Zombie: A fiend we still fear

Zombies can eat you alive. Vampires can drink your blood. Werewolves can tear you to shreds. Witches can turn you into a frog, or anything else for that matter.

Despite the horrible fates that these monsters and others can force upon a human, the fear people once had of such mythical figures has gone way down even though Hollywood has made them more real than ever before, with movies and TV shows that depict vampires and company walking among us.

Burt Raifsnider is essentially an expert on making monsters come alive. He and his company, Community Underground Studios, run Chambersburg, Pa.'s, "Terror Beyond Bars," an experience where people are thrust into a world overrun by zombies. He says that although zombies have had their share of limelight - Walking Dead is one of the most popular TV shows - they are among the few monsters people still fear.

"There's too many die-hard zombie fans out there that are in the business that I think actually are able to come out and keep the zombies really terrifying," he said.

A search for "Zombie Apocalypse" on Facebook backs up his theory. Click "see more results" 30 times, and the list of pages will keep growing, some of them with thousands of members who believe such an event will happen.

"The zombies in today's movies run at you and tear you apart limb by limb, whereas the old George Romero zombies, you could push them around, run around them," Raifsnider said. Romero is the man behind the original Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and other zombie films.

Vampires have probably taken the biggest hit from Hollywood, which has made sex symbols of the bloodsucking creatures. Before Stephenie Meyer's Twilight and subsequent movies, and TV series such as HBO's True Blood and the CW's The Vampire Diaries, most people pictured a fanged, cape-wearing Dracula figure, not a tall, beautiful (although pale), lust-worthy being.

Vampires came to the forefront with Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, Dracula, which is also where the traditional vision of a vampire originated. According to www.dracula.info, the Dracula character was based on Vlad the Impaler, a Romanian ruler who lived in the mid-1400s and tortured the people who killed his father by skinning, boiling, or burning them - among other things - and cutting off body parts. His surname actually was Dracula, a name he got from his father, Vlad Dracul; the addition of a means "the son of."