Festival of the Living Dead (2024)

The Soska sisters (American Mary, Rabid (2019), and my personal favourite: the Hellevator TV series!) bring us Gen Z teens fighting zombies in this "spiritual sequel" to Romero's Night of the Living Dead.

Set 55 years on, the festival in question is commemorating that past zombie outbreak... and our lead, Ash (Ashley Moore), is trying to fit in after years of being a social outcast with one good friend, Iris (Camren Bicondova). 

Ash agrees to attend the festival along with her douchebag boyfriend and his terrible friends, while Iris covers babysitting duties. When everything almost immediately starts going wrong, Ash's heroic heritage of being the granddaughter of Night's Ben (Duane Jones), and being rather skilled with a shotgun, certainly comes in handy.

Social media influencers start snorting dust from a recently crashed meteor near the festival site - could see a YouTuber legit doing this btw - triggering a zombie outbreak as they die and reanimate ("Talk about going viral..." <-- actual dialogue 🤦‍♂️). But now it's 2020's festival style, with fairy wings and face glitter.

At the risk of stating the brutally obvious, Festival of the Living Dead is not to be taken too seriously! It's a fun little appetizer of a zombie flick; a silly, simplistic, colourful romp of snark, guts, and finding your place in a terrifying world.

This song also gave me an earworm.

Really reminds me of the indie I was into in my early twenties. Got that Dandy Warhols vibe, y'know?

Anyway, this is streaming on Tubi now. I picked it out of a whole heap of zed flicks currently in their catalogue. Maybe services are stocking up for when we all get zombie fever again, from the soon-to-be-released 28 Years Later? We can hope.

The Signal (2007)

 A signal sent out over the radio, TV, phone, etc. turns those exposed homicidal. They aren't zombies, they still have their personality, they're just obsessed with killing and see it as a completely rational act.

Told in three parts and following a young woman, her abusive husband, and her love interest, this is a low-budget, tonally slippery tale. Violence is gruesome, but worse is hinted at offscreen in all three acts; and the second adds dark, almost absurd humour into the mix. Not sure it needed to be 1hr43min long, but the fake-outs and strangeness kept me watching.

28 Days Later... (pod appearance!)

I was delighted to be asked to guest on my friend Justin's podcast recently, to talk about 28 Days Later! It was a lot of fun to chat about one of my favourite films.

View this post on Instagram

It’s easy to forget but the year 2002 also endured a scary pandemic: the zombie movie genre (but they run now!) The show welcomes @relaxcupcake to discuss the Danny Boyle film 28 DAYS LATER. @wehateyourhate #28dayslater #dannyboyle #cillianmurphy #naomiharris #brendangleeson #christophereccelston #zombies #running #london

A post shared by Amusing Ourselves to Death (@amusingourselvestodeath) on Oct 26, 2020 at 5:29am PDT

31 days of horror: October 2020

What is time, amirite?

Fuuuuck, this year... I am taking a different approach to 31 Days of Horror for 2020 and refuse to feel bad about it! 

I am not assigning a film to a day, NOR am I attempting to review them all (I'm thinking maybe one a week?) NOR am I even starting with 31 (or more) films. I simply made a list of movies I am excited to watch this October.

Click the image below, if you want to know what I have to pull from, and please feel free to share your own list or plans for the spooky season 💀👻🎃