Eric Rawlins of Rutherford, New Jersey is the winner of our Ultimate Night of the Living Dead Quiz winner. We asked Eric a few questions about how he was able to answer all of the fan quiz questions and what he likes about NLD.

1) Did you have to consult your DVD for the answers or did you just know them?

I did have to "go to the video tape" for number ten; in fact, I almost posted a response to say that it was a trick question, it was impossible to know the answer without consulting, say, John Russo's book, The Complete NLD Filmbook. But then I reread the question and realized the answer had to be in the movie. It's  almost impossible to hear the announcer say the name of the state, since the radio cue is way, WAY in the background at this point, but I knew it had to be a state in "the eastern third" of the U.S., and that it had an ess or zee sound in the middle. I actually didn't know whether I got that one right, I just took my best shot and kept my fingers crossed!

2) Where do you stand on Dawn of the Dead and the great which-is-better controversy?

Can't we all just get along? If you mean some row about Zack Snyder's version vs. George Romero's, I don't take sides. I thought both were pretty great, but were products of different eras. Snyder's movie was a shot in the arm for the zombie genre, which had petered out from over-exploitation in Italian cinema in the '70s and '80s. I think it's impossible for a movie to shock us anymore like NLD did when it came out, but Snyder's film did "go there", and did a pretty good job of it. I don't see why either one has to be "better", they're just different, and you can literally find both on the top shelf of my DVD library.

3) Who's the best zombie?

Bill Hinzman (Graveyard Zombie) is iconic, the best-looking of the bunch, and actually prefigures the New School of the Dead with his speed and strength; Kyra Schon as Dead Karen is the creepiest, since - up to that point in American cinema - children were sacrosanct and you just didn't expect to see a child zombie; but for me, Russ Streiner as Dead Johnny is the scariest, because you see him go from happy-go-lucky, comedic screwball to an implacable, unblinking, unflinching eating machine (not unlike Robert Patrick in T2), bent only on consuming his sister. THAT'S scary!

4) Is Harry Cooper a misunderstood nice guy or a jerk?

I don't think there's any way to construe Harry Cooper as a nice guy - he's simply too nasty - but he's no Carter Burke (Aliens) and he's certainly no Archie Bunker. It would have been easy for Romero to make us hate him by having him be a racist or a wife beater or child molester, but instead George kept him a little more Everyman just trying to protect his family. It's hard to say how any of us would behave in a situation like that, so I can't really judge him too harshly...and the fact that Cooper wound up being right about how to survive the onslaught only makes it that much more ironic that we were so happy to see him killed.

5) What in your opinion is the single best line from the film?

The most memorable is Russell Streiner's mock-menacing, Boris Karloff-inspired "They're coming to get you, Barbra". But my personal favorite is George Kosana as Sheriff McLellend, summing up two days of medically impossible terror and mayhem with this gem of understatement: "Yeah, they're dead, they're all messed up".

6) What would you like to see Monsterfest do next?

I would love to see Monsterfest do for horror films what Jack Black did for rock music in School of Rock - diagram out the history of horror films, show what films made what other films possible, what films spawned what genre of films, etc. Or maybe an in-depth investigative report a la VH-1's Behind the Music on just what really went wrong with John Carpenter. Or a "Where Are They Now?" segment on the scream queens of the '70s and '80s. Or feature up-and-coming horror directors, much like VH-1 does with You Oughta Know: The Best New Artists on the Rise. 

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Thanks Eric for taking the time to take our fan quiz. For the answers, check out Eric's responses in the original post. Look for the next Ultimate Fan Quiz, coming soon.