This Halloween, Don't Go Zombie; Go "Zombieland" Zombie-Killer!

Need a quick zombie fix?

There’s an iPhone app for that (actually, there’s a whole slew of ’em). And that’s just the tip of the funky corpse, of course. The living unalive are cropping up in gory, oozy glory pretty much everywhere lately, from the legion of Zombie Walks spawning worldwide to the University of Baltimore’s much-ballyhooed fall 2010 course in zombie lit, to ZombieMe.net letting you gross-up photos of yourself as flesh-flapping zed-heads, to that green-blood-zed roommate on Comedy Central’s devilishly delicious Ugly Americans, to the AMC channel’s new The Walking Dead series, launching this Halloween night, to ... .Yet when Barnes & Noble starts hawking a cutesy zombie plush toy (“Zombie Buddy,” with little Xs for eyes and toting a bag of candy corn), could it be that all this post-deadification has maybe lurched a bit too far beyond the bodiless grave, out into the fickle mainstream still choked with last summer’s plastic Twilight vampire fangs? (Coming this Christmas: Zhu Zhu Zombie Pets! Don’t scoff; it could happen.)

So this Halloween, enlisting in the ratty ranks of costumed rotting meatbags isn’t, alas, all that likely to set you apart. (Oh look, a zombie and, hey, there’s a second one and, over there, it’s … another freakin’ zombie.) Wanna have some real fun instead? Then suit up to go hunting the increasingly ubiquitous undead. Go zombie killer. Go as Tallahassee.

Pulling off the amped-up Panhandle-cracker look of the quintessential Twinkie-lusting zombie-whacker is easy, actually. It’s all about a great, big dose of attitude and the right hat, and everything else is just the plastic wrapper on the Twinkie. And by right hat, we mean, of course, our own Real Deal Brazil recycled-tarp hat, the same headwear worn by Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) in the 2009 box-office/2010 DVD smash Zombieland, as he shot, stomped, stabbed pummeled, sheared, etc., the ravenous undead. “Nut up,” as Tallahassee himself would say, “or shut up.”

Tips on tapping into your own inner Tallahassee? Check below. You dirty little zombie killer, you!