ZOMBIES!

Zombies are 21st Century stars of the big and small screens. They have been serialized, spoofed, snuffed and ridiculed in movies like “Shaun of the Dead,” “Zombieland,” and television shows like “The Walking Dead.” Though they are a staple of horror fiction, they also have some base in reality. In fact, zombies can be traced back to the Haitian tradition of voodoo.

Host Frank Stasio talks about zombie origins with Laurent Dubois, a professor of history and romance studies at Duke University and the co-director of the Haiti Lab at Duke’s Franklin Humanities Institute; Maria Pramaggiore, the head of North Carolina State University's Film Studies Program; and Richard Dansky, a gamewriter for Ubisoft and a horror novelist.