Pennsylvania leads the nation in horror movie deaths. It’s all those zombies.

As Halloween approaches and the mind gets macabre, take pride knowing more people were killed in Pennsylvania-based horror movies than any other state.

Most of them were eaten by zombies.

The number, according to a “study” by CableTV.com, found that 615 people were killed in six horror films set in Pennsylvania. The website doesn’t name the six films, which makes the math a little fuzzy. While M. Night Shyamalan, our homegrown horror/thriller guru, has racked up a formidable body count of his own — a whopping 306 in the not-quite-horror film Unbreakable — Pennsylvania’s gory throne is out west, in the Pittsburgh area. That’s zombie country. Oddly, three Pennsylvania films in the genre account for 643 deaths alone. That’s more than CableTv.com’s total but does a zombie death count as a death if it’s already dead? This is like the SATs.

The godfather of zombie films, 1968′s Night of the Living Dead, directed by George Romero and shot in Evans City, has only 15 deaths, but one of its sequels, Dawn of the Dead, has 124. That flick was set in Philadelphia but filmed in the Monroeville Mall, outside of Pittsburgh.

Romero, a horror legend who died in 2017, really padded his numbers with 2005′s Land of the Dead, a Pittsburgh zombie flick in which 504 died.

Since CableTV.com calculations doesn’t name any of the movies that account for Pennsylvania’s body count, The Inquirer is making a few guesses. Philadelphia’s most famous horror movie, The Sixth Sense — major spoiler here — has just one death. Shyamalan killed three in Split, and, possibly, 77,074 in his 2023 film Knock at the Cabin. Six people died in the 1958 sci-fi/horror classic, The Blob, which was filmed in Phoenixville, Downingtown, Chester Springs, and other parts of Chester County. This isn’t an exact science, but while we’re at it, some sites say Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King has the highest death count, ever, at 836, while others argue that Thanos, in 2018′s Avengers: Infinity War, killed billions with the snap of his fingers.

Even though 10 people were killed in the original Friday the 13th — filmed at a Boy Scout camp in North Jersey — the Garden State didn’t make the list.

One of Pennsylvania’s biggest killers may be Mark Polonia, a Tioga County resident who makes B-movie horror at a blistering pace. The Inquirer visited Polonia on the set of Return to Splatter Farm in 2019, a sequel to his most “famous” movie, Splatter Farm. It was his 64th film and he’s released about two dozen since, including Cocaine Shark, Sharkula, and Virus Shark.

Polonia, when reached Thursday, said he never explicitly mentions where his films are set, but “fans alike know full well where they are lensed.”