Sony has zombies on the brain. First, the studio’s horror goof Zombieland pwned humanity at the box office over the weekend. Now the march of the undead continues with the web-only series Woke Up Dead, with four episodes premiering Monday on Sony’s Crackle website.
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Set in the ultimate land of the undead (Los Angeles, natch), the web series stars Napoleon Dynamite‘s Jon Heder as Drex Greene, a college grad slowly turning into a zombie.
Part of Crackle’s month-long Zombiefest, a new episode of Woke Up Dead (trailer embedded above) will be released online every weekday until the day before Halloween. The series, produced by Electric Farm Entertainment, is Heder’s first stab at web-only entertainment.
It’s yet another piece of the resurgent zombie zeitgeist. Ghouls ruled the box office this weekend, with Zombieland earning $25 million, and the zombie madness continues with DC Comics’ mega-event Blackest Night, forthcoming television series The Walking Dead and 2010 films like George A. Romero’s Survival of the Dead and Resident Evil: Afterlife.
The undead trend even takes a step into weird science with the copulating cadavers of the upcoming Body Worlds Life Cycles exhibit.
“This major breakthrough ends one of science’s enduring mysteries,” Stephen Colbert joked in a segment (video embedded below) on the exhibit. “What does it look like when zombies do it?”
We’re a long way from Romero’s undead cultural touchstone Night of the Living Dead. Has the so-called War on Terror, torture porn and soulless consumption turned us into a bunch of brain-eating drones? Do these entrants into the zombie zeitgeist hold a candle to that classic? Let us know in the comments section below.
