British actress Lucy Griffiths’ starring role on The CW’s now abandoned teen-zombie apocalypse series “The Awakening” may be DOA, but the 25-year-old starlet is set to breathe new life into the fifth season of HBO’s hit vampire soap “True Blood.”

According to TVLine, Griffiths will play Eric Northman’s (Alexander Skarsgard) sister Nora, a centuries old vampire turned by Godric (Allan Hyde) and now working as a double agent within the Vampire Authority. She’s described as an intelligent and intimidating force with a penchant for lying.

Griffiths is best known for her portrayal of doomed Lady Marion of Leaford on the BBC program “Robin Hood.” Earlier this year, she and “Royal Pains” star Meredith Hagner were cast to play sisters on The CW’s “The Awakening,” a coming-of-age drama set against a zombie apocalypse backdrop that wasn’t picked up to series.

American World Pictures has released a trailer for director Mark Atkins’ upcoming Jaws-meets-Tremors creature feature Sand Sharks … and I, for one, am hooked. Written by producer Cameron Larson, the story finds prehistoric tiger sharks attacking spring breakers from beneath the sand.

The film stars Brooke Hogan as shark scientist Dr. Sandy Powers, Vanessa Lee Evigan (Briana Evigan’s sister) as Deputy Sheriff Brenda Young, “7th Heaven” hottie Julie Berman as a bikini-clad party reveler and gorgeous genre queen Gina Holden and Corin Nemec as Sandman Festival promoters.

Peep it:

Leslie Bibb, star of the upcoming ABC midseason replacement series “Good Christian Belles,” is ready for take-off in Japanese director Takashi Shimizu’s (The Grudge) in-flight frightener 7500. The 37-year-old stunner joins Amy Smart and Ryan Kwanten in the CBS Films production, set to shoot later this month.

The film  follows a group of passengers terrorized by a supernatural force after the mysterious death of a passenger on Vista Pacific Flight 7500. Bibb will play a flight attendant with a secret, while Smart and Kwanten portray a married couple traveling with friends to Japan.

Bibb’s genre creds include Heathers scribe Daniel Waters’ horror-comedy Sex and Death 101, the superb Clive Barker-produced Midnight Meat Train, Michael Dougherty’s beloved Halloween anthology Trick r’ Treat, and Jon Favreau’s Iron Man 1 & 2.

Norwegian actress Ingrid Bolsø Berdal is part of the ensemble cast featured in writer/producer Oren Peli’s (Paranormal Activity) new untitled radioactive ghost town thriller. Joining Berdal are Jonathan Sadowski (Friday the 13th), Jesse McCartney (“Greek”), Nathan Phillips (Wolf Creek), Dimitry Diatchenko (Burning Palms), Olivia Taylor Dudley (Chillerama) and Devin Kelly (“Chicago Code”).

According to Deadline, the film’s plot follows a group of friends stranded in a town long believed to be abandoned after a nuclear disaster (sounds like Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes meets shaky-cam to me). The project is the first to be fully financed by FilmNation and is currently being shot in Eastern Europe with F/X guru-turned-director Brad Parker (Let Me In) at the helm.

Berdal is best known for kicking ass while looking good in the 2006 Norwegian survival frightener Cold Prey. She will next be seen as a deadly witch in Dead Snow director Tommy Wirkola’s Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, a flash forward of the classic fairy tale that finds the siblings hunting down supernatural forces for profit.

So … the wife and I found ourselves down at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles this weekend to partake in their annual Spider Pavilion event. The show, which presents a variety of exotic spiders brought in from around the world, runs from now until Nov. 6.

The deadly species are kept encased in a viewing area, while the harmless—but still very creepy—arachnids are housed in a walk-thru landscaped area, where they spin their webs freely, feed on bugs, and occasionally drop down to scare the curds and whey out of visitors.

Over the Halloween weekend, the Spider Pavilion was held at night. Aided by small complimentary flashlights and buckets of alcohol (consumed prior to the event), Mrs. Muertos and I braved the experience and even took a few photos for your viewing pleasure.

Happy Halloween!

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An intriguingly spooky trailer for the Ti West-directed supernatural thriller The Innkeepers has hit the web. Shark Night’s Sara Paxton stars in the film as one of the last clerks working at the haunted Yankee Pedlar Inn before its scheduled demolition.

Peep it:

The official synopsis reads:

After over one hundred years of service, The Yankee Pedlar Inn is shutting its doors for good. The last remaining employees -Claire and Luke – are determined to uncover proof of what many believe to be one of New England’s most haunted hotels.

As the Inn’s final days draw near, odd guests check in as the pair of minimum wage “ghost hunters” begin to experience strange and alarming events that may ultimately cause them to be mere footnotes in the hotel’s long unexplained history.

The Inn Keepers costars Pat Healy (Rescue Dawn), George Riddle (“The Onion News Network”), and Kelly McGillis (Top Gun). It was shot in Connecticut at the actual Yankee Pedlar Inn, a hotel long believed to be truly haunted. The film arrives on VOD Dec. 30 and will play theaters on Feb. 3.

Paxton, who got her start in a string of family-friendly features, broke out of her good girl image with her starring role in 2009’s brutally violent—and so-much-better-than-the-original—remake of Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left.

Paxton has since starred in this summer’s fish-&-chicks frightener Shark Night 3-D and will be seen in Indie Entertainment and Sundial Pictures’ truth-or-dare thriller Liars All, producer Jack Heller’s (Homecoming) cabin-in-the-woods set chiller Enter Nowhere, and upstart banner New Artists Alliance’s dead child ghost story Static.

You can also find Paxton on Clatto’s list of The 20 Hottest Women Working in Horror/Sci-fi Today.

Horror fans may want to keep an eye on former ABC Family star Johanna Braddy (“Greek”). The 24-year-old actress recently wrapped The Collection, Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton’s sequel to The Collector, and can currently be seen on the big screen in Paramount Pictures’ Paranormal Activity 3.

Braddy also toplines CastLight Pictures’ found footage thriller The Levenger Tapes. Directed by some guy named Mark Edwin Robinson, the film stars Braddy as one of three college students who go missing while trying to find a lost eight-year-old girl in the wilderness.

Peep it:

Gorgeous model-turned-actress Julia Voth toplines director Sridhar Reddy’s Lilith, a modern day ode to Dante’s “Inferno.” The Canadian stunner plays Sarah Wilson, a woman who is led by the spirit of her dead sister to a seemingly abandoned building where each of its nine floors holds horrific revelations.

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The film’s synopsis reads:

A contemporary take on Dante’s ‘Inferno,’ ‘Lilith’ is the story of Sarah Wilson, who finds herself haunted by visions of her tragically murdered younger sister, Lilith.

After a night of surreal terror, Sarah is led by her visions of her dead sister into a hellish labyrinth populated by bloodthirsty demons and bedeviled ghosts from her past.

Her journey into darkness forces Sarah to confront painful secrets and her innermost fears, and her path back to reality is one fraught with terror, sadness and deception.

Personally, I’d watch Voth pick her nose on film (well, if she did so sensually and in slo-mo), but I gotta say this looks really good and genuinely creepy. Having a girl-on-girl make-out scene between Voth and South African model Bianca Christians Beck doesn’t hurt either.

Voth made her feature film debut as a not-what-she-seems downtrodden stripper named Trixie in director Rick Jacobson (“Spartacus: Blood and Sand”) girl-powered actioner Bitch Slap, a tongue-in-cheek  homage to the sexploitation flicks of yesteryear.

She is also said to be the character model for Jill Valentine in the 2002 Resident Evil game for Nintendo’s GameCube.

Visit the Lilith FB page to stay updated and to see additional pics from the project.

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What do you get when you put the son of a major Hollywood mogul, his daddy’s money, and the author of a quirky bestseller in a room together? If you guessed KatzSmith Productions, you’re far better at this game than me.

Founded by David Katzen (28-year-old son of Jeffrey Katzen) and novelist Seth Grahame-Smith (“Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”), the upstart studio is set up at Warner Bros. and will specialize in producing genre mash-ups. Most interesting on their list? An X-Men meets The Breakfast Club hybrid series.

Explains Grahame-Smith:

A group of kids gets detention on the same day. They have absolutely nothing to do with each other. It’s the goth, it’s the jock, it’s the this, it’s the that …

They’re in a chem lab for detention, and, in a very comic book, origin-story kind of way, something goes wrong in the lab and they all get different super powers.

All the sudden this group of total non-friends has to become a poor man’s X-Men, figure out what their powers are, and fight a growing crime menace we reveal in a Buffy-type way.

If this project, entitled ” Extra Curricular” takes a dark Chronicle type approach instead of a CW teen soap angle, I’m all in. I’d love to see what the nerd and the goth would do, and watch the John Bender-inspired rebel not get the horns for once.

KatzSmith Productions are also looking to produce Unholy Night, an action oriented retelling of The Three Wise Men Christmas story based on Grahame-Smith’s upcoming novel, and a 26-years-later Beetlejuice sequel with Michael Keaton reprising his role as the titular spook.

To read more about what the mash-up men have in store, go to EW.

Hailee Steinfeld, the talented 14-year-old Academy Award nominee for last year’s True Grit redo, is set to star in Paramount Pictures adaptation of author Cat Patrick’s teen sci-fi novel “Forgotten,” published in June by Little Brown.

Scripted by Oren Uziel, the scribe behind New Line’s upcoming Mortal Kombat re-imagining, Forgotten is the story of a 16-year-old girl whose memory of the previous day is erased at 4:33 every morning. She can, however,  remember events from her future.

Wow, this is so crazy. The same exact thing happened to me hen I was 16 … except I’d start to forget things around 4:20 every afternoon.