Get ready to break out your copies of The Zombie Survival Guide, and be sure to stock up on bottled water and "lobos" (you know, those weapons with which one decapitates the living dead in hand-to-hand combat) -- Max Brooks's World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War is being made into a film, with J. Michael Straczynski (who's also scribing Silver Surfer) adapting the book for the big screen. The film is being produced by Brad Pitt's Plan B Entertainment and Paramount is distributing.This is probably old news to some of you, but it's exciting news to me, since I just last night finished reading World War Z.

I was absolutely immersed in this book and found it hard to put down. I've had deliciously scary zombie nightmares regularly while reading it, and have spent waayyyyyy more time than is probably healthy in discussions with my husband about the practical issues surrounding surviving a plague of the undead, comparing World War Z to Stephen King's plague book, The Stand, and pondering whether such a thing as an undead plague could actually scientifically happen (see, this kind of freakish obsessiveness is why I don't read or watch a lot of horror ...).

She isn't too well known in America, but Star Wars fans may recognize Claudia Karvan as the actress who played Padmé's elder sister Sola in Revenge of the Sith. Now the Australian actress, who is a popular television star in her native country, has landed herself another Hollywood role sure to make her more familiar to audiences in the States. She has been cast as the female lead in the futuristic vampire movie Daybreakers, in which she'll co-star with Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe and fellow Aussie (slash New Zealander) Sam Neill. The casting of an up-and-coming Australian star makes perfect sense since the movie will be shot Down Under by Australian filmmakers the Spierig twins (Undead), who also wrote the screenplay.

According to Moviehole, Karvan will be playing a human love interest for Hawke's vampire character. The movie is set in 2017 when the world is mostly populated by vampires, a race that may become extinct once the blood-supplying humans are also extinct. Hawke is some sort of good guy vampire who is researching a way for his people to survive with a blood substitute. Dafoe plays his rival. Still no word on who or what Neill will be playing. If Karvan's part is correct, I think we can assume that once Hawke falls for her, he begins to think twice about feeding on humans. Of course, he could just turn her into a vampire and then live happily for eternity with her, but narratively that idea lacks conflict. Daybreakers begins filming soon and is set to release next year, which will be long after we've already seen I Am Legend, 30 Days of Night and Bloodrayne II. Hopefully we'll still be interested in vampires by that point.

Back in December, we totally failed to pick up the news that someone had written a screenplay for a sequel to Dracula. Whatever, right? Hollywood has sequel-itis, and a whole lot of the results suck. It turns out, though, that the film, entitled Un Dead, is the first Dracula movie to win the approval of author Bram Stoker's family since Tod Browning's 1931 masterpiece. Not only that, but it was written by a gentleman named Ian Holt who, according to the always-reliable internets, is a Dracula scholar, and actually traveled around Europe, scouting locations while he wrote. Plus, it's NOT a sequel to Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula, but rather to Stoker's original story. I don't know about you, but I'm suddenly feeling quite intrigued.

Variety is just reporting the story today (which is fine because, well, so are we), which probably means that all the dotted lines are finally signed, and that the project might actually be getting off the ground. Action king Jan de Bont (he's busy right now directing Meg -- fear his power) will produce the film, which picks up 25 years after the end of Dracula and brings all the surviving characters together, along with an Inspector Cotford, who appeared in Stoker's original draft of Dracula, but was cut prior to the story's publication.

• Christa McAuliffe: Reach For The Stars - Massachusetts native Christa McAuliffe has become quite inseparable from the image of the ghastly tendrils of smoke hanging over the Florida sky after the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded in January 1986, but she's also remembered as a schoolteacher who never stopped teaching. It is this second image on which first-time filmmakers Renée Sotile and Mary Jo Godges focus, going beyond blindly reverent fluff and digging into the humanity that made the loss of McAuliffe and the subsequent grounding of the Shuttle so much of a tragedy. With a warm, comforting narration by Susan Sarandon and a note-perfect song track by Carly Simon (whose tapes McAuliffe brought aboard Challenger), the film captures the spirit of exploration and discovery through McAuliffe's example, and not by just stating she was a shining star we should all try hard to emulate.