Our zombie episode published the day after “The Walking Dead” aired its midseason finale. That timing was completely planned, let me tell you. That’s just how on top of it Holly and I are when we go into the studio, especially when we’re recording stuff way ahead of time because of holiday scheduling. Really.

Here’s what we talked about:

• Brains and the Muppets contained therein
• “The Walking Dead“
• “28 Days” and “28 Days Later” (which I was meaning to say as “28 Days Later” and “28 Weeks Later,” but we record in the morning and sometimes I am behind on coffee).
• The zillions and zillions of IOS games that feature zombies, from “Plants vs. Zombies” to “Zombie Booth”
• An IOS game I thought I made up on the spot in which you feed a baby zombie, but it turns out there are, no joke, at least eight of those already in the App Store
• The Run For Your Lives 5k races which Holly and I are going to do, apparently
• Lots of other zombie things you can buy or do, including ThinkGeek’s Dismember-Me Plush Zombie
• Vampire and werewolf mythology, and how they often carry a warning against sexual excess
• Zombie mythology, and how it often carries a warning against the taboo of cannibalism, along with themes of death and decay
• “Fido“
• Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series and the zombies therein
• “Hocus Pocus“
• The history of zombie cinema, which was first influenced by Haitian folklore
• Zombie cinema in the ’60s and ’70s as a response to Vietnam war
• The modern zombie resurgence as a possible response to the economy, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and consumerism
• Fairy tales and the recurring theme of parental control as both a nightmare and a luxury
• The knowledge of firing weapons, which Holly and I both have
• Our nonfunctioning spud gun that lives in my office, and the Silly String that is also in my office
• The many disbeliefs you must suspend if you start thinking about zombie digestive systems and the other body processes that have to work if it’s going to work
• Haitian voodoo (an actual religion) vs. the voodoo shown in zombie movies (typically made up and horrifying)
• Fast zombies vs. slow zombies
• Modern zombie cinema as being more about the story of the survivors than the story of the zombies
• Zombification as the cost of immortality
• “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy
• “Shaun of the Dead“
• “American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall and Rise of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture” and the term “zombedy” I found within
• Holly’s must-watch zombie things: “28 Days Later” (but save that until you’ve seen some other stuff), the Romero films in order, “White Zombie,” “I Walked with a Zombie,” “Shaun of the Dead,” “The Walking Dead,” “Zombieland,” “Pet Sematary“
• Two zombie films Holly wants to see: “Dead Snow” and “Brain Dead” (aka “Dead Alive“)
• A non-zombie movie that is very zombielike: “The Birds“
• Jonathan Coulton’s “r.e. Your Brains“
• Terrorism and fear of a global pandemic as drivers behind the ongoing zombie fad
• “How Zombies Work“

My Research:

• Bishop, Kyle William. “American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall and Rise of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture“
• Bishop, Kyle William. “The Idle Proletariat: Dawn of the Dead, Consumer Ideology, and the Loss of Productive Labor.” The Journal of Popular Culture. Vol. 43, No. 2, 2010.
• Douthat, Ross. “The Return of the Paranoid Style.” The Atlantic, April 2008.
• Drezner, Daniel W. “Night of the Living Wonks.” Foreign Policy. Issue 180, July/August 2010.
• Parker, James. “Our Zombies Ourselves.” The Atlantic, April 2011.

Holly’s research:

• McLain, Jack. “I Need to Feed.” America.
• D’Costa, Krystal. “The American Fascination with Zombies.” Scientific American Anthropology in Practice Blog
• Carson, Tom. “Zombies, As American as Apple Pie.” GQ.
• Harper, Stephen. “Zombies, Malls, and the Consumerism Debate: George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead” Americana.

Link to the episode: Zombies. Why did it have to be zombies?

You can follow PopStuff on Twitter at @PopStuffHSW, and you can keep up with us on the PopStuff Facebook page.