Once a person gets a taste for human brains, conventional wisdom holds that there is no turning back. From there, it is a slippery slope to a violent existence full of killing and, well, more killing.

These brain-eaters known as the undead - "zombies" in common parlance - have fascinated humans for millennia, from the Babylonian poem "Epic of Gilgamesh" to Michael Jackson's "Thriller."

And now, they've taken over the Hippodrome State Theatre in "Night of the Living Dead," which opens Friday.

The play is largely based on the famous movie of the same name, but is full of ad-libs and inside jokes that only a Gainesville resident would get.

"Night of the Living Dead" is by turns creepy, violent, bloody, ridiculous, self-referential and slapstick. It is full of screaming, shooting and, naturally, zombie dance sequences.

"It's more 'Shaun of the Dead' than 'Night of the Living Dead,' " says director Lauren Caldwell, referring to the popular 2004 horror-movie lampoon.

Caldwell says that the zombie genre is more suited for movies than the theatre, which affected the staging of the play.

"The question I asked is can you create horror on stage? The answer is no, I don't think you can. So we made it a little absurd and ridiculous," she says.

Caldwell, who has directed her share of high drama, seems to visibly enjoy the playfulness that doing zombie theater allows. She says that in addition to making sure the play was as purely entertaining as possible, she also wanted to live up to past Hippodrome Halloween productions, such as last year's spook-tacular "Alice."

"We're famous for our Halloween slots," she says.

The result is anything but a standard theatrical production. Of course, when one of the driving questions behind a play involves choosing the best place to hide from a zombie attack, the normal director's playbook doesn't hold.

"My goal was to tell the story as clearly as I could, but to also allow Gainesville to have somewhere to go to just have a blast," Caldwell says, adding, "I just tried to have fun."

That spirit has (pardon the word) bled into the actors as well.

"There's nothing in this show that's off limits," says Kate Kertez, who plays Barbara, a shell-shocked girl who experiences the first zombie contact.

Thus, if an actor comes up with a funny ad-lib, it stays in the play, and there is a lot of room for each show to be different from the others.

"A lot of it depends on how the audience reacts," Kertez says.

Armando Acevedo, who plays Ben, the self-proclaimed leader in the fight against the zombies, says that kind of freedom for an actor is very refreshing.

"This feels good to me," he says. "It's like vacation."