Confession time: I’ve never played Left 4 Dead. I’m obviously aware of what Valve’s iconic shooter is all about—team up with friends and shoot zombies—and that a ton of players sucked it up like zombies feasting on cerebral miasma. Still, despite the game’s ubiquity, I just…never got around to it. Happens sometimes! Can you blame me?
Over the past few days, I’ve been dabbling with its spiritual successor, Back 4 Blood, which came out for PC, PlayStation, and Xbox earlier this week. (It’s also available via Game Pass.) It’s my understanding that the games are very, very similar—which makes sense, seeing as Back 4 Blood is developed by Turtle Rock, the folks who made the original Left 4 Dead.
Folks, I think I get it now. The formula—team up with friends and shoot zombies—absolutely rips.
Having played Back 4 Blood’s beta in August, I knew a bit about what to expect. But it was playing the level “Bar Room Blitz” this week that crystallized for me just how freakin’ cool these zombie-killing games can be. Set partway through act one, the level’s premise is simple: You hole up in a bar. You kickstart a jukebox. Zombies swarm your position. If they reach the jukebox, the music stops, at which point you need to restart it. Your goal is to defend the jukebox until the song can play all the way through. Then, an armored jeep shows up, allowing you to escape.
A few days ago, I ran through the level with Kotaku’s Zack Zweizen. Our jukebox played “Black Betty” by Spiderbait, just the absolutely spot-on zombie-killing song. We both remarked on how perfect a fit the tune was for the moment, the ideal soundtrack to gun down hundreds of zombies. I distinctly recall saying something to the effect that it felt like we were in Zombieland or 28 Days Later.
Little did I know that “Black Betty” was one of several songs that can pop up during that scene. Apparently, you can also get other iconically riff-heavy tunes, like “Tick Tick Boom” by The Hives, “Rusty Cage” by Johnny Cash, “All Hell Breaks Loose” by Misfits, and the rip-roaring “Ace of Spades” by Motorhead. (Some kind souls have cobbled together the jukebox’s offerings in various Spotityplaylists.) Reading through the full setlist, yeah, every single one is just as fit for the situation as “Black Betty.” I fully plan on playing through the level several times to see what songs I get.
G/O Media may get a commission
It’s Actually Available Get a next-gen console for playing exclusively digital games in 1440p.
I’ve played plenty of zombie games that capture the zipping freneticism of a good zombie flick, but I’ve never legitimately felt like I’m in one, not the way I did with Back 4 Blood’s “Bar Room Blitz” level. That alone is enough to keep me coming back 4 more.
What will the Biden Administration do to save our children from the disease-spreading, right-wing zombie death cult?
This week, we started to find out.
On Monday, the U.S. Department of Education opened civil-rights investigations into five states—Iowa, South Carolina, Utah, Oklahoma, and Tennessee—that are banning local school districts from imposing mask mandates. They are relying on two federal laws: the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which protects students with a disability from discrimination and guarantees them a right to a free education, and Title II of the Americans With Disabilities Act, which prohibits disability discrimination by public education systems. The states could be found in violation of federal law if the investigation finds that “students with disabilities who are at heightened risk for severe illness from COVID-19 are prevented from safely returning to in-person education.”
The penalties include loss of federal funding—or the school can simply agree to change its policies, which in this case would be choosing life by requiring masking and vaccination for school employees.
These students with heightened risk of illness include my 5-year-old daughter Nusayba, a Stage 4 cancer survivor who is immuno-suppressed due to her liver transplant. I recently wrote about how we were desperately trying to get her into virtual school, along with her brother, Ibrahim, who just turned 7. Thankfully, they were both admitted, and now I’m at home doing tech support until 3:30 p.m., but at least I know they are safe.
Meanwhile, there’s already been one COVID case on the second day of school. And their school is far from the worst of it. Thanks to the GOP’s multi-pronged and coordinated attack on masks, social distancing, and vaccines at schools, Delta is still thriving and there have been massive outbreaks at schools across the country.
A medical professional oversees as a fifth-grader gives himself a rapid COVID-19 test on the first day of school at Montara Avenue Elementary School in Los Angeles.
Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
This isn’t a “both sides” problem. Of the 10 states with the most COVID-19 cases per capita, as of Wednesday, nine of them were led by Republican governors—surprise!—and voted for Trump in 2020, as The New York Times reported. Meanwhile, 16 Democratic states have statewide mask requirements for schools. Tennessee, one of the five states being sued, just set a new record for COVID hospitalizations, and previously moved to cut off all vaccine outreach to students and young adults.
Now, thousands of its school-aged kids have COVID-19 with no end in sight. Some school districts in the United States are even leaving it up to parents to decide if they will quarantine their exposed child or send the child to school to spread the disease to other unvaccinated children.
Meanwhile, conservative radio hosts and influencers who peddled anti-vax misinformation are winning Darwin Awards and dying weekly from the coronavirus.
However, this doesn’t stop the right-wing hate machine. Onward they persist with their nihilistic, counter-majoritarian death march.
Republicans, such as those in Texas, believe they have the freedom to infect their kid and your kids with coronavirus, but women shouldn’t have the freedom to control their own bodies. Other conservative activists believe “freedom” means harassing and threatening school boards, intimidating health care workers, and spreading the dangerous QAnon conspiracy theory, which is now a domestic terror threat. Among other things, some suggest that anyone who believes in vaccines and mask mandates in schools is actually a “demonic entity” and bears “the mark of the beast.” That’s what Melissa, an alleged nurse from Lee County, Florida, recently said at a school-board meeting where she said that Christians around America will “take them all out,” referring to anyone who opposed her pro-death initiatives to spread COVID-19.
People protest the North Allegheny School District’s mask mandate.
Alexandra Wimley/AP
You’d think she’s a kooky outlier, a walking punchline. But she’s an ordinary rank-and-file soldier in this death movement that is holding our children’s safety hostage to advance their culture war. They aren’t the “American Taliban” or “enforcing Sharia,” and we should stop using Islam and Muslims as the benchmark for extremism. They are agents of White Christian Supremacy hellbent on ensuring minority rule for white men by any violent means necessary.
Our kids are simply the bait and collateral damage.
Steve Lynch, a Republican running for Northampton County executive in Pennsylvania, is an anti-masker encouraging violence against school boards unwilling to submit to his anti-masking belligerence. On Aug. 29, he said, “You go in and you remove ’em. I’m going in there with 20 strong men… They can leave or be removed.”
In Buncombe County, North Carolina, anti-maskers tried to “overthrow” the school board, encouraged in part by Rep. Madison Cawthorn, who fought a tree and lost, and continued rehabilitating the imprisoned violent insurrectionists of Jan. 6 at a recent rally by referring to them as “political hostages.” He said he’s working on “busting them out,” and he also seemed to call for another riot, despite this past one effectively killing five people, including a police officer, and being followed by law-enforcement suicides. He urged the Macon County Republicans to “defend their children” from harmful vaccines.
One of my lovely fans emailed me this week to warn me that violence will “spill out into the streets” and “there [are] 100 million Americans waiting for the day. I don’t foresee any Army coming to the rescue of the voices such as yourself who spin a web of lies and hateful rhetoric.”
He used his full name and email address. There’s no need to hide in the shadows and wear the hoods when your elected officials and your God-King, Trump, openly incite potential violence and criminality.
A teacher holds up a sign protesting Florida’s decision to open schools last summer.
Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel/Tribune News Service via Getty
They are deliberately using threats of violence to terrorize the majority and have us cede ground. It seems to be working, as school-board members are stepping down across the country, unwilling to tolerate the “toxic and impossible” environment.
We’re dealing with a potential criminal element, and might need to flex with more than the Education Department and broad vaccine mandates to save our kids. I asked former career federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner if the Department of Justice could step in with a criminal investigation if there’s evidence that these GOP-led state governments are actually harming children.
“I happen to believe that, because education is primarily a local issue, that local and state prosecutorial authorities should be evaluating whether the state governors and governments are recklessly and criminally endangering our children,” Kirschner told me, holding Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as “a prime example.”
He believes DeSantis’ mask bans in Florida school districts might give prosecutors enough evidence to initiate a criminal investigation. He cited the recent Florida judge who overturned the recent mask ban and sided with parents whose lawsuit alleges, in part, that the policy violates the state constitution that requires providing a “uniform, efficient, safe, secure and high quality system” of public schools.
“I cannot understand why our prosecutorial authorities—federal, state, and local—seem to have concluded that we shouldn’t try to hold elected politicians accountable for killing the citizenry,” Kirschner added.
It is still possible that the Department of Education is introducing the carrot before the Department of Justice unleashes the stick. From my eyes, these GOP leaders are helping to actively kill people and harm children with their pro-death policies. That should immediately warrant criminal investigations and liability for causing avoidable COVID deaths.
The rest of us, the majority, need to stand our ground against this belligerent minority for the sake of our children’s safety and public health.
We can’t “both sides” or seek a bipartisan solution with a pro-death movement. Enough.
Last night, while playing the Back 4 Blood beta on PS5, I was attacked by a large group of zombies. That’s not surprising; it happens all the time in the game. What was shocking was hearing a sound clip from one of the zombies that made it seem like it was yelling out a racial slur. Based on viral videos making the rounds right now, I’m not the only one hearing that similarity. Other beta players say they’re hearing the same thing: Zombies yelling the n-word.
Back 4 Blood is the latest game from original Left 4 Dead developers Turtle Rock Studios. It plays a lot like Left 4 Dead, which isn’t a bad thing at all! Those older L4D games were some of the best co-op games ever made. But the undead in B4B are more vocal than the infected in L4D, often yelling and screaming more noticeably. Most of these screams are just random noises and grunts. But one scream that I and other players have heard stands out in a way that is 100% likely unintentional but also 100% unfortunate.
Twitter user @HomBKE encountered a zombie in the beta that seemed to scream the n-word as it ran at the player. His response was simple but understandable, asking “What did you call me?” while shooting the zombie attacker.
You can also hear the scream in question in a clip shared by YouTuber and streamer DotoDoya.
G/O Media may get a commission
In my own time with the game, I’ve heard this scream at least twice and both times I wasn’t sure what to think. I feel safe assuming the folks making this game didn’t intentionally record or include a sound clip of a zombie yelling out a slur. Probably, it’s just a random guttural sound that comes off the wrong way. But the clip sounds so similar to the word that, this early on, before the game is released, it might not be a bad idea to change or remove it from the game altogether.
Kotaku has reached out to WB Games and Turtle Rock Studios about the scream.
The beta for Back 4 Blood is so far proving to be a lot of fun, even if it doesn’t quite live up to the high expectations many Left 4 Dead fans (myself included) might have. Still, Valve ain’t ever making the third game in the L4D series, so this is the next best thing.
Let’s just get rid of that scream that sounds like an n-word, please.
I don’t need to sell you on the brilliance of Left 4 Dead, especially when half the industry seems to be drawing inspiration from it right now. But after two hours with Back 4 Blood‘s verses and campaign modes, does it have the same genre-defining charm? That’s hard to say.
Back 4 Blood is made by Turtle Rock Studios, a company that largely defined itself through its success with the original Left 4 Dead and its sequel. So it’s no surprise that Turtle Rock — after a half-decade dalliance with VR projects and the unsuccessful Evolve — is back in the zombie horde genre they know and love.
Let’s get the common traits out of the way. The trash infected (read: zombies) will typically go down in a single hit, with the more specialized foes — which are also playable in the multiplayer mode — absorbing substantially more bullets. Back 4 Blood incorporates a whole suite of stats and attachments for each gun, ranging from handling, mobility, accuracy, range and firepower. It felt a fraction unnecessary: a bit of aim, coordination and common sense are really all that’s needed to not get overwhelmed.
Screenshot: Turtle Rock Studios / Kotaku
The Ridden are split into four “families,” or at least that’s what is accessible so far: Stingers, Reekers, Tallboys and Common foes. Stingers are your ranged attackers that stick to walls, leaping to awkward angles and firing weak projectiles to buy time for weaker zombies to close the gap. Reekers are basically the Chargers and Tanks from Left 4 Dead, while the Common are the trash mobs, the characters you play when all the other choices are taken.
G/O Media may get a commission
Each class has three choices. In the Stinger family, for instance, you can play as a Hocker, Stalker or Stinger, each with slightly different playstyles. Players can also spend mutation points on offensive, defensive or supportive upgrades for each class.
These could be bonuses like improved damage while hanging on a wall, a reduction in movement penalties under certain conditions, or flat health upgrades. The Common class also gets really interesting after a bit of investment: its upgrades are based on horde, power and evolution, improving not only their attacks but more useful common zombies.
Fundamentally, however, there wasn’t enough time to fully explore any advanced strategies. The structure of our preview session — not helped by a delay at the start with matchmaking — meant we only had time for a single PvP game. The first of the three rounds was largely awash as people got to grips with the map, the spawns, how the Ridden’s controls work, trying to quickly understand what cards do what, and then a frantic search for slightly better weapons.
Screenshot: Turtle Rock Studios / Kotaku
The card system is the first thing that really stands out in Back 4 Blood. When you pick a character, you’ll also be given the option to choose a deck of aggressive, defensive and supporting powers. All of these offer various boosts — small, but not insignificant amounts — to various actions like shooting, healing, stamina regeneration, and so on.
The first four default decks are tuned to obvious roles: Medic, Soldier, Squad Leader (team-wide buffs, basically) and Operator. Those names are just symbolic, though, as all cards come from one of four classes: offense, defense, mobility and utility.
People will naturally make their own custom decks pretty quickly. You can equip, for instance, a card that gives you 10 percent faster movement speed, reload and weapon swap speed for 30 seconds whenever you use pain meds. Or a team-wide 10 percent boost to stamina. Offensive cards include one that boosts your damage the longer you aim down the sights. There are flat buffs to accuracy, stamina regen, healing efficiency, and a doubling to explosive damage and resistance.
Screenshot: Turtle Rock Studios / Kotaku
More than 60 cards are equippable. But the real trick is in how they’re deployed. When you start a match, you immediately draw and activate the first card — and in between rounds, you’ll get to equip and activate three cards from your deck, randomly drawn from a set of 5. Your deck is only a maximum of 15 cards, so getting the draws you want, statistically, is pretty good. Each character will have their own unique card that comes into play too: Holly, for instance, boosts the team’s stamina, can take more hits and regains health every time she kills a Ridden.
While it’s hard to really evaluate the multiplayer from such a short playthrough, it was enough to give a taste of how the cards could influence gameplay. Cards are used in the PvE campaign as well, although your decks don’t carry over. It’s also where the game tries to dynamically add its own touch, progressively adding “corruption” cards.
But in the first few levels I played — about half of the entirety of the first act — the corruption deck didn’t really try to rebalance the scales for the horde. Instead, it offered a series of dynamic challenges, like an extra 500 copper if the team completed the mission without raising any alarms.
I was hoping the corruption deck would be a little more aggressive, if only to highlight just how dynamic a modern Left 4 Dead director could be. The amount of forethought into managing the game’s pace, and the amount of threat facing the players at any given time.
But the early Back 4 Blood campaign missions — probably guided by the fact that they are the first missions — didn’t have that same foreboding aura. Instead, more of my time was occupied with the game’s systems: scouring the map for copper to unlock upgrades on the next map, looking for higher tiers of shotguns, pistols, assault rifles and such, and trying to one-shot as many Ridden as possible so it’d show I’d done the most damage on the scoreboard at the end.
What I wasn’t doing was worrying about communicating with teammates or coordinating holds in certain chokepoints. Progress never felt difficult. There was one mission involving a cruise ship that involved a restart, but that was down to human error navigating the map rather than any threat from the horde. Even the rise of the Ogre, the enormous boss-like creature teased in Back 4 Blood‘s early trailers, offered little resistance. One member of the group took a few hits, but nobody was ever really threatened.
Screenshot: Turtle Rock Studios / Kotaku
That’s not really the experience I remember from Left 4 Dead. But it’s also supremely early days. Three, four, five maps just aren’t enough to judge the number of interlocking systems at play here. It’s also not the same experience playing with strangers as it would be playing with friends. (seven in the morning also isn’t the most conducive time for top-notch communication, but living in Australia, you take what preview windows you can get.)
The maps are large enough that you’d certainly have plenty of downtime with mates. Not downtime in the traditional sense that you’re not shooting zombies — Back 4 Blood will always throw some Ridden your way to keep you mechanically engaged.
But the waves, even the largest hordes that triggered on major mission objectives, always felt completely manageable. I was never ruing for one second that it was early in the morning, that people weren’t talking or that we needed a particular strategy to deal with a certain area. You ran forward, cleared the path in front, shot anything that spawned behind you, and carried on.
It was target practice, not survival.
Screenshot: Turtle Rock Studios / Kotaku
Later maps started to introduce more interesting objectives that at hinted at what Back 4 Blood might throw at players. You also get a small snippet of story when each map begins, told through ambient voice lines instead of more interruptive cut scenes. The lore all seemed wedged at the start of the story, though. None of the characters seemed to banter much in-between levels, not unless there was a bit of friendly fire or the occasional quip tied to an in-game action like reloading, firing, and so on.
What my two hours with the game left me with was a lot of questions. There’s a lot of potential and directions for all of the interlocking systems to go. Corruption cards could obviously become more severe, directly impacting the players instead of putting the onus on them to challenge themselves. The story and banter in the campaign mode will obviously deepen as the acts progress, and there’s no technical reason why some of those levels can’t and won’t be heavier on the dialogue. The PvP element, naturally, will be transformed when organized groups start getting accustomed to the maps and some shred of a meta forms.
Also, and crucially for a lot of people, the gunplay is really good. That’s not really a surprise if you consider Turtle Rock’s history: apart from their work on Left 4 Dead and Evolve, the studio first cut their teeth on Counter-Strike: Condition Zero and Counter-Strike: Source. Back 4 Blood‘s guns don’t have CS‘s notoriously heavy recoil, of course, but the studio knows how to make guns shoot, sound and feel satisfying.
The beta’s performance was solid too, and supporting DLSS out of the gate meant my system had no issues running smoothly at 4K. I don’t usually look to zombie shooters for their visuals, but it’s a pretty clean-looking game. It doesn’t lean into, say, fog or volumetric lighting — Back 4 Blood isn’t really a horror game, after all. It’s an action shooter with zombies. The priority is visibility and visibility at long distances, but even in close-quarter scenarios, everything looks pretty good.
Screenshot: Turtle Rock Studios / Kotaku
I’m keen to spend more time with Back 4 Blood, if only so I can answer to one nagging question: can Back 4 Blood recapture the same magic that Left 4 Dead had?
I’m no closer to answering that question after two hours of gameplay. If pressed at gunpoint, I’d tell you Back 4 Blood was simply fine. But while fine might have worked a couple of years ago when the market wasn’t so co-op friendly, Back 4 Blood doesn’t have that luxury. A lot of co-op centric shooters, zombified or not, are just around the corner. And if Back 4 Blood wants to stand out, fine isn’t enough.
The zombie-killing thief of Army of the Dead is back in Netflix’s new prequel, Army of Thieves. The trailer for the heist movie was released on Sunday during the movie’s San Diego Comic-Con panel, where the cast revealed a few secrets about the project and some of their favorite moments.
Army of Thieves follows a heist conducted by Ludwig Dieter (Matthias Schweighöfer), a safe-cracking expert and one of the original movie’s most popular characters. This movie was in production well before the release of Army of the Dead, but it seems Netflix, Snyder, and Schweighöfer, who also the director of Army of Thieves, already had a pretty good sense that Ludwig would be a fan favorite character.
Netflix hasn’t released the teaser trailer on YouTube yet, but it starts at 26:24 on the official Comic-Con panel video:
In the trailer Ludwig is recruited by Gwendoline, Game of Thrones’ Nathalie Emmanuel, to pull off a massive heist with America’s new zombie outbreak as the perfect distraction. While the movie is definitely set in the post-outbreak world, this trailer is definitely lacking in the zombie-department. It seems this spinoff might be more of a pure heist movie, instead of a zombie-heist hybrid like it’s predecessor.
Thankfully, there’s no lack of action in the trailer. There are gunfights, armored-personnel carriers, and car chases for this team of thieves to deal with. And of course, the trailer also includes a massive safe for Ludwig to crack.
But even if this movie doesn’t have zombies, Zack Snyder’s hopes for a true sequel to the movie are still plausible.
“Shay [Hatten, co-writer] and I know exactly what happens next,” Snyder told Polygon in May, “and it’s insane.”
Army of Thieves is set to stream on Netflix this fall.
Dave Bautista and friends are going zombie hunting.Screenshot: Netflix
Trailer FrenzyA special place to find the newest trailers for movies and TV shows you’re craving.
Yes, in recent years director Zack Snyder has become synonymous with the comic book heroes of DC. But let’s not forget where he got his start: with zombies—and with muscle-bound men brutalizing each other in slow motion. And after several years in the world of comics, Snyder is going back to those not-so-humble beginnings.
We’re talking zombies. We’re talking action. We’re talking Army of the Dead, Snyder’s latest film which will be released on Netflix May 21. The film stars Guardians of the Galaxy’s Dave Bautista, as one of a group of mercenaries who swoop into Las Vegas to rob a casino. Sounds dangerous enough, it’s but even more so since it’s happening during a zombie apocalypse where Las Vegas has already been lost. Here’s the first trailer for Army of the Dead.
We’ll have much more on the trailer later this week. For now, tell us what you think in the comments below.
Army of the Dead hits Netflix May 21.
G/O Media may get a commission
For more, make sure you’re following us on our Instagram @io9dotcom.
The last thing she wanted to do was make her real-life husband Jeffrey Dean Morgan crack up during one very serious scene.
“The Walking Dead” gave viewers a deep-dive into Negan’s backstory on Sunday’s Season 10 finale, an episode which gave Jeffrey Dean Morgan some time to really shine and allowed his actual wife, actress Hilarie Burton, to play his on-screen other half.
While bits and pieces of his past on previous episodes, “Here’s Negan” laid it all out in a series of flashbacks highlighting his relationship with Burton’s Lucille, the namesake of his trusty bat.
Pre-zombie apocalypse, the two weren’t exactly living a life of bliss: Negan had been fired from his high school coaching job following a bar fight with a student’s dad — and, instead being there for her when Lucille was diagnosed with cancer, he was too busy sleeping with her best friend to answer her calls. Yeah, not great.
AMC
But as she battled cancer while hiding out from the walking dead, he became a new man and better husband — one who would do anything to make sure she still got her treatments. Sadly, she died while he was out trying to get her last doses of chemotherapy and — after he burned their home to the ground with her reanimated body inside — Negan donned his leather jacket, picked up the barbed wire baseball bat and killed the men who delayed his return.
As an origin story, it stayed pretty close to the source material, but having Morgan’s real-life wife by his side certainly brought even more emotion to the storyline. TooFab caught up with Burton after watching the episode, where she opened up about her biggest fears joining her husband’s show, praised Morgan’s work ethic and revealed what it was like to live in Rick Grimes’ home while filming.
Whose amazing idea was it to have you play your husband’s on-screen wife and did you have any concerns about working together on something like this?
Jeff’s been saying it for years and fans would say it on Twitter and social media and I would always act very territorial, like, ‘You’re damn straight I’m playing Lucille! No one else is gonna make him cry, it’s my job!’
Then when we got the phone call from Angela Kang and Scott Gimple late last summer, oh man, you know when you ask for something and you’ve got all that bravado — like, of course I can do that — and then you get it. Oh no, now I’ve gotta show up! The script was so good, it’s the best script I’ve ever gotten to do and I really wanted it to be great. Thankfully, my husband is just such a good scene partner. We liked surprising each other, we liked trying new things and we both like to show up really prepared and go to work, so to find that we had a really similar on set — we don’t like it too serious, there’s no point acting like a drama queen when the camera’s not rolling — it was a delight.
We really had a great time and high-fived each other at the end of the day and go home and cook dinner.
How was it for you two to film some of the more serious or emotional scenes? We find out he’s been cheating on Lucille, before she starts dying of cancer. It’s not exactly light material for a real-life couple to tackle.
We filmed it in October, at which point we’d all be in quarantine for a really long time. There were so many emotional things in the news and in all of our lifestyles, everyone was upended. Being able to tap into emotion wasn’t necessarily difficult. For me, it was more difficult to restrain because Lucille is supposed to be this, she’s the rock. She’s the sturdy one. And the first take we did of the scene where Negan says ‘We’re never giving up,’ baby, they could not use my coverage on that take because I had snot all over my face, I was a mess. The way he looked at me, I was like, ‘I never want you to look at me like this in real life.’ It was heartbreaking. But you also feel such pride in the moment, because you’re like, ‘Look at my baby go, he’s so good!’
Can you talk a little about your zombie makeover? What was that process like for you and what was your husband’s reaction when he saw you all done up for the first time?
I loved it. I loved it so much and I’m such a dork about it. I couldn’t wait. I wanted them to do camera tests, I wanted them to do it like 3 or 4 different times and they kept being like, ‘Calm down Hilarie, we do this every day.’ They gave me a little zombie lesson and Jeff didn’t see me. He wanted me to hide from him, so the reaction that you see on camera is his real reaction.
That put some pressure on me. I was so scared that he was gonna pull the bag off my head and crack up, if I was being a bad zombie. If I was being not a good zombie, I didn’t want to ruin the emotion that he’d spent all day working on. But, you know, he pulled out such a beautiful, layered performance. Getting to bear witness to that, as the person who loves him the most, that was awesome.
Waiting for your permission to load the Instagram Media.
I’ve seen your Instagram posts, did you and your family really live on the set while filming this episode?
I feel like the production was like, what can we do to make sure they’re safe in quarantine and they’re not having to deal with transportation to and from set? So the natural decision was, let’s just put them up in Alexandria in one of the houses that they used on the set. We ended up living in Rick Grimes’ house. Paola [Lázaro, AKA Princess] lived next door, other actors lived a couple houses own. There’s only 2 or 3 inhabited houses in the whole neighborhood. It was this weird summer camp vibe, where at night, after the crew would go home, it’d still be light outside — you’d go walk the dogs on the empty streets, trash everywhere, the apocalypse surrounding us, 20 foot walls surrounding the community. It was one of the most surreal experiences ever, but definitely one for the books.
Like taking quarantine to the next level.
It was so meta. We’re in a real life apocalypse, we’re filming the beginning of an apocalypse in this episode and we’re living in an apocalyptic set. It’s creepy, man!
They didn’t realize — no one had ever lived in the houses before — that the shutters on the Rick Grimes’ house have deteriorated and fallen apart over the years. It’s hurricane season in October, so the wind that would pick up at night, it just sounded like someone was banging a drum against the house every night. how would anyone know that, no one’s ever lived there, we were the guinea pigs.
In an interview with Forbes, you mention that your husband, as a person, has been vilified ever since he started playing Negan. How have you seen people struggle with the line between actor and character … and do you think this episode might help humanize him?
The people who love Negan are going to love him even more and the people who hate him are going to have a hard time hating him. I’ve said a number of times, Jeffrey’s said it, a lot of people have said it, had you followed Negan from the beginning the way you followed Rick, all his decisions would make sense, they’d be justified. But because he came him halfway through, swinging the bat, it made it very hard to like him.
We’ve taken our kids to county fairs, car shows and things, people come up and they gotta say something and wag a finger at him. I love all three versions of Negan that we see in this episode, because they’re very very different and I think that’s a testament to my husband’s talent. I’m really proud of how he was able to pull it out.
There’s some bad guys in real life that play really good bad guys on TV, but it takes a really talented actor to be a kitten in real life and play a real bastard — and he’s so good at it!
Waiting for your permission to load the Instagram Media.
What’s one thing you’d love fans to know about him, regarding how he approaches his work? Especially now that you’ve seen it more than ever, first-hand.
I’ve been able to see him prep for work for the last 12 years, but I’ve never been on set with him. That was an experience that I .. you know when something really amazing is happening in the moment and you’re like, ‘Oh my god, I’m going to remember this forever’? That’s what it felt like. He’s a really generous scene partner and he likes to make people feel good about themselves and I loved working with him. I’m not just saying that because it’s a good selling point, he’s really, really, f—ing fun. Hopefully, we’ll do it again one day.
Which wig did you keep?
Baby, I kept that rainbow wig! My daughter is definitely a daddy’s girl, it’s daddy, daddy, daddy, daddy — but when I came home in that rainbow wig, she thought I was amazing. So I am playing to my daughter, that’s what I’m appealing to with the rainbow wig.
Lastly, how do you think you guys as a family would fare in a real life zombie apocalypse?
I’m a prepper. I am prepared for the worst case scenario at all times. I was a kid that grew up watching Red Dawn. Oh man, we gotta prepare for the invasion! So I feel like we’d be okay. I don’t want to brag about it, but Jeff and I, we could fistfight strangers or whatever we need to do. We’d be fine!
Season 11 of “The Waling Dead” will premiere in Summer 2021.
Waiting for your permission to load the Instagram Media.
The human brain is buzzing with activity after a person dies, researchers have revealed, although there appears to be a logical, non-zombie-related explanation for the bizarre phenomenon.
A new paper published in Scientific Reports found that glial cells – non-neuronal cells that operate in the central nervous system – spring into action hours after a person passes away. Not only do the brain cells come alive, but they also expand in size and grow arm-like appendages.
Read more
Study author Jeffrey Loeb, who heads neurology and rehabilitation at the University of Illinois, Chicago’s College of Medicine, noted that his team’s findings may come as a surprise to many people, including other researchers in his field.
“Most studies assume that everything in the brain stops when the heart stops beating, but this is not so,” Loeb said. “Our findings will be needed to interpret research on human brain tissues. We just haven’t quantified these changes until now.”
However, he stressed that the postmortem activity wasn’t “too surprising” as glial cells are inflammatory and “their job is to clean things up after brain injuries like oxygen deprivation or stroke.” The peculiar trait resulted in glial cells being nicknamed the “zombie gene.”
The findings will have huge implications for past and future studies involving brain samples. Until now, scientists who used human brain tissue to research new treatments and potential cures for neurological disorders such as autism and Alzheimer’s disease did not take into account the postmortem cell activity. In other words, future research in these areas is expected to be more accurate.
But even after death, the “zombie gene” doesn’t live forever. Loeb’s team discovered that after about 24 hours, the cells ceased all activity and became indistinguishable from degrading brain tissue.
Why not break into a casino vault during a zombie apocalypse?
Netflix
The first trailer for director Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead, about a group of mercenaries planning a Las Vegas casino heist during a zombie apocalypse, hit Thursday. These days, Snyder may be better known for superhero films (and the Snyder Cut of Justice League, streaming on HBO Max on March 18), but his first feature film was the 2004 remake of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, so he knows his undead.
I’m not really sure why money is a concern in the zombie apocalypse, but to each their own. Snyder shared the trailer in a tweet, saying “What happens in Vegas, must stay in Vegas.”
The trailer shows a now desolate Las Vegas overrun by a massive horde of zombies. In true Vegas style, we even see an Elvis impersonator in the undead crowd. We also get a glimpse of star Dave Bautista and and his team taking on zombies with some serious firepower, while Matthias Schweighofer’s character sports the classic baseball bat covered in nails.
Entertain your brain with the coolest news from streaming to superheroes, memes to video games.
Bautista, aka Drax the Destroyer from the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, announced the preview was coming with a tweet Wednesday showing a picture of the actor and a big pile of bodies. Other stars include Ella Purnell, Ana de la Reguera, Theo Rossi, Huma Qureshi and Tig Notaro.
Army of the Dead is scheduled for a May 21 release on Netflix. And if you like the concept, you’re in luck. Deadline reports a film prequel and anime series are planned.
New movies coming out in 2021: James Bond, Marvel and more
It seems we inch closer to some sort of apocalypse every day, but even if you’re not fighting off hordes of zombies or killer robots, you might still need to know the weather in the middle of a hurricane. That’s where an emergency radio comes in. The Dodocool Emergency Radio has all the bases covered, including AM/FM and NOAA weather broadcasts, a flashlight and 2,000-mAh USB charging for your mobile devices. Right now you can get this Emergency Radio for $23 when you click the coupon on the product page and apply promo code TECHB0025 at checkout. That’ll save you 34% off the usual price of $35.
The best part of this radio — and the feature that caught my attention — is the hand crank, which lets you power it entirely with human muscles. Whether you crank it yourself or opt to keep your kids busy during a power failure by cranking the radio is up to you. During routine, non-emergency situations, you can use the radio without working up a sweat, because it runs on your choice of AC, a trio of AAA batteries, USB or solar power as well.
The radio is pretty compact; it measures about 7x5x3 inches, but is packed with routine and survival features. There’s a flashlight and reading light, SOS alarm and radio, as well as a 2,000-mAh power bank. That versatility can earn it a place on camping trips as well as your robot-invasion-bug-out kit.
Get all the latest deals delivered to your inbox. It’s FREE!
CNET’s deal team scours the web for great deals on tech products and much more. Find more great buys on the CNET Deals page and check out our CNET Coupons page for the latest promo codes from Best Buy, Walmart, Amazon and more. Questions about the Cheapskate blog? Find the answers on our FAQ page.
