When you gather with your loved ones this week, be sure to give extra thanks for that turkey or soy-based equivalent on which you’re about to dine. Times are hard, but for most of us, we’re still able to eat. Nevertheless, we need to prepare for the even tougher times that inevitably lay ahead. As countless movies attest, desperate times call for desperate measures at the dinner table. Like cannibalism.

The circumstances under which “eat or be eaten” becomes the rule vary widely. Plenty of films have taken on this ancient taboo; in fact, a search for the tag “cannibal” on Spout.com yields eleven pages of results. For your holiday viewing pleasure, I’ve narrowed the list down to ten.

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Thursday, October 30, Grand Rapids, Michigan. A seemingly average midwestern city. Until the zombies invade. A throng of at least 3,370 zombies flowed through the downtown streets (it’s very likely it was over 4,000) to try and break the world record for the largest zombie walk. The event, organized by college sophomore Rob Bliss, shattered the previous record of 1,375, set just a few days earlier in the Pittsburgh suburb of Monroeville. If Monroeville sounds familiar to zombie fans, it should. The Monroeville Mall was the setting of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead.

While Grand Rapids may not have the zombie pedigree of Monroeville, it’s no less qualified for an invasion of the living dead. Annalee Newitz recently wrote a post on io9 charting the correlation between civil unrest and zombie movie production. The results are surprisingly revealing. Given the current economic downturn, it’s no surprise that struggling post-industrial areas like Pittsburgh, and the whole state of Michigan, would see an increase in zombie invasions. If Michigan’s unemployment rate cracks 10%, I predict a complete state-wide zombie apocalypse by Halloween 2009.

For more ghoulish goodness on Spout.com, check out The Zombie Group and Horror Movies 101.

Photo gallery after the jump of the Grand Rapids Zombie Walk:

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Two weeks ago I wrote a list of five doomsday films ranked by plausibility. The response to this piece made me realize that I overlooked the most pressing apocalyptic threat of all: zombies.

The onslaught of the living dead has been a mainstay of horror cinema for decades, beginning with the Bela Lugosi vehicle White Zombie in 1932. Over the following years zombies popped up in movies as one of many monstrous villains, often filling the minion role. It wasn’t until George Romero’s groundbreaking 1968 film Night of the Living Dead that the idea of a zombie apocalypse was introduced. Romero’s cannibalistic zombies have since become the archetype used in countless films, books, and video games. The cause of the virulent plague of the walking dead varies, however. Everything from spiritual curses, viruses, chemical weapons, and alien microorganisms have been used to explain the origin of zombies. Below the jump we examine the real-world evidence behind some of these threats, and which ones you should be most worried about.

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• Julie Taymor is directing a film adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which will star plenty of Oscar-caliber performers, including Helen Mirren, Jeremy Irons, Djimon Hounsou and possibly Geoffrey Rush (Also: Russell Brand as the jester, Trinculo!). Taymor’s version should be interesting considering her postmodern take on the Bard’s Titus Andronicus for her film debut, and she’s already revealed one twist by casting Mirren in the lead, as a gender-reversed “Prospera”. But I bet it still won’t out-arthouse Peter Greenaway’s film version of the play.
• Forest Whitaker, who has already portrayed jazz saxaphonist Charlie Parker on the big screen, will play Louis Armstrong in a biopic obviously titled What a Wonderful World. Whitaker is also directing the film, though, so don’t expect this to be quite as Oscar-baited as it seems.
• Hollywood is going ahead with more than 40 major projects that will each lack strike protection despite the continued possibility of an actor walkout. According to Variety, the studios are indeed worried about the financial ramifications of a SAG strike, but they’re more concerned about not having enough tentpoles to release in 2010 and 2011. Because moviegoers will put up a fuss if they don’t get their Alvin and the Chipmunks 2 and remakes of RoboCop, Fame, Footloose, Clash of the Titans and A Nightmare on Elm Street.
• Oh, and we can now add Overture’s newly announced remake of George Romero’s The Crazies to the pile, too.
• What should we do about the financial crisis? Kill the poor — or eat them? — says a new sci-fi film titled Fortuna that’s heading into production next month. Likened to Soylent Green, the pic will be set in 2100 when the middle class is gone and the rich have created a deadly contest with which to eliminate poverty.

When the trailer for Watchmen hit the web a few weeks ago, I was as pumped as anyone. I’ve always been a fan of comics, but when I finished reading Alan Moore’s opus for the first time, I closed the back cover, starred into space, and solemnly said, “This changes everything.” Seriously, it’s that good. And the trailer looks good, it appears to be a faithful adaptation of the source material.

The key word here is appears. The visuals are stunning, some sites even took the time to do shot by shot comparisons with the book. But I’m not worried at all about that, I’m more concerned with how the film will be edited. Like most comics/graphic novels, Watchmen is practically a story board waiting to be transformed into a film. But what made the book so revolutionary was not the art, it was the story, and the way the story was told. Watchmen is a dense web of complicated interconnected stories. Multiple generations of characters deal with epic personal, philosophical, and political struggles, all woven into one masterwork.

Watchmen, the book, excels at the graphic novel version of cross-cutting. Several pages contain nine panels that are set up like a checkerboard, alternating between two separate stories that intimately inform one another, albeit across expanses of space and time. On the one hand, this seems like source material for a final-scene-of-The Godfather level of powerhouse editing. But on the other hand, it could just be a huge mess.

After the jump, Snyder says why he feels up to the challenge…

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The deadline for our Presidential Zombie Photoshop contest has technically already passed, but due to the madness of Cannes and the holiday, we haven’t started judging yet, so we thought we’d give stragglers a bit of extra time. If you still want to enter, you have until midnight EST tonight. See our rules and regulations here.

In our never-ending quest to find new ways to mock contemporary popular culture whilst celebrating the classics, we bring the first ever (ever!) SpoutBlog Photoshop Contest. We have a George Romero DVD two-pack to give away: a copy of the new Diary of the Dead, and the 40th Anniversary edition of Night of the Living Dead. Here’s the quip from the press release:

The NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD 40^TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION DVD features a fully restored and remastered version of the original 1968 classic film and bonus materials, overseen by the master himself. This DVD marks George A. Romero’s long legacy with great interviews and multiple featurettes that emphasize the quality of this ultimate horror classic. The DIARY OF THE DEAD DVD bonus features include an optional audio commentary by George A. Romero, character confessions, a making of and the top five Myspace contest shorts.

Find out what you have to do to get the discs after the jump.

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George Romero’s Diary of the Dead opens tonight. In an interview with him at Sundance, our eyes were opened to what an eloquent artist he is. We watch Night of the Living Dead to examine the origins of the zombie genre and compare it to Diary. Just in time for Valentine’s Day, Karina Longworth gets personal with the loneliest movie going experience ever: Watching Build a Ship, Sail to Sadness.

 

 FilmCouch 57 [29:40m]: Play Now | Download

(Subscribe to FilmCouch in the iTunes store and an episode will download each Friday)

FilmCouch 57

Night of the Living Dead, Build a Ship, Sail to Sadness

Michelle Morgan and Shawn Roberts star in George Romero’s latest zombie romp, Diary of the Dead. The film follows a group of film students whose efforts to produce a zombie movie are thwarted by an actual undead apocalypse. They quickly turn the cameras on themselves, documenting their struggles to survive, uploading their videos to the internet whenever possible. As with many Romero films, the campy delights of exploding zombie heads are lovingly blended with social commentary, this time about the ineptitude of mainstream media compared to “bloggers and hackers” self-publishing their experiences. In this interview stars Michelle Morgan and Shawn Roberts talk about the mood on set, not knowing if their characters will undergo zombification, and their favorite zombie flicks.

 

 Morgan and Roberts Interview [3:21m]: Play Now | Download

You can check out the Diary of the Dead trailer on the film’s MySpace page.

Morgan and Roberts

• Laszlo Kovacs, the Hungarian-born master cinematographer who shot Paper Moon, Easy Rider and Ghostbusters, has died. A documentary about Kovacs and his friend and fellow cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond is currently in the works. Above: a clip from one of his most visually stunning works, Martin Scorsese’s batshit-insane 1977 musical New York, New York, via YouTube.
• The Telluride Film Festival has invited Edith R. Kramer to serve as guest diretor of the 2007 festivities. Kramer served as lead curator at UC Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive for two decades, and as Telluride’s Tom Luddy notes in this press release, “Her international reputation will result in Kramer bringing movies to Telluride that nobody else could get from archives.”
• George A. Romero’s latest will debut in the Midnight Madness program at the Toronto Film Festival. The director promises that George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead is “not a sequel or a remake, it’s a whole new beginning for the dead.”