Best Locations for Zombie Mayhem

As you can tell, I'm a man who likes to put things off until the last minute; squeaking by in the final days of October with my zombie list. Well, I do have excuses, but I wont bore you with them here.

If you're looking for a list full of details, excessive and accurate research, then I will most certainly disappoint. Instead I write from the heart, which is also where I keep my love for zombies. Anyway ... enjoy and Happy Zombieween!

5. A Large House/Mansion
Haunted houses are a staple of Halloween and horror in general, so zombies fit in just fine. Thanks to Resident Evil, we know that that the only thing that makes fighting zombies more difficult is doing it in a maddeningly complicated home. Plus the original Night of the Living Dead is a classic for taking place mainly inside a house. Not a mansion, of course, but it set up the idea of trying to take shelter inside a home and having the situation not improve.

For me I have to put this on the list because I have often fantasized about surviving a zombie apocalypse at home and have given far too much thought to how I would fend off the invading hordes of brain-thirsty goons.

4. A Cemetery/ Graveyard
It doesn't get more classic than zombies in a graveyard. You're more likely to see it in older films, but it really should make a comeback. Nowadays zombie movies begin in the middle of the anarchy and we rarely see that hand burst from the ground and zombies clawing their way into the night air.

Whether it's Night of the Living Dead, the video for Thriller, or the Simpson's Tree House of Horror, there's just something satisfying about watching zombies sprouting up like undead flowers.

3. A Hospital
Hospitals are creepy and unsettling enough when they are fully operational, so it only makes sense that when you throw the undead into the mix things are all the more terrifying. But this isn't about what is a scary location, it's more about entertainment value.

With hospitals you have all sorts of potential: operating rooms, morgues, long white hallways just asking to be painted in blood. Zombies have appeared in hospitals in various movies and games, but a personal favourite of mine is Planet Terror. In the movie we watch the place slowly become more and more chaotic and overrun with zombies. When Wray charges into the infested hospital with only a set of knives and some acrobatic skills it's really impressive to say the least.

2. An Amusement Park
Until finally seeing it in Zombieland, I always thought that amusement parks and carnivals would make for ridiculous set pieces of zombie killing. There are some solid moments in that movie, but I still think more brain-smashing goodness can be extracted from this potential.

With the bright lights, music, and giant spinning machines, it makes for a nice contrast with the horrific appearance of zombies (eg. bright shining candy apples meets shirts stained with dried blood and mud). Little ghouls running around a flashing rainbow playground - it's damn near adorable.

1. A Shopping Mall
What can I say? Who doesn't love the idea of zombies and shopping malls? First of all, it's awesome because the human survivors inside are living out a fantasy we all secretly have; to have free reign in a land of excess, to loot and pillage in the name of your own survival. Plus watching zombies in a mall is almost beautifully poetic. Watching people shop in the real world is like witnessing consumer zombies. They shuffle around blindly in search of something, but never being completely satisfied.

Thanks to the Dawn of the Dead films and games like Dead Rising, we have been able to celebrate and enjoy the wonder of zombies, those insatiable consuming monsters, invading a world where that sort of behaviour is encouraged.

Plus zombies on escalators are hilarious.