You want to put some kind of explanation down here before you leave? Here's one as good as any you're likely to find. We're bein' punished by the Creator. He visited a curse on us. So that man could look at... what Hell was like. Maybe He didn't want to see us blow ourselves up, put a big hole in the sky. Maybe He just wanted to show us He's still the Boss Man.
They're after the place. They don't know why; they just remember. Remember that they want to be in here.
- DAWN OF THE DEAD
We couldn't visit Pittsburgh without taking a zombie along to the shooting location of George Romero's 1978 Dawn of the Dead - the Monroeville Mall.
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It has been established that persons who have recently died have been returning to life and committing acts of murder. A widespread investigation of funeral homes, morgues, and hospitals has concluded that the unburied dead have been returning to life and seeking human victims. It's hard for us here to be reporting this to you, but it does seem to be a fact.
- Night of the Living Dead
An oldie for sure. Ruined with a flash camera of course (thanks, mom). The late 80s were really the start of the cemetery/groundbreaker/zombie yard display layout that would follow for the next decade or so. I often try to remember what it was that made my brother and I go in the direction of zombies, as we never saw it in a book or magazine, and the internet didn't exist as yet. And we never really saw a home haunt in our neighborhood that featured zombies. Though I guess the lawn cemetery was semi-common, with maybe a stuffed glove hand popping up here and there.
Always love this Haunt...so much anguish and menace in these props. That's not easy to achieve.
Calcutta, you will say. What a place to have been when the dead began to walk.
And I reply, what better place to be? What better place than a city where five million people look as if they are already dead—might as well be dead—and another five million wish they were?
Poppy Z. Brite
This effect is pretty cool. And pretty low-key, which really works.
The Dead returned. Billions of corpses began to move, convulse, groan, and then, quite horribly, shriek. It was a high-pitched and piercing sound. The world called it The Shrill. And it was the extent of their cruelty. There were no armies of dead, no brain-seeking deceased hungry cannibals. Just the shouting from frail, weak frames which made no attempt to stand. Cemeteries around the world became places of the unholy deafening Shrill. Layers of earth muffled the shrieks, but the sheer volume of the deceased in one condensed location created a terrifying chorus that never stopped.
It was a sunny, windy day in late October. I stood on the other side of the river across from the city's acres-wide cemetery. I listened to the shrieks carried on the wind and over the water. I remembered some lines from an old poem by T.S. Eliot. He wrote
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
We've heard speculation, on everything from the Ozone layer and chemical weapons, to uh... voodoo mysticism and organisms from space.
Night of the Living Dead (1990)
