Now it looks like they're taking that classic story, and making it even more blatantly post-apocalyptic. 

Here's the full release:

On the eve of the Berlin film market, prolific independent producer Jonathan Sothcott (Elfie Hopkins, Strippers Vs Werewolves) has announced ambitious plans for a post-apocalyptic, steampunk-styled adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's classic horror story The Mask of the Red Death, to be directed by acclaimed British film maker Robert Pratten (Mindflesh, London Voodoo).
 
"London. 2020 as the radioactive clouds begin to fade after a devastating nuclear war, the last dregs of humanity fight to survive – drought and famine cripple this cracked, broken world. Electricity is a thing of the past. Hideous mutants stalk the night, desperately searching for food and warmth. A cold planet.A dying planet. Superstition is rife. Evil rises. Through the husk of the once great metropolis stalks a lone figure, The Red Death: to some a God, to others a freedom fighter. To all a nightmare of agonising death.
 
From the shell of a once great building, all that remains of his empire, corrupt billionaire Marzo rules what is left of London. His kill squads murder, pillage and rape. His group of friends indulge in every excess. Yet neither money or power can save Marzo from the Red Death… and it is coming for him."
 
Mask of Red Death will be a transmedia project encompassing a feature film, mobile app, web videos and social media. All media and marketing for the project will be integrated with a new technology called Conducttr which allows audiences to take a participatory role in the storyworld. Although audiences can't affect the outcome of the movie - it plays like any other - they will be incentivised  to collect items across the web and physical locations in order to have a heightened experience of the movie when it screens.
 
Sothcott, Head of Programming for the Horror Channel prior to his successful career as a film producer, said "I have been looking for a project to work on with Robert that was more than just a film. As a producer I am constantly looking for new ways to tell stories and transmedia represents a very exciting opportunity. This version of Poe's most famous story has everything the modern horror audience could want – its terrifying, sexy, action-packed and gory. As a film maker, Robert has a unique visual style that will make for an incredibly stylish film – this will be every bit as shocking as Mindflesh was and the post-apocalyptic setting allows us to give it a unique flavour – part steampunk, part cyber goth."
 
Pratten commented "When Jonathan mentioned the idea to me my mind first went to Tenpenny Tower in Fallout 3. It's not quite like that at all but it does give you the idea of a rich dude trying to protect himself from the inevitability of death after an apocalypse.
 
This is a great opportunity to show how society might look after a reboot from a damaged hard drive: there's a lot of what we recognize mashed up with medieval behavior we thought had been erased.In a world today in which many are predominantly hostile to spirituality, all they've done is replace faith in God with a faith in silicon chips and silicon breasts. In an post-apocalyptic Britain set in 2020, with life as we know irretrievably lost, new leaders will need to create myths in order to bring hope to the hopeless. And where there is no hope there'll be violence, drugs, superstition and lust driven by the fear of facing our own mortality."
 
The $1.5 million picture is scheduled to begin principal photography on June 1st 2012. No casting has been announced as yet.
 
Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Mask of the Red Death was first published in 1842 and has been filmed a number of times, most notably by Roger Corman in 1964 with a cast including Vincent Price and Hazel Court.

Sounds pretty cool to me, so I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this one.

For such a short book, the depth of the world that Howey creates is incredible.  Ostensibly, Wool takes place 400 years after an unknown apocalypse forces survivors underground into a huge concrete silo, where their descendants now live.  The silo is sectioned off into hydroponic farms, manufacturing facilities, living quarters and community areas.  The privilege of having children is decided by lottery, and law breakers are punished swiftly and severely, sent to their deaths in the poisoned air outside, while at the same time asked to provide one more service to those that condemned them.

I say "ostensibly" because part of what's great about the story are the unanswered questions. What caused the apocalypse?  How long have they really been down there?  Who's in control,  and what do they know about the past? What is the world really like outside their self-imposed prison?

One of the good things about not discovering Wool until now is the fact that I may not have to wonder about those questions for very long.  Wool was initially meant to be a one-off story, but it turned out to be so popular that Howey kept writing, and has so far released five books in the series, and is currently working on a sixth.

The ending of part one was amazing and left me wondering which direction the story would go.  I can't wait to jump into part two to find out.   

My official rating for Wool is 8.5 megatons.

In the talk, Dr Macfarlane discusses our fascination with ruins, whether they be actual ruins from the past, or our imagining of a future destruction of our current cities and environments.

His chronicle of the history of ruinism mentions several early and also modern examples of what we would now consider post-apocalyptic fiction, including poetry, books, movies and even Japanese anime.

The lecture is just over an hour long, and is available in a variety of audio and video formats on the Cambridge media site.

The pilot, titled Revolution, is supposed to be "an epic adventure thriller, where a family struggles to reunite in a post-apocalyptic American landscape: a world of empty cities, local militias and heroic freedom fighters, where every single piece of technology — computers, planes, cars, phones, even lights — has mysteriously blacked out … forever."

Sounds familiar uh?  I wonder if they'll go as far as gun powder and even steam power not working, but no matter what, it sounds cool to me.

I know there are people out there who aren't fans of Abrams, but I've enjoyed his stuff so far, and he's a big enough name to pull in some real talent, so I'm really excited about the prospects for this one.

But with no lights, how's he going to create all that lens flare?

Published by Pixel Pandemic, Zombie Pandemic is "a free browser based MMORPG featuring enriched RPG elements, including missions, advanced combat, perks and an inventory with hundreds of weapons to battle the more than 175 different NPC opponents."

I'm still on the first of three available maps, and have only gotten up to level 20, but it's been fun so far, and has definitely kept me interested enough to want to keep going.

But what I'm really waiting for is Pixel Pandemic to hurry up and release either one of their two upcoming games that look to have even more of a post-apocalyptic theme, Radiated Wasteland and Rise of Robots.

I don't have much information on Radiated Wasteland yet, but I did get a press kit for Rise of Robots.  Here's the description:

Machines have risen against mankind and those of us that remain must fight to survive in a world set in flames. As a player you are one of the few survivors who escaped the first attacks, trapped in the ruins of what used to be a metropolitan city. You are now part of the resistance fighting for whatever is left of civilization in this near future post-apocalyptic setting inspired by the Terminator movies.

Players can co-op by joining clans and constructing safe houses, hidden away from the machines who try to hunt you down. You must scavenge resources from what is left of the looted stores and left behind items in the city and you must stay well fed to survive. Combining items you scavenge you can craft improvised weapons and engage in tactical combat against the mighty robots and drones with more than 400 weapons available.

The game features classic MMORPG elements offering a fully customizable avatar which you can equip with the clothing and armor you find. The game is turn based and set on a huge tile based map of more than 3000 tiles to explore. Each tile is customized and during the explorative gameplay players are able to locate NPCs that offer missions, trading or even training facilities.

So it sounds like the gameplay will basically be a clone of Zombie Pandemic with new artwork and storylines.  But that would be fine with me, and I can't wait to play them.

From what I understand, both games will hit closed beta sometime in 2012, though I haven't heard exactly when.  You can go to the sites to sign up to be notified, or just stick around here, because the folks at Pixel Pandemic have already said that they'll throw some beta keys my way when they're ready to launch.

My official rating for the Wanderers is 7 Megatons.

PS Just a quick note on the translation.  Generally, it's very good, but I would guess that whoever did it is not a native English speaker.  Some of the language or vocabulary used isn't what I would have expected; for example a phrase like "The scene was splattered with blood and screams" which isn't exactly correct.  But at the same time there was never a case where the language was jarring, or failed to get the point across, and most of the time it read as any other English novel would, while giving the book a bit of a unique feel.

Running for just 13 episodes in 1975, Return to the Planet of the Apes didn't follow the chronology of the films and live-action tv series, but rather was a sort of re-imagining of the mythology with many of the same characters. As with the previous stories, this one follows a handful of astronauts who are thrown into the future and find themselves in a world populated by intelligent apes.  They try to figure out what happened while avoiding the apes and protecting the humans who live there.

I'm really looking forward to watching the shows, but it turns out that if I had known to look, I could have watched them anytime because all of the episodes are posted in their entirety on YouTube.

I only paid $7 for the DVD and I'd rather watch them on my tv anyway, but if you're interested in seeing them yourself, here's the first episode to whet your appetite.

On the Audio page, I added the end of the world extravaganza, 2012, and the post-apocalyptic classic, Cyborg, bringing the number of movie audio rips up to 34.  That's in addition to 50 other files in the audio drama, music, and audio book categories.

The latest addition to the Videos page is a cool short film called The End, one of over a hundred short films and videos I've gathered from various sources.  Two in particular that you might want to try, given the holiday season, are Peace on Earth and Good Will to Men, both classics of animation.

To round out the updates, there are three new short stories on the Fiction page.  The first is Tales of a Blood Earth, by Steven Montano, set in the same dark fantasy universe as his Blood Skies trilogy.  The other two, How to Catch a Vampire, and Magical Mystery Treasure, are Thundarr the Barbarian fan-fiction by Sheila Shillingburg.  I'm a huge Thundarr fan, so I'm looking forward to reading those in particular.

But even if none of the above pique your interest, there's bound to be something that floats your boat on the media pages, so why don't you head on over and have a look?

So I bought them both and just finished the first one, Sooner Dead by Mel Odom, and it turns out it was exactly what I was looking for.

Now it's been a long time since I cracked open a Gamma World rule book, so I forget what the mythology said about the cause of the apocalypse, but in these books it was a mishap with the Large Hadron Collider. It tore apart the world, and opened ripples, gateways to other worlds and dimensions, bringing all manner of strange creatures into ours.

Having the plot device of rampant inter-dimensional wormholes means that you can introduce basically anything you want into your story, and Mr Odom certainly took advantage of that.  This book has human-animal hybrids, cyborgs, nanobot-enhanced humans, alien creatures, and more kinds of psionic abilities than I could count, all set in what 200 years before was known as Oklahoma.

The story follows Hella, a bio-engineered young woman with a mysterious past, and her bisonoid companion, Stampede, as they serve as guides for a group hunting for a lost object in the ruinous wastes of the American southwest.  It's a fast-paced adventure chock full of gun fights, raiders, mutant creatures, mystery, loyalty, and betrayal. 

I really enjoyed it, and if there's ever a sequel following the same characters, I'd be sure to pick it up.

Overall, I can definitely recommend it, at least if you're the right mood for it.  My official rating for Sooner Dead is 7 Megatons.