Our Fixation With Zombies

Important conversations and encouraging words to help you make every day a great one.

If you’ve ever watched a movie and wished you could be the Chosen One, now’s your chance. Evermore, a new park in Pleasant Grove, Utah, is designed to give guests the opportunity to become fully immersed in a fantasy/adventure world. An interactive theme park designed to look like a Gothic-style European village, Evermore lets guests explore its 11 acres of gardens and buildings, meet its many characters, and above all else, participate in an adventure. Matt Mattson is the Creative Director at Evermore. He is a phenomenal musician, improviser, and actor, and he’s with us today to talk about his job, his ideas, and the park.

We have a natural curiosity about what happens after we die. You’ve probably imagined what it will be like—but it’s unlikely you’ve imagined an afterlife quite like the one portrayed in The Good Place. The hit tv show features imperfect humans trying desperately to gain “good points” retrospectively in the afterlife. If they don’t, they’ll face the infinite tortures of The Bad Place. At the heart of this comedy is the theme of becoming a better person, brought to us by the character of Chidi, a moral philosopher. Dr. Angela Wentz Faulconer is here to discuss with us the use of moral philosophy in The Good Place, and how the show has managed to make philosophy a hot topic.

In the last segment we just talked about zombies and why our culture seems to have this allure or fixation to them.  When you think of zombies or monsters, though, there’s one iconic zombie that comes to mind, and that’s, of course, Frankenstein. He’s the mascot of Halloween and a character that has changed the way we think about monsters. But he may have had more influence on society than just becoming a Halloween costume. This year is actually the 200th anniversary of Frankenstein’s original publication, which has become one of the most popular works in the history of western literature. Aspects of the story have saturated our world over the centuries and still appear in today’s pop culture