage, on the proviso that it sprinted up to the mic. The genre was diminished, and I think it's a shame.

Despite my purist griping, I liked Dead Set a lot. It had solid performances, imaginative direction, good gore and the kind of inventive writing and verbal playfulness we've come to expect from the always brilliant Brooker. As a satire, it took pleasing chunks out of media bumptiousness and, more significantly, the aggressive collectivism demonstrated by the lost souls who waste their Friday nights standing outside the Big Brother house, baying for the blood of those inside. Like Romero, Brooker simply nudges the metaphor to its literal conclusion, and spatters his point across our screens in blood and brains and bits of skull. If he had only eschewed the zeitgeist and embraced the docile, creeping weirdness that has served to embed the zombie so deeply in our gray matter, Dead Set might have been my favorite piece of television ever. As it was, I had to settle for it merely being bloody good.

• 

  Gallery: Zombies on film

  Is Simon correct? Find out with our A-Z (ambulatory-to-zippy) guide to zombies old and new

Related:

22 Aug 2008

Simon Pegg introduces his series of video blogs from the set of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People

Profile: Simon Pegg

Simon Pegg on why the undead should never be allowed to run This article was first published on guardian.co.uk at 00.01 GMT on Tuesday 4 November 2008. It appeared in the Guardian on Tuesday 4 November 2008 on p21 of the Arts section. It was last updated at 15.45 GMT on Tuesday 11 November 2008.

12 Apr 2005

College days: Simon Pegg

Simon Pegg's video diary: Episode one

22 Aug 2008: Simon's first video diary from the set of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People

Nellie McKay's "Zombie" Song

Nellie McKay has apparently gained a bit of popularity for her song "Zombie." A musically much better version was performed on Mountain Stage, available online via NPR. Below is a video with less-satisfying audio. As a New York Magazine article mentioned, McKay began recording at 17 years old. “People don’t understand teenagers. The only way you’re going to get your kids to not do drugs, if that’s your goal—which I don’t understand, because a lot of drugs are good for you—is to do drugs around your kid, which my mother did. She smokes pot, and I’ve never wanted to. I can be difficult—I take out my neuroses by punching things. That doesn’t sound very female, does it? There’s more than a little Sean Penn in me. There’s a lot of fury in me.”

Austin Highway Sign: Zombies Ahead

Hackers Crack Into Texas Road Sign,
Warn of Zombies Ahead

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

By Joshua Rhett Miller

Transportation officials in Texas are scrambling to prevent hackers from changing messages on digital road signs after one sign in Austin was altered to read, "Zombies Ahead."

Chris Lippincott, director of media relations for the Texas Department of Transportation, confirmed that a portable traffic sign at Lamar Boulevard and West 15th Street, near the University of Texas at Austin, was hacked into during the early hours of Jan. 19, 2009.

"It was clever, kind of cute, but not what it was intended for," said Lippincott, who saw the sign during his morning commute. "Those signs are deployed for a reason — to improve traffic conditions, let folks know there's a road closure."

"It's sort of amusing, but not at all helpful," he told FOXNews.com.

Tampering with portable road signs is illegal and potentially dangerous to drivers. It is a misdemeanor in Texas, with penalties ranging from fines to potential jail time.

Lippincott said the hacked sign — manufactured by IMAGO — is owned and operated by the city of Austin. Texas Department of Transportation signs have not been affected, he said.

"It is always possible that it could occur, but we attempt to prevent hacking incidents," Lippincott wrote in an e-mail. He declined to comment on security measures to protect the state's signs from hackers.

Austin Public Works spokeswoman Sara Hartley said the incident was not initially reported to police, but will be shortly. The sign was reverted back to its original message within hours, according to Hartley, who insisted the signs are tamper-resistant and equipped with external locks.

"This sign was broken into, it was not just a 'walk up and change the sign' kind of thing," Hartley told FOXNews.com. "This is a new one for us, we've never had it happen before."

She said she did not know whether any other signs in the area had been altered.

According to the blog i-hacked.com, some commercial road signs, including those manufactured by IMAGO's ADDCO division, can be easily altered because their instrument panels are frequently left unlocked and their default passwords are not changed.

"Programming is as simple as scrolling down the menu selection," i-hacked.com reports. "Type whatever you want to display … In all likelihood, the crew will not have changed [the password]."

I-hacked.com warns readers not to try to alter the signs, which cost roughly $15,000.

ADDCO Chief Operating Officer Brian Nicholson told FOXNews.com that the company is sending out notices to customers on the potentially dangerous security flaw.

"It's incumbent upon users to change the default password and secure the sign with a padlock," Nicholson said. "We're having our engineers review this information."

In the meantime, if you're driving in Austin, you can rest assured: There are no zombies ahead.

NOTE: How prevalent is the zombie image in American society today that somebody would place a "warning" in public. Even as a hoax would this warning have any effect on drivers? Did it lead at least some people to a nervous, increased heartbeat?

Nokia's Zombie Dating Service

Nokia Launches Zombie Dating Service
By Spanner Spencer, N-Gage News

As part of a distinctly hilarious promotion of its new N-Gage title, Resident Evil: Degeneration, Nokia has launched a spoof dating service for zombies. This gore-nographic spoof site, called Zombie Singles, provides all the tools you need to zombifiy a photo of yourself (or others) and create an undead profile to appeal to other living dead lovers.

Dubbed as the official dating site of the undead, Zombie Singles is profoundly hilarious, and it's great to see Nokia finally making a sincere effort to promote the N-Gage platform. We've seen the film (it was pretty good - tapered off a bit toward the end, but that's often the case with anime and CGI films) and after splattering a bit of blood about the place on Zombie Singles, you're undeniably inclined to check out the Resident Evil: Degeneration game, so hurrah for the ghouls!

Let's just hope Zombie Singles catches on, and we can continue to enjoy a few grave pleasures after the game's deceased. Head on over to Zombie Singles and give yourself a decomposing makeover. See you on the other side.

Zombie Comics for Kids

Norway's Nazi Zombies: Dead Snow

Dead Snow (2009)
Reviewed by Heather "The Horror Chick" Wixson.

DreadCentral.com

I must say that lately overseas horror has been collectively kicking American horror’s ass in terms of keeping the genre fresh. In the last year alone we received such goodies as Let the Right One In, Timecrimes, and Martyrs. Well, now you can add Dead Snow to that list of foreign horror goodies as this flick is destined to become a cult classic.

The minute I heard the basic premise of Dead Snow, I was so there; Nazi zombies chasing down promiscuous and drunkard young adults so that they can off them in seriously brutal ways? Sign me up!

Dead Snow is the latest film from Norwegian director Tommy Wirkola and recently premiered in the States at the Sundance Film Festival as part of their “Park City After Midnight” series of films. Wirkola is best known in Norway for his first film Kill Buljo: The Movie, which was his parody of the Kill Bill films.

Dead Snow’s premise starts back at the end of WWII, when Nazi soldiers in the village of Øksfjord were forced into the hills by an angry mob. In these hills the Nazis supposedly froze to death and were never to be seen again. Cut to over 60 years later, and a group of eight medical students that are going to take a ski trip, fueled mostly by beer and endorphins, to the very same hills. True to horror movie conventions, when the medical students start to misbehave, their actions raise some evil spirits, and soon enough you have snowmobiles fashioned with machine guns and undead Nazis being shot to pieces. The fact that Wirkola has an eye for parody and paying homage is also very apparent in Dead Snow, as most of the movie seems to pay its respects to the Eighties slasher genre.

However, it is Wirkola’s ability to keep things moving with an approach that still feels fresh that keeps Dead Snow from feeling like just another retread of movies that have already been created. The film was excessively gory at times, which added to its campy charm, and it was even mentioned during the Sundance screening Q & A that over 450 liters of blood were used during the entire filming process. There are plenty of body organs on display, including some impressive intestine tracks, and the zombie make-up actually looks great.

The only thing that might give some viewers a sense of disconnect is that there is a switch in the movie’s tone about halfway through. I personally don’t mind when a movie decides to shake things up a bit, as I feel like sometimes a tone switch can really serve a purpose like in The Signal.

Overall, if your preferred brand of horror movie runs along the lines of something like Hatchet, where the gore factor is as fun as it is excessive, or if you just enjoy watching Nazi zombies hunt and be hunted, then Dead Snow is definitely the flick for you. (Review taken from DreadCentral.com)

Directed by Tommy Wirkola
Starring: Vegard Hoel, Stig Frode Henriksen, Charlotte Frogner, Jenny Skavlan, Jeppe Beck Laursen

Watch more YouTube videos on AOL Video

Carriers: Viral Pandemic with Zombie Imagery

A deadly virus has spread across the globe. Contagion is everywhere, no one is safe and no one can be trusted. Four young attractive people race through the back roads of the American West to the pounding beat of a vacation soundtrack. Their aim is to retreat to secluded utopian beach in the Gulf of Mexico, where they could peacefully wait out the pandemic and survive the apocalyptic disease. Carriers follow their getaway through a surreal and dangerous world where laws and rules no longer apply.

Their plans take a grim turn when their car breaks down on an isolated road starting a chain of events that will seal the fate of each of them in an inexorable and horrifying voyage of hell through a western landscape populated by only the hideous dead or the twisted living. Their desperate retreat south turns into a deadly battle against infected children, homicidal doctors, crazed survivalists, rabid dogs, and, finally each other. The virus is the least of their problems as horrible choices must be made in the face of lost humanity. (From DreadCentral.com)

Carriers trailer
by blankytwo

Zombie March Madrid 2008

Perhaps the most frightening thing of this is that so many people know the MJ "Thriller" dance enough to stage their own zombie shuffle on the streets of Madrid. This video from last year's 2008 Zombie March. The call has already gone out for this year's zombie march.

Night of the Living Dead ... Bunnies!

Here's Romero's classic Sixties film that set the modern zombie into motion. Oh, that terrible trowel scene (1:23).


And if you haven't got time for the full film, try the 30-second re-enactment by cartoon bunnies.

And for something really interesting, try presidential candidate Ralph Nader's campaign ad (made for Halloween). How fascinating that this film is such a part of the American pop-cultural mind that Nader can take it out of context for a political ad, and we all know what he's talking about.

More Metatext: Zombie Girl

Official Site of what should be a very interesting "metatext," another fake documentary, but this time about a 12-year-old girl making her own zombie film.

Babylon Fields

Babylon Fields: Download pdf Script

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3315295143249630002

German Otto: Up With Dead People

Otto, or Up With Dead People (Germany/Canada 2008)

Here is a Canadian/German film venture. What more proof do we need that zombies are becoming "hip" somehow? Click on the photo to visit the film's Canadian website.

Synopsis: A young zombie named Otto appears on a remote highway. He has no idea where he came from or where he is going. After hitching a ride to Berlin and nesting in an abandoned amusement park, he begins to explore the city. Soon he is discovered by underground filmmaker Medea Yarn, who begins to make a documentary about him with the support of her girlfriend, Hella Bent, and her brother Adolf, who operates the camera. Meanwhile, Medea is trying to finish "Up with Dead People," the epic political-porno-zombie movie that she has been working on for years. She convinces its star, Fritz Fritze, to allow the vulnerable Otto to stay in his guest bedroom. When Otto discovers that there is a wallet in his back pocket that contains information about his past, before he was dead, he begins to remember a few details, including memories of his ex-boyfriend, Rudolf. He arranges to meet him at the schoolyard where they met, with devastating results.