Halloween is on its way, and while ghosts and ghouls may have been the undead horrors of decades past, here in 2012 it's all about the zombies and their ilk.
What better way to get in the mood for spooky doom than with this weirdly lovely, thoroughly instructive image from Left 4 Dead 2? See zombie, apply flamethrower. Now that's useful advice for the ages.
Click the image to expand to its full hi-res gory glory.
Open Up [Dead End Thrills]
Brothers Colin and Connor McGuire wanted a Left 4 Dead movie... so they made one.
The home project took them the better part of two years, including 3000 hours of editing. The final product is about the length of an "hour" long television show, clocking in around 40 minutes, and looks at least as good as several TV shows I've seen.
You can find out more about the making-of from the video listing and the McGuires' Facebook page.
Eagle-eyed gamers watching the tricksy horror flick Cabin In The Woods might have noticed a cool shout-out to Valve's Left 4 Dead in a sequence in the third act of the movie.
Talking today in a Reddit IAmA, the film's director Drew Goddard said we almost got a lot more than that: If MGM hadn't gone bankrupt, we would've gotten a downloadable Left 4 Dead expansion pack based on the movie.
Cabin In The Woods Spoilers Follow.
Here's Goddard:
We actually were going to do a downloadable L4D2 expansion pack, where you'd fight in the Cabin world, but then MGM went bankrupt so the delay squashed it. But the people at Valve were still cool enough to let us use some of their monsters to fill the cubes in the background (I had a lot of cubes to fill.)
By the way — the game was gonna be amazing. You were gonna be able to play in both the upstairs "Cabin in the Woods" world and the downstairs "facility" world with all the monsters. Believe me, I HATE all video games based on movies, they always suck, but porting Cabin into Left For Dead felt like the right fit. It pains me that it didn't happen.
I already think that Cabin in the Woods had a lot of fun playing with video game tropes, so it hurts my heart that we almost got to take a four-player run not only through the cabin but through the monster-filled facility underneath. I wonder if there would have been a merman? Or if Sigourney Weaver would have been the final girl-boss?
I guess now we'll never know. But we can always imagine.
Drew Goddard IAmA [Reddit via Tom Francis]