We tried, we really did try to convince the public as much as we can that zombies are not real. Please don’t stock up a bunker, please don’t work on your sharpshooting skills, please realize there is absolutely no such thing as zombies, so don’t try to protect yourself against a ridiculous threat that just doesn’t exist.
In spite of our warnings, right after the Walking Dead mid-season return, some pranksters pulled a War of the Worlds style joke, and you wonder how much people believed it.
When Orson Welles executed his War of the Worlds prank, people did indeed panic, thinking we were under an alien invasion, and it may have been the precursor to Punk’d.
This prank follows in a similar vein, as hackers recently managed to slip in a zombie alert on a TV station in Montana known as KRTV. This happened during the Steve Wilkos show, and the program was interrupted with familiar sounding warning alarms, and the proclamation: “Authorities in your area have reported that the bodies of the dead are rising from their graves and attacking the living…Do not attempt to approach or apprehend these bodies as they are considered extremely dangerous.”
Now anybody who knows horror films will recognize the above warning from Night of the Living Dead. This warning went on in several counties in Montana, and the Times report tells us that, thankfully, there was no panic that resulted from this joke. Some viewers also got the joke, with one calling the station to ask, “If a zombie walks on my front lawn, can I shoot him?”
This prank also came after The Walking Dead broke another ratings record, with sixteen million people tuning in for all three showings of its mid-season return on Sunday the 10th.
Dead has already come under fire for violence, and according to the Hollywood Reporter, there’s an average of 38 people killed per show, 91% of them zombies. While I don’t watch horror films with a clicker counter to tally how many people get killed, these statistics come courtesy of funeralwise.com. After all, no one said getting rid of zombies wasn’t messy…
