A Geek History of Time - Episode 126 - Zombies Part II

Episode Date: September 25, 2021

So first thing foremost, I think being the addition of pant leggings is really when you start to see your heroes get watered down. The ability to go straight man, that one. Which is a good argument for absolute girls. Everybody is going to get behind me though, and the support numbers will go through. When you hang out with the hero, it doesn't go well for you. Grandfather took the cob and just slid it right through the bar. Oh god, Bob. Okay.

And that became the dominant way our family did it. Okay. And so, both of my marriages, they were treated to that. Okay, wait, hold on. Yeah, rage, I could. How do you imagine the rubber chicken? My grandmother actually vacuumed in her pearls. Oh my god, you always had to sexual revolution.

It might have just been a Canadian standoff. We're gonna go back to 9-11. Oh, I'm gonna get over it. And I understand that the book is just wonderful. Agra has no business being that big. With the cultists when we all win. This is a geek history of time. We're a We Connected Nurgere to the real world. My name is Ed Blalock. I'm a world history teacher.

I'm a world history teacher. I'm a world history teacher. And this week, the biggest thing I have going on is that I have actually unlocked the ability for you and producer George to join me in Macquarie. Do we have to unlock that same ability? No, I think I can, I think I can, if I'm understanding it correctly, I can invite you to join me in the campaign mode of the game, which is awesome.

The downside is when I do that, you're playing as members of my mercenary company. Okay. And right now, members of my mercenary company. Okay. And right now, all of my mechs are, well, with the exception of my, you know, Hero mech, which is a 50 ton centurion, everything else I have is 35 tons or lower. That's fine. So, you know, upside down sides. But I'm excited that I've managed to get that far. And also, when you get to a point in Mech War your five,

where you actually have supporting AI pilots back in you up, shit gets so much easier. So much easier! Because I can just say, oh, that Mech, right there. Fuck him up! And then instead of just me, I've got multiple guns on target. It's really quite powerful feeling. I have to say.

Come on. So that's kind of what I've got going on. How about you? Well, I'm Damien Harmony. I'm a Latin and drama teacher up here in Northern California. And the most exciting thing I found this week was that it is the world is on fire. Yes.

But what's interesting to me is the fact that the world was exactly on fire at this time last year. Yeah. Well, it's become successful. The regularity. Seasonal is one thing. The regularity, the reliability of... And the severity.

Yes, of this time. Like eventually we're gonna run out of fuel to burn, but... Apparently not yet. Not... not for a while. So, but it's really quite something. So that's exciting. Yeah, in a bad way. Yeah.

So speaking of ends of the world. Oh, yes. Oh, nice. Your thesis is about the end of a personal world, just to say, zombification. Yeah. And I don't know that there's necessarily a thesis here yet. I think there's going to be some conclusions about why

shift happens. But ultimately, we have seen in the previous episode was that zombies up until 1968 were largely brain slaves. Yeah, and they were the victims. Right. Yeah. Post 1968, it's a very different thing. Oh yeah.

Well, I mean, night of the living dead. Just the first one, yeah. Well, because, I mean, you can't talk about zombie movies in the American Zitguest without talking about George Romero. Frankly, it might not be worth talking about if you don't. If you don't. Yeah. And night of the living dead is a really,

like on a bunch of levels, it's a remarkable film. It is. But I think the way in which it really manages to make horror out of something that is visually very minimalist. Yes. Like the zombies, the effects on the zombies, the, you know,

rotting antdeadness of the zombies in that film really isn't that pronounced. Right. And we don't see, like, like, in the walking dead, for example, like in the very first episode of the walking dead, we see, you know, skulls into, you know, you see into, you know, skulls, you know, you see into, you know, bones poking out of places and the gore is everywhere. Right. In night of the living dead, they're salo and pale and they've, they're clearly wearing, you know, a funereal clothing. Yeah.

But, you know, and a few of them kind of have, you know, a little bit of nod to a little bit of, you know, scarification or something. But they are what's horrific about them is they don't ever stop. Yeah, I mean, ultimately, it's night of living dead was to zombie movies, what jaws is to shark movies. Okay. In that it's minimalist

and they occupy space on screen without very often being on screen. Oh yeah, the shark in jaws was on screen for a total of 11 and some odd minutes. Yeah, and it was terrifying and it held space in everybody's mind on screen and therefore the audience is mine. Yeah, so. But yes, 1968, George Romero changed zombie movies forever. I don't know that he was looking too, but yes, 1968 George Romero changed zombie movies forever. I don't know that he was looking to, but he did.

So in 1968, Night of Living Dead released. And I would say this changed the genre forever in a way that is comparable to Adam West changing Batman forever. Okay, that's a Adam West. That's a film. That's West changing the Val Kilmer movie. I mean Batman, comma forever. Yeah.

Uh, or in the way that your science fiction writers changed the genre forever. Uh, this was the watershed prior to it. Zombies were central to the plot, uh, but they were always controlled by malevolent intelligence. Now there were other movies that they weren't central to the plot, but like I said, there's a bit of a nuance there. I don't think that those really count as zombie movies. Those are movies that feature zombies. Okay. There was a difference.

It makes sense. The only exception was the Earth-Dice Screaming, where it's an alien invasion, and the malevolent touch of those aliens kills people and then zombifies them And that's really just a byproduct of alien contacts and alien killings. Yeah But yes, they are still mindless. They are still menacing after they've died But George Romero is for a zombie film shifted everything from then on to what we readily recognize as a zombie movie George Romero was born in New York to Ann Dvorowski and George Romero, who is not George

Mara's senior because they didn't have the same middle initial. But she was Lithuanian, his dad was Spanish, having arrived in America as a young man. George, the younger one, little boy George, went to Carnegie Mellon when he was older. He also rented movies I found when he was much younger, including I forget what the movie is called, but it was from 1958. And he and Martin Scorsese were the only two who ever rented that movie to play on their own projectors at home, just kind of a happy coincidence. Interesting. But he graduated from Carnegie Mellon in 1960 and immediately said about directing and shooting including commercials, including one from Mr. Rogers, where he got a ton select to me. Really? Yeah, I found that really fun. Huh. Yeah. George

Romero of all people. Mm-hmm. In the neighborhood. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. So he started an independent company. Uh, and what I, what I find interesting here is he's still staying as far away from Hollywood as an American director could and filmmaker could, uh, for much of his early career. Now this movie, not living dead, never mentions the word zombies. Romero himself said that he, yes, was inspired by other zombie movies and novels specifically I am legend. Okay, which is really interesting to me because that book and that movie that was based on it, the first one, had creatures that were much more vampiric than zombie and Romero figured that he should go a

different direction from the vampiric zombies that were in it. He admitted to cribbing from Matheson's book, the I Am Legend book. He said, quote, I had written a short story, which I had basically ripped off from a Richard Mathis and novel called I Am Legend. But he wanted to do more than just a remake. So quote, I thought I am legend was about revolution. I said, if you're going to do something about revolution, you should start at the beginning. more than just a remake." So, quote, wanted something that would be an earth-shaking change, something that was forever, and something that was really at the heart of it.

I said, so what if the dead stop staying dead? And the stories are about how people respond or fail to respond to this. That's really all the zombies ever represented to me. In Richard's book, The Original I Am Legend, that's what I thought that book was about. There's this global change, and there's this one guy holding out saying, wait a minute, I'm still human. He's wrong. Go ahead, join them. You'll live forever. In a certain sense, he's wrong, but on the other hand, you've got to respect him for taking that position." End quote. Okay. So he's very much on purpose, decide what if the dead don't

stay dead. Now what comes after that is kind of like anytime my daughter and I decide to like world build a little bit, I'm like okay you want to let's start with the city. It's like great okay. Where is the city located? It's on the coast. Great. Okay. Do they fish? Do they do this? And then we just start answering and asking questions back and forth. So he's kind of doing the same thing. Now this movie is set in Pennsylvania where, what I find interesting here, it's quite the subversion.

White people are the background to a black man as your protagonist. Yes. Now Romero claimed that he actually casted based entirely on auditions, which means he didn't actually cast a black man on purpose. He just cast the best actor he found. Yeah.

Who was black? Yeah. He fell over backward into being subversive. Yeah. It cannot be ignored though, the subversive impact here. And as always, our theory of intent is... Mean squat. Exactly, limited.

Now, he cast a black man as a lead in the movie in 1968. Yes, starts filming in January. I think it finishes up like I think it's like a month. So it wasn't a reaction to King's murder. No, But a lot of people tried to describe that to him. He's like, no, dude, I was trying to find a distributor when I heard being had been killed on the radio. Yeah. But in Pennsylvania, there's no natives. There's no exoticism.

It's much more basic and generic, a setting. And Romero actively avoided any similarities between the Haitian zombies and his own, although later he'd claim that he took inspiration from them, he also was actively avoiding them. Now this means that there's no malevolent intelligence guiding the zombies. No, they're just spontaneously rising from the grave. And there's no explanation why? Exactly. Well, there are some explanations, but they're flawed narrator explanations yeah they're scientists on the radio theorizing and

when you don't have a malevolent intelligence guiding your zombies it becomes a phenomenon and a phenomenon begs explanation and that begs subtext okay prior to 68 malevolent intelligence running thoughtless corpses that were reanimated was the thing. Maybe there was an occasional breakthrough as we talked about last time due to the power of Lady Boners or whatever.

But basically, that was your zombie movies. Malevolent intelligence guiding thoughtless folks. Now what I find interesting is that both fascism and communism, as seen by Americans and other colonial powers, definitely had mindless followers. Oh yeah. Okay, so in the war and then in the Cold War, I mean, it's very much talked about the hordes.

Your mom was afraid of the reds. Oh yeah. We've talked about it a number of times, held the movie Top Gun, you never see the faces of the bad pilots. Of the Soviet pilots. Yeah. Or even if they're Soviet, you can see the faces of the pilot of the Soviet pilots. Yeah, you were even if they're so big, you'd see a red star. Yeah. So they they had

mindless followers both in fascism and communism and of course people Horseshoe argumented it. Yeah, it's endlessly. But those mindless followers followed a leadership cast or a specific leader. Okay, an evil that you can decapitate as shown in Italy in 1944. Yeah. Almost literally. Yeah. Everything or hang. Yeah. Yeah. But like you take out the leadership of a fascist state, you can de-nautify them, right? Everything goes back to the way it was more or less, right? And that was the hope for communism,

although I would say that was the flaw in the fight against communism, one of many, that doesn't exist. Because when Ho Chi Minh died, North Vietnam still kept being North Vietnam, still kept doing what they were doing, just like when they imprisoned Ngo-Nosian, Ngo-Vo-Nuen-Jap, just like when they imprison a no, no, no, no, no, Von you in job. Yeah, yeah. Um, when they imprison him and his wife,

he still kept going. Yeah. Uh, but so, so German denazification can happen when you get rid of Hitler, it cannot afterwards or, uh, cannot, if you don't. The hope was post Soviet Russia, you could do the same thing. The hope was Haiti post-US occupation. You could do that. But Romero's world, that he's created, no source of the zombie infestation. In fact, the best you get is a very vague radio broadcast where a scientist is hypothesizing about the potential cause. He says that radiation emanating from a Venus space probe that exploded in the Earth's

atmosphere did something. But he's not sure. The very unsureness of the scientific community adds to the terror. Yeah. Well, because there's no rational explanation for it. Right. It is to get all Stephen King Dance Macabre again, which is probably because we're talking about horror tropes here.

It is the Dionysian nature of the, as you say, the phenomenon that is part of the horror. We don't know where it came from. We don't know what their motive is. Right. I think it can't be reasoned with. It can't be reasoned with. It cannot be halted. I mean, it is classic primordial monster

kind of storytelling. And- But even monsters are singular. You can rip off the arm of Grendel. Yeah. You can stab the serpent. You can cut off and burn the Hydra. Yeah. You can strangle the lion. You could do shit. But in this, well, the very fact that it's that it is the dead. Right. You know, yeah, means that it is too massive to overcome. I think one of the lines in the film, if I'm remembering right, is somebody says,

well, that's not really why it's happening. It's happening because hell is full. That's later. That's later. That's in a different movie. Okay. Yeah. All right. Yeah. That's, that one is in Dawn of the Dead. Dawn of the Dead, okay. Yeah. Or maybe it's Day of the dead. Dawn of the dead, okay. Or maybe it's day of the dead. Now I think it's dawn of the dead. Okay. Anyway, there's never conclusive evidence showing the reason for this.

But more importantly, it doesn't actually matter what the cause is. Narratively, it's not important. Our protagonists aren't interested in reversing anything. Neither is anyone else that you run into in this world. In fact, everyone just wants to survive, and literally just survive to the next minute. Yeah. And the radio also gives us that information too.

The radio says it's been found that a gunshot basically to the dome or a heavy blow to the dome will kill them. So you can double kill them. You can double death them. They're walking double kill them. You can double death them. Like they're walking around on dead, you can make them dead again. Yeah.

If you inflict significant enough cranial trauma. Exactly. Now this means though that either it's gunfire, bullets run out and you miss or up close and personal where they can get to you as well. Now, from a filming perspective, this is clever writing because it makes filming easier, especially when you're on a low budget.

If you can write something in that makes sense to what else is going on and justifies the angles that you take, it's so much better. You can keep your shots tight and up close for drama or have them be gunshots from a distance for a less personal approach. And to cut down on the amount of money you have to spend on makeup. Yeah, not only makeup, but also lighting, and making everybody wait while you get shit right for the next shot. Yes, you can be like, okay, we need eight reaction shots of you firing a rifle. Okay, we need eight reaction shots of you firing a rifle.

There you go. We need, okay, now we need you, you know, today is the day where we're going to do all the bludgeoning scenes, you know, stuff like that. Yeah, yeah, really. Now, it also mentions that people are also taking things into their own hands on the radio. Armed posses are going around killing ghouls. They do use the word ghouls. Nice. Who are clearly cannibalistic zombies. Okay. Never mentioned zombies, though.

Another news report on the radio indicates, which again, by the way, on the radio. So you've got technology bringing you the narrator's voice, the box text, you know. Another news report indicates that the levels of the quote, mysterious radiation in the area have been increasing. Suggesting that the phenomenon is going to become even more widespread than it already is. But also that the situation is going to be under

control soon. If we can control the radiation, we can control the spread. Okay. So the reporter asks if ordinary people can fight off the attacks and the sheriff confidently tells him that shots to the head blows to the head with blunt objects and fire are all effective against these hordes. Except fire takes time to do its job. So for a certain period of time you just have burning zombies trying to kill you. Right, so you burn them after the fact. Okay. Okay. I'll stack them up. I'm not going to knock them down and then and then cremate. Okay. Fair enough.

Now the chief weapon that the undead the zombies have is that they mob you. Yeah. They have numbers. They're unthinking, unrelenting, unhesitating numbers. Their menace, therefore, is real. It is palpable and it is deadly. And more importantly, it's mundane. Okay, explain that last, but in what sense do you mean mundane?

There's no magic to how they kill you. Okay. And everybody can be a threat as a result. Okay. It is so simple that even a child could do it. Yeah, okay. Now in this particular one, I don't think that any child's could do it. Yeah, okay now in this particular one I don't think that any child's no they didn't they didn't kids on the fine

But I think it did in the second and in the third one I remember very very specifically got the kids on me in the third one Mm-hmm messed with me Like yeah, well Now their menace is real. Yeah, their menace is pal Now, their menace is real. Yeah. Their menace is palpable, and their menace is deadly. Yes. Right?

Uh, the protagonists are driven to great stress regarding the zombies. Communication will break down between your protagonists and everybody else. Fights will occur, people get lost in the melee, and eventually our protagonist is killed by well-meaning people who thought he was a zombie. Yeah. And the problem, after he's killed, he gets thrown on the pile, they make a bonfire, and they move on.

The problem still exists. People are still dealing with it in ways that are both helpful and maladaptive. And the story begins as it ends in the middle of an ongoing crisis. There's no fix, there's no resolution. Oh wow. Yeah. Well, the narrative arc of that movie just changed for me completely.

Like oh damn. All right. I mean, you know, nobody really discovered anything about themselves. Yeah. Yes, they got along better. Yes, there were interactions that further the plot, but... There's a deeply kind of nihilistic streak to that.

Very well put. That's... Wow. Uh-huh. There's a lot going on. Like, that's past existentialism to straight up, nothing means anything. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Wow.

Yeah. The only thing that matters is surviving to the next minute. Yeah. Morality is subjective. Morality is important, yeah. Yeah, wow. Yeah. Now, I want to unpack a lot of things about this thing.

But, yeah. Wow, that went from being, man, that movie's a downer to man, that's depressing. Like, wow, okay. Oh yeah, damn. Now, first thing I wanna address is the writing, okay? Because the writing is elegant, and I mean elegant in the same way that it's like a classical sense is elegant.

Yes, yeah. It does a lot with a little. Yeah. You don't need to explain what zombies are because we have the radio exposition for that. Okay. And the radio exposition does two things there. It explains what zombies are.

And it heightens the tension and raises the fear. So it's doing double duty. It's kind of like everything that's being used is doing multiple things at once. You don't have to explain why they are the way they are because the radio exposition has an unsteady explanation. That in itself highlights the fact that this is a problem beyond our grasp. And that ultimately points out that the cause is frankly secondary to our survival.

Is unimportant. Yeah. You don't have much in the way of special effects either, or acting needed, even, since the zombies are just smashing and stumbling around. Yeah. They mob you. So the tension, so where you see one, you see many, and to get away from one, you still have to get away from the many,

and that's a forever fear. And you have to constantly have your head on a swivel because if you see these over here, you don't know where there are stragglers. Right. Which just makes me think of Derri's all over again. Like, God almighty. Yes. So the tension increases for the protagonist, as the zombies are an unrelenting hoard

with nothing to protect or keep safe. You don't get to attack their strategic safety point. No. They don't have one. They don't have one. You know, okay, 68. What this, another parallel that this immediately brings to mind to me

is asymmetric warfare. I was gonna say, a 10 offensive. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you know. They mob you, they chase you up to the second floor of the building, yeah. Yeah. And again, you can't,

you have strong points that are critically important to you. Right. They, or at least in the imperialist perspective, you can't get to you. Right. They are at least in the imperialist perspective. You can't get to theirs. You can't get to that. At the very least, you can't get to theirs because there's a wall of them between you and all of it. You and all of it.

And in the case of the zombies, it just doesn't exist. Right. So yeah, no, I mean, the zitgeist connection to asymmetric warfare and Vietnam is hard to avoid now that we're talking about it. Well, and there you go with the, it used to be fascists because it was mind control. Yeah.

Now it's a diffused everybody. Well, now it's communist, which it was before, but now the nature of that, the perception of the nature of that enemy has changed. Because of Vietnam. Yeah. And I'm sure, I mean, this probably wasn't front of Romero's mind, but I mean subconsciously

that's what was going on in the news every night. Absolutely. And I mean, that's what he was growing up with, too, was the fear of communism as being whether or not he was afraid of it, and by all accounts, he seems a fairly leftist fellow. Yeah. But yes. And then on top of that,

the one thing that they do have is just a hunger that drives them toward you to destroy you. They're going to consume you. Yeah. So like, how do you keep them from that goal? In the first movie, I don't remember. Do we see anybody turned? No, first, okay, no. They drag

you down and they devour you. Yeah. And, and you, you just go down screaming under a wall and then we're grabbing arms. Yeah. And then we, and then we, and then we, and we, we pan to somebody screaming at your and you're indescribably awful fate. Yep. Okay. Yeah. But we don't, we don't see Somebody being zombified by right the attack of the C the kitchen. Yes, okay, and I don't think he had that in mind at that point I know he did well looking and looking at what the not explanation for what's going on is he didn't have that in mind right and and quite frankly seeing it featured so dramatically in the second movie you'll find,

and there's some serious stigmata shit going on there by the way. Okay. But yeah, now, the other thing is, you can end the story whenever you really want to. Because, well, because there isn't really an ending. Right.

I mean, when we get into talking about how that narrative ends, like it would be the postmodern kind of thing to do would then be, oh, well, okay, Ned Stark is dead. Now we're gonna start following this character over here. Hey, we have a new protagonist. Like, because the crisis is over, and everything is morally gray anyway So we're gonna now move over here and you know run with it

Well and the protagonist at the end of the movie he could have lived just as easily as he could have died Yeah, like narratively it still didn't make a difference if he'd lived You could have him join the posse. Yeah, If he died, it's because the Posse killed him. And you could make all the protagonist secondary to the overall trauma and the menace that was brought about by the world that you've written into existence anyway. Yeah. Which is frankly what's happened. If Ben had lived, that is our main character's name.

If he had lived, he would have joined a posse and he would have gone along with them. The problem still isn't getting solved. No. And permanently anyway. Yeah, and since he died, they put his corpse on the bonfire with the other corpses, and therefore there's no mystery to solve. There's no, did we get the right guy? It's just a quick moving forward. And that means that we get to play with all sorts of metaphor when we're unpacking this because Romero has given us such a gift here. Yeah, I don't I don't want to say it's

a it's a blank slate to put whatever we want to on it, but there's there's a lot of room for interpretation. Like you can you can put a whole lot of context on that. And since every movie from this point forward, as far as zombie movies goes, is either response to or a continuation of this type of zombie with very minimal differentiation, we can look at what each one was trying to say through their zombies. So... Okay.

First, I'm gonna take Romero at his word. I always like doing that first, because it's the easiest, right? Yeah. He cast Duane Jones as the lead because Duane Jones was the best actor that Romero auditioned. That's what he said. Okay. Cool.

However, the fact that Duane Jones is black in 1968, even though, like I said, filming wrapped up before King was shot. So it wasn't tied to that. It absolutely adds a racial component to whether a remarrow meant to or not. First, where are the zombies from? The ground. Yeah, right?

Like, but they're from Pennsylvania. Okay, yeah. Right, yeah. And that's the mainland. Okay. That's white bread America. Oh yeah, no, it's, it is totally middle America. And that part of where it takes place is small town.

I mean, it's literally two hours away from the main city. That's what Barbara and her brother, Tom, I think. They're coming to get you, Barbara. But they're arguing about having to go all the way out to the cemetery to Rheath yeah And it's two hours of drive away from a main town so

You know I would just point out that in every other Zombie movie they removed black people and pushed them to the background at best. And they centered white intelligence and avers in those films. In this one, a zombie movie is following a Black man as he attempts to survive in an unending menace and threat to his life that's being created by a bunch of white zombies. Right. Okay. So so I mean what is the menace here? What are these zombies are there's an allegory there? Oh, yeah, there's any number of allegories wrapped up in that yeah American culture police brutality white supremacy It's 19 fucking 68 Watts happened two years earlier Detroit has burned down. Yeah, there's a lot of shit going on Detroit has burned down. There's a lot of shit going on racially.

So, what are the zombies representing if not a permanent threat to him as a black man? Now, Jones himself played against type in terms of what audiences were used to seeing from a black person on screen. He played against what Romero had in vision too. Now, remember Romero wrote the part, color block. Yeah, yeah. Okay, Romero had him as a semi-generic, not black, not white, truck driver.

Carl Hardman, who was one of the main producers of the movie, he said, quote, the script had been written with the character Ben as a rather simple truck driver. His dialogue was that of a lower class uneducated person. Dwayne Jones was a very well-educated man and he simply refused to do the role as it was written. As I recall I believe that Dwayne himself upgraded his own dialogue to reflect how he felt the character should present himself. Nice. And they trusted his acting chops to do the job the right way. Yeah. And they let him do the work that he thought he should

do, which I think is there are different kinds of directors out there. There are some who are auters in other words, they torture their catch. And they're control freaks. And there are others who are like, I hired you to do this job. So do it.

Yeah. We'll figure it out. Yeah. So I think this was option B there. But also allowing that choice and not clamping down on that choice, like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, he's supposed to be a truck driver,

you need to dumb him down. Yeah, allowed, and not insisting on a very specific character type, it allowed Dwayne Jones to subvert the audience's expectations, because he's following a black man who is not talking as you have seen black men talk in movies for the most part. Yeah. Now, so far Romero's genre defining movie, which he didn't set out to make as such, is a

heaping helping of subverting audiences and societal expectations. The movie itself is kind of pulling at a hidden fortress. Okay. We see Barbara and her brother Ben, Bickering as they visit their dead father's grave. Yeah. Right? He's antagonizer, she's upset.

And so far, it's pretty stock relationship to open a movie with. You've got, you know, Bickering. It's like grown up Hansel and Greta with some baggage. And it's through them that were introduced to the menace of the film. Her brother's name is Johnny by the way and he gets killed by the ghouls and so we don't actually, we follow them and they're not even the main characters. Star Wars did this too. Yes. Okay. Now Star Wars comes after this, but yeah, you know and so

Brother Johnny gets killed and the formerly Formerly bickering baggage of a sodded beautiful blonde Barbara It takes herself to a buccolic safety bounding well-be-draggled but deviled and beset by beastly baddies before bubbling into bed Yeah, you you spent some time putting that sentence together. Didn't you be? Yeah. Sometimes I do be like that. Yeah.

But we don't see him until one of the other two siblings finds him 14 minutes into the film. Oh, wow. We're led from whom we expect to be the main character, blonde white woman, to the real protagonist, and it's another inversion or at least a thwarting of audience expectation. Our hero is not who we think it is. And yet everyone is still as hopeless and still is damned by this menace as we expected Barbara to be. Yeah.

So we've subverted it and at the same time, they're just as fucked. Yeah. More so. Yeah, actually, because for 1968, that ending was... Yeah. That was not how these movies ended in 1968. Right. You know, the Apollonian wins.

You know, whatever Apollonian shit you got going on, and the end of the movie, that's gonna win. Exactly. Like, no, no, the Apollonian wins, you know, whatever Apollonian shit you got going on and the end of the movie, that's gonna win. Exactly. Like, no, no, we gotta uphold the social order. Right.

You know, yeah. It's not as far from the truth. Yeah, and nice. Thanks. And, uh, you know, Romero just looked at that and went, nah. No. No, I think that's not the world I've created. Nialism. Yeah.

Yeah. And I mean, like I said, Star Wars did this too. It took them 22 minutes to get to Luke in the first movie. I would say Star Wars was a hell of a lot more hopeful. Well, yeah. But the opening sequence, by the way, has them driving up to a cemetery, which makes sense. But so they're driving toward death.

Okay. And what's interesting in that is in the first shot of them driving up, there's an American flag. Now it makes sense that it's probably a memorial day thing because he complains about the sun being up so late. So that puts it into the early summer. But it's the only flag that's there in an empty cemetery at 8 p.m. And it specifically says 8 p.m. because he is complaining about the Sunset. They're basically driving into trouble and that trouble is heralded by the American flag.

Yeah. Now, I want to get back to Duane Jones though. So the character he played, Ben is quick thinking. He's decisive and he's intelligent and he slaps a white woman who's gone hysterical. Yeah. Now even if Romero didn't mean it, this is pretty shocking to the audience's expectations. Yeah. Remember only one year earlier did American see an interracial couple on the big screen in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Wow. And in that same year, in the heat of the night came out and it saw a black man slapping a white racist in the face in retaliation for being slapped. Yeah.

Both of those incidentally played by Sidney Portier. That's true. Yeah. So only a year later, let's combine the two. There we go. So Ben and Barbara are now stuck together in a house that they don't own and I really like that idea. And they have to rely on each other for survival.

Now Ben takes a quick lead and he begins to do what a capable person would do. He assesses the capabilities of the zombies by listening to the radio. And then he sets the work slowing them down and stopping them. He tears apart a door. He gets an ironing board. He boards up the windows and the doors. Yes. Earning himself, you know, hopefully enough points to at least get, you know, a good rifle right. But instead, and the process, he does actually, he does, because he trades in his tire iron for the rifle that he finds in there. Yeah. Now at this point, the people who've been hiding out in the basement show up. OK.

Harry Cooper, an older white man who clearly thinks that that means he should be in charge, his wife Helen and their little daughter, Karen, who is injured, as well as a young teen couple, Tom and Judy. A fairly middle aged or a middle American white family dynamic. Oh, yeah. You could say that this was all one family. It's not, but they're acting in their, yeah, Barbara fades into the background

after they show up too, because she's, you know, one of many white people that, yeah, yeah, Ben is having to deal with, but also more importantly, there are two men here, ladies go over there. Yeah. So we see Ben, 1968 see the ground ups are talking. Exactly. We see that Ben in this exchange is maintaining his identity and his agency in an all-too-familiar paradigm.

The racial tension is there, but it's not central to the story because it wasn't written as central to the story. If Ben had been white, it would have been the same story, the loading, the emotional loading would have been very different, but it would have been more about which one of us is gonna be the alpha. Right.

And there would not have been the extra societal exploitation. Yeah, yeah. And they're for subversion because Ben does. Because Ben doesn't. Yeah, yeah. And they're for subversion because Ben does- Because Ben doesn't know for a long time. Yeah. Now it's woven into the fabric of the survival story because they casted Ben or they casted Twain Jones.

Now just to dig a little deeper, the black man did all the labor in the house. Wow. And now the older white man shows up after it's done and wants to assume leadership by proxy of that, credit now the older white man shows up after it's done and wants to assume leadership Yeah, by proxy of that credit for the work. Yeah All the while everybody around yeah, all the while he was hiding out with his family away from the danger Oh, yeah, interestingly Harry and his family are the only people who have last names and

You know what a Cooper is too. Yeah, somebody makes barrels. Yeah. Someone who, their occupation, so the name is based on the occupation of someone who has expertise with binding wood together in a sturdy way. Okay.

And yet this family didn't do that. I don't think Romero got all up into the name business. Yeah. Like me when I play D&D. No. But nobody gets all up into the name business, like me when I play D&D. No, but- Nobody gets all up into the name business like you do when you play D&D. But at the same time, it is just kind of interesting.

Funny how these things fall together. Yeah, yeah. And he's acting like a bunghole. So nice. Nice. Here's White Helen. Focuses only on her daughter's infection, which is a fair thing to do. She does disagree with her husband, but not really forcefully, because she's still too

focused on her own family to address what she's seeing is wrong. Now the teenagers try to be the connective tissue between Harry and Ben. Oh, come on, guys. We're all on the same team here, that kind of thing. Now again, if if Ben was white, then it wouldn't really have that kind of impact. But instead, you have a woman, a group of young white people telling, telling, telling, yeah, to calm down. And you have a woman disagreeing with how the older white person is treating the black man, but not actually standing up to it. So, white lady allyship being with it.

So, yeah. Wow. You have all that dynamic. Yeah. As you said, elegant. Now, having Erie, there's another part where Harry asks Ben, is this your house? Which again, if Ben had been white, it's got a different tone to it. Or Ben telling Harry, he says, quote, get the hell down in the cellar. You can be the boss down here. I'm down there. I'm the boss down here. I'm down there. I'm the boss up here. If Ben were white, it wouldn't have an allegorical reference to North and South. Oh, okay.

Now playing opposite to TROPE, Ben, the black man, is the only one who survives the ordeal. Yeah. This keeps happening in Romero's movies, by the way. So I need to go and look at where the black guy dies at the beginning of the horror film starts as a trope. Because in Romero's, that's almost always the guy who survives.

Oh yeah. Well, because I think after a certain point, Romero was aware of the trope. Certainly by the second movie. By the second movie, he was totally aware of that trope and he is consciously throwing a finger to it. Yes, because it deserves to have the finger thrown at it. And what I love here also is that he survives the living dead,

but he doesn't survive a well-meaning posse sharpshooter. No, he isn't killed by the menace directly. He's killed by the incompetence of those who are trying to help. Now this could simply be an issue of panic. In fact, that an all-white posse kills a black man who's emerging from a basement, when the radio had earlier said and warned people that zombies who were called ghouls were, quote, things that look like people but act like animals. That carries more weight when you cast Dwayne Jones instead of, oh, yeah. It also, to me, reminded me a lot of Eric Maria remarks book all quite on the Western front. Oh, yeah.

That last scene. Yeah. Where he gets killed. Like, yeah, there's no point. He pokes his head up. Yeah. Crack. Yeah, but nowadays it reminds me of filling the blank news story about a group of police

officers fearing for their life against an unarmed black man and killing him. Yes. So what killed Ben was not the living dead. What was a greater threat to him in 1968 through most of the film was the white people that he was stuck with. And what killed him at the end was white people. White people survived everything, was white American self-appointed armed police. Okay.

Now, Romero didn't mean any of that. But wow. But there it is. Yeah. It is in gentlemen. Yeah. So from this movie forward, there was no evil intelligence behind the zombies in any major film.

It was much more of a play. It was much more of an infestation. It wasn't something that you could just stop or reverse most of the time either. It was something that you could survive in out last and the odds are you weren't gonna even do that. There was a poorly made drive in released film called I Eat Your Skin. Wow yeah now it was released in 71 but it had actually been made in 65. So it actually predates Romero's concept of zombies. So when it does get released, I believe it was titled Zombies Originally. And it was supposed to be a double feature with Frankenstein meets the space monster. It attempted to pick the Caribbean idea of zombies.

Okay. Um, and so it does, it because it was made pre-romero, um, it does have that. There's a malevolent intelligence. Okay. Yeah. And it is set in Haiti, uh, but it, it was released after a male. But so the reason why that inconsistency exist is because it was made prior. Yeah. Now what followed 1968's watershed moment was a growth of zombie movies in other countries. Many of which still maintained the cult leader, the intelligent malevolence, the controlling zombies to some extent or another. But the American films can closer and closer to what Romero had brought. I always find that interesting.

Well, because the zit guys here in, yeah, the zit guy Stelzware was still, I mean, if we're talking about any place in Western Europe, they were still operating under the threat of, you know, us and the Soviets starting to lob bombs at each other. And so, and so they were, they were worried, that's what was going to scare them. Now for us, we were seeing, as we mentioned before, we were seeing We were seeing, as we mentioned before, we were seeing the effect of, you know, late-stage imperialism and asymmetric warfare. And there was the red scare of the 50s. There was my car.

Yeah, there had been the red scare of the 50s, but again, the red scare of the 50s was more in line with the idea that there's this evil intelligence who is suborning our, you know, the common turn is working through people within the State Department. This is new in that. Oh, I see where it's in. We can't stop this, you know, cutting the head off the snake, there's going to be a new head to the snake. Or the snake is headless. Like our concept of the threat that we perceive

had shifted. Yes. And we no longer had room in our horror stories for a sorcerer running everything. Right. Now it was simply, they're all out there and they're coming like, like, you know, like you're running.

Like you said. Yeah. Like the Chinese in Korea, you know, they're just, they're gonna come over and we don't have enough numbers, you know. Also a hoard. Also a hoard. For too as us, yeah.

And again, by this time, we would have also known, because I've talked about this before. We would have, we would have by this time, had information about Soviet doctrine. And Chinese military doctrine. Absolutely. And that literally was, we just have more people. Yeah, like like like you know in in in terms of armor The Soviet doctrine was

They need foreman to crew a tank right because they have a driver a From bottom of hierarchy to top loader driver gunner commander Every Soviet tank they developed autoloaders before we did. And so they had driver, Gunner, Commander. So they automatically had a four to three advantage just from tank crews. Just as an example of how that doctrine worked. And so, I mean, we knew that. And that informed this evolution of our perception of the threat.

This is also the point at which I think, I want to say, 1968, a little bit before this, was when we started hearing about the missile gap. Yeah. Yeah. The Russians, the Russians have got more missiles than we do. We can't let them, you know, get the numerical advantage on us. Right. Never mind the fact, okay, the missile gap is kind of an artifact of the way the math gets done. Number one, right.

Number two, our own technicians and scientists and engineers knew our missiles were more reliable. They needed to have more rockets because they would try to launch three of them and two would take off. Right. And how many times do you need to kill a person? Well, number one. But, you know, and so all of those issues, I think our perception of the Soviet threat

I'm putting in in air quotes, and maybe I shouldn't because it was, we had gotten into this conflict with them. And so there was a threat there. But our perception of the Soviet threat had changed. We were not as afraid of losing our agency as we were by that time of simply being overwhelmed and dragged under. Yeah.

Now, that doesn't mean that there weren't American films that had zombies who were still under the sway of someone else. We did. There were still some that existed. Many of which actually centered such things in references to Haiti. But these were films that were singular zombies used like attack dogs. So again, films that featured zombies. But not films.

Yeah. So for instance, the blood of Gasly Horror, which was a name of a movie, did Vincent Price have anything to do with it? No, oddly enough, I didn't find anything of him, but I found so many movies with John Caridine in them really all these zombie movies Already every other one had John Caridine in them. Huh? Yeah, kind of like Christopher Lee and Dracula. Yeah Yeah, yeah, in a lot of ways or Peter Cushing or we were one or the other right. Yeah, yeah

It's the the Hackman to Nero rule. Yeah Yeah, 1980s and 1990s at some point on TV or any point on TV You will find a movie with Gene Hackman or Robert or Robert D'Nero. Yeah, no, it's true So but yeah, this movie blood of Gasly Horror was a Frankenstein horror movie and I don't mean that it was about Frankenstein I mean it was a few different movies that got stitched together With the added plot device of a father seeking revenge on his son's tormentor and killer by going to Haiti and returning with a Haitian zombie to do this. So it was okay wait, yeah, wait, hold on.

Okay, okay. So he didn't study how to create a zombie and try to find a way to like, you know, turn this guy into a zombie. Right. He went to Haiti. Yes. And got a guy into a zombie. Right. He went to Haiti and got a hold of a zombie to bring back. Sort of. Yeah. Okay.

So in 1965, there was a movie called Psycho Agogo. And it, that's so, that's so, 60s. It had been a jewel thief movie, a thriller, that then got re-edited into a horror film. You know those, trying to do this and do a horror film, trailers, this is so fun. But do it with a whole movie, and then add a mad scientist plot for funsies. Okay.

And then it was called Defined with the Electronic Brain in 1969. Okay. Then it got its final treatment, complete with the Haitian Revenge Zombie in 1971. Okay, then it got its final treatment complete with the Haitian Revenge zombie in 1971. So just just butchered. Like just just take a pair take a pair of scissors to the print and well okay. So it franken movie yeah I mean it became a zombie movie because people couldn't just leave it well enough along. And you know what do you get when you have a body that you, you know, re-animate and stitch a bunch of parts on?

Exactly. Okay. Yeah. Now, there's another movie called Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things and that was... I've heard that title before. Yes. Okay. That was a comedic and semi-farsicle take zombie films, using a Romero's idea of zombies,

but being trapped in a house and getting attacked through the night. In this instance, it was an abusive director taking his actors to an island cemetery, abusing them and pretending that the dead have come to life. Then he does a ritual as a joke to bring the dead back to life, and then it actually brings the dead back to life. Then he does a ritual as a joke to bring the dead back to life. And then it actually brings the dead back to life.

It actually works. And then everyone dies. And at the end, the zombies are getting on a boat to go back to the mainland. Oh, wow. Wait, yeah, it was on an island. They have enough agency or intelligence to get on a boat. Yeah. Okay. So again, it's, it's, I mean, that's great use of the Oh, hey, Dynacing Thread showing back up again. You're not safe, that whole trope. Right. But that's a kind of a big departure

from zombie behavior. It is, but. It's a Romero model. It's also a comic. Yeah, okay. And it's farcical. Yeah. All right.

Now, European Central American, South American, Asian movies, I'll start featuring zombies by the late 1960ical. Yeah. All right. Now, European Central American, South American, Asian movies, I'll start featuring zombies by the late 1960s. Okay. Most still have a malevolent intelligence. And again, I think it's for two possible reasons. And these are mostly just my ideas. First, they might not have been as influenced

by Romero's movies. Pretty simple and straightforward. Yeah. I mean, they might not have seen it, right? Second and more interestingly to me, during the Cold War, there was in fact a malevolence that was zombifying the world. It was post-colonial superpowers doing it now. Whether it's the US or the Soviets,

if you are not the US or the Soviets, you are being controlled by someone. You are a client state. Yes, at best. So in America, the concern was far different, right? As we saw, accidentally in Romero's movie in 68, American racism was an even bigger threat than the zombies. But the zombies themselves were still

an unthinking, undirected, driven by their urges, a group of white people who devoured everyone they accosted. It feels very much like cut out conformity during the American atomic age. Okay. Okay. So in the rest of the world, that's not the problem.

No, that's, that's leagues away from the problem. The problem is you've occupied us and set up a base. Yeah. Thanks for putting your missiles here. Thanks for planting your missiles in our backyard. Right. You know, now we have to. Thanks for making us a target. Right. Yeah. In the 1970s, zombie films again fall to the background. Well, zombies in their films fall to the background. And they become plot devices for other menaces in the film. Or they're more singular and they're less horny. You know, it's very often that there's a singular zombie.

In the House of Seven Corpses, zombies were awakened by Satan worshippers, specifically an actress who is a Satan worshipper who reads the Tibetan book of the dead, which is strangely written in Latin. Okay. Hold on. Yeah. Okay. A... An actress.

Actress. Who's a Satan worshipper? Who's a Satanist? Satan worshipper. Yeah. Okay. An actress. Yes. Who's a Satan worshipper? Who's a Satanist, Satan worshipper. Yep. Okay. Reads the Tibetan book of the dead. Reads the Tibetan book of the dead. In Latin.

Well, you know what, the in Latin part, I'm not even, I'm not even going to worry about because we've already, we've already departed from our own premise. Yeah. So dramatically, because that's number one, if she's a Satan worshiper, what is she doing with a Tibetan mystical book in the first place, because that's Buddhism, which doesn't believe in a devil, any devil, like at all.

I mean, it's as part of core Buddhism, full beliefs within Buddhism or a different thing. And then the Tibetan book of the dead isn't even what you think as a Westerner, the Tibetan, it's not a necromancy manual. It is about the process of guiding the dead into their next incarnation. But it's not like you can't take the passages

of the book of the dead and turn yourself into a Tibetan version of a bokeh or like that's not, no, you're a psychopath, you guide them to the next phase on their journey. So there's ignorance, but of course, Hollywood is ignorant of Buddhism. We know this anyway. Also it's 1974.

And what had been really popular in the last couple years had been the exorcist and discussion move. Rosemary's baby. 68, yeah. So those things were extant. So this seemed like a good bridge between the two but but like just do like 10 minutes of homework. Right. I mean I understand they didn't have Google back then. Right. Okay fine. But go to the library. Yeah. Like talk to the New York public librarian and say, yeah, I need to know I'm writing a movie. Right. I need to know, I'm writing a movie, I need to know this and they'll find you a book.

Yep. Read the fucking book. Yep. But this movie ends with everybody being dead, not zombified, and the zombie inhabits the body of a minor character who then takes the corpse of his drowned girlfriend back to the grave with him at the end. So again, a zombie film, No, a film that features zombies a bit. Yes. A film that features the word zombie and some undead. And deadness. Yeah. I'm going to I'm going to go with that's an undead movie. And they use the word zombie, but that's not that's no. I don't think that's. Yeah. I don't think that's yeah I don't think that qualifies now there is one movie post-Romero one of the only movies that's

an American movie post-Romero that retains the malevolent intelligence as well as the Haitian aspects of zombie lore it's a black exploitation film called sugarhill from 1974 sugarhill is the name of a photographer whose boyfriend was killed by local mob boss in Houston. And she enlists the help of a Haitian voodoo queen to get revenge. Okay. This Haitian voodoo queen then someone is bearing the samedi. Oh, well, oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Specifically. Two great boards. Is he, is he Lord Saturday one of his

we're one of the wonderful things about the the lore about the lower is is there's this wonderful idea that they don't just have the one name right and somebody goes by all of these nicknames yes because depending on the circumstance you might want to call him by his name right but if you're talking about him but you don't want to get his attention, right, right, you, you know, refer to him by the nickname, you know, yeah. But anyway, sorry, he brings his army of zombies to kill all the gangsters and save the nightclub. Okay. It's that is, that is definitely a black exploitation plot line. Uh-huh. definitely a black exploitation plot line. And I'm kind of here for it. Like, and here's why, right? You're using Haitian zombies, so they're black. You're bringing in Baran Samedi, so you've got a powerful

black character, and they're used to actually protect what property black folks have from the murderous predations of white gangsters. Yeah, I kind of, I mean, I get that like, there are horror trappings here. But like, I don't get, I don't get how it's really a horror movie. Because yeah, I don't see, I don't see the terror. Right. Like, you know, oh, spooky zombies, but like beyond that, like on a related note, if your victim's in a horror movie

are awful enough people, is it really a horror movie? Right, you start sharing for the good reason. You start sharing for the monster. Like don't breathe. The, there's a sequel coming out. Okay. That I've seen ads for on Facebook. The original premise of the film is,

the original, the first film is a bunch of Nairdewels, catch wind that the old blind hermit has a whole bunch of money stash away in his decrepit old house. And so they think they're going to break into the house and he's blind and they don't need to worry about him. They'll just find the money and if they need to kill him whatever he's blind, they get into his house and then they find out, no, no. He is blind, but in that way that Hollywood loves to do,

he can hear like a bat in the dark and all this other stuff. And he is in fact a stone cold killer. And so, I mean, they wind up trying to find a way to make him worse than the people who were breaking into his house, spoiler alert. him worse that the people who are breaking into his house, spoiler alert, the criminals find that he's keeping a woman prisoner in his basement. But still, he's a badass.

As for me, like, if I don't break into somebody's house, I don't need to worry about them hunting me down in this way. Sure. Like the only reason the monster is coming after you is because you've crossed over into the monster's territory. Right. Which you did for nefarious purposes. Yeah, you transgressed on purpose. You transgressed on purpose.

Why do I care? Right. Like why, like, I mean, what, what, what, what, no. That's a horror movie is alien. Like, that's a horror movie. Night of the living dead is a horror movie. Like, so, in this case that you're talking about, I'm like, okay, these guys don't sound sympathetic.

Like the, the monsters victims don't sound sympathetic. No, and why? What's a black exploitation? Yeah, I mean, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, and why? It's a black exploitation film. Yeah, I mean, that's, that's, that's, that's, so it's not really a horror flick. Right, the genre is, okay. So notably most of the movies post-Rumero

still have people bringing the zombie menace upon themselves or traveling to it. Very few have it happen upon them like in Romero's movie. I think that's pretty common for most horror films to begin with though, as it's often a morality tale for youngsters or society in general, telling them where to avoid going

and what behaviors to avoid. Oh, yeah, well, I mean, look at an slasher flick. If you get laid, you're dead. Right. So in 1977, Shockwaves hit the theater. Okay. The filmmakers admitted that they made a Nazi aquatic zombie film because they knew that they'd be filming in Florida

and that the backers of the movie insisted on it being a horror film because horror movies have the best odds of making their money back. Okay, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. So it's another Nazi zombie horror flick. Yes. You said you said Nazi zombie. I said Nazi aquatic. Nazi aquatic, well, yeah, no, I mean, but the aquatic is just like the environment. It's still a Nazi zombie movie. Yes.

Okay. Yeah. And if there's any state in the country that's going to have that, it's Florida. Florida. Well, this way you can do under watershed. Okay. Yeah. And Florida ends up being the scene for a couple other Nazi films, two or no, zombie films,

two. Yeah. But yes, I find that last part especially know where the horror films tend to be single or at least very limited amounts of location shoots. They tend to have small casts. The horror is typically one thing or sometimes a small hoard of something. The shots that involve those horrors tend to be limited as well, so as to heightened attention.

Well, if you have two biggest set piece, it stops being a horror movie, and it becomes an action flick. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's a good point. So the shots that involve those horrors are fewer and further between, and you really set up the tension for them in the writing

and in other ways. The film's budget, therefore, is not taken up with too many special effects or too much makeup as a limited number of shots are actually needed to establish and solve the danger. Usually horror films start relatively unknown actors or actors who are on their way down, or John Caridin. There's not that much camera work that's needed either.

There's lots of close-ups, there's lots of medium shots, but that's about it. If you think about most of the films, nothing too creative needed there. Well, the nature of the effects in a horror film. Typically, not always but typically are such that it is most effective if you don't ever see the monster in full lighting. Which brings me to the next point. Okay. Always shot at night. Well yeah. So you don't have to worry about lighting that you can't control. This is true. So, which means that your shoots are usually smaller shoots. Yeah. Your shoots are usually packed in over a shorter period of time. The budget for a horror film is much easier to make the money back

on just because of how the outlet is much smaller to begin with. So back to shockwaves the yeah yeah the aquatic Nazi a aquatic Nazi zombie movie. A bunch of tourists are on a boat that goes through a creepy orange haze. It gets damaged and it has to shipwreck on a on a reef. It's back in the day where we had coral reefs. It's kind of drawing on America's collective understanding with Gilligan's island as well. A little bit there yeah. They shipwreck and they take a glass bottom rowboat to the island. There's the captain, the captain's first mate, and then a whole bunch of people. The captain ends up dying under the water, probably drowned by the aquatic Nazi zombies. Everybody else takes the glass bottom robot to the island.

On the island is, of course, a huge hotel that has seen better days, and it has a recluse living there. OK. On the ocean floor, the nazis zombies are awakened. And eventually, it comes out as they climb from under the surf onto the beach that the recluse admits that yes, in fact, the Nazis tried to make super soldiers who could be amphibious and lead assaults, and that he had been fact-been their commander.

But it didn't work out, and they all attacked each other instead, and he had to scuttle the ship when the war ended, determined to live on his own on this island. That's his penance. He even tried commandeering his former troops. He goes down to the beach where the Nazis, zombies are coming out of the water, and tries to command them. And they ignore him, they don't listen.

And I think they end up drowning him. In fact, almost every death in this movie is a drowning death come to think of. Really? Yeah, kind of interesting. That's an interesting departure. It is. It is.

Less effects. Makes sense. Ultimately. Ultimately, yeah. Oh, budget. The party barricades itself in the hotel's refrigerator. OK. Walking.

Walking fridge. All right. Tempers flare. Yeah. Someone fires an actual flare gun. OK. The party splits. The, someone fires an actual flare gun. Okay. The party splits. The Nazi zombie seem content with drowning everyone

from what I could tell. Eventually, the young and pretty protagonist and the captain's mate are the only two left. Captain's mate actually was a little boy on flipper. Oh wow, okay. And he said that this movie was the nadir of his career. Yeah. You ha ha ha. You well, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, it sounds like it. So they're trying to get into the glass bottom boat. Of course, he ends up dying. She ends up living, and we see his corpse under the glass bottom. Roboat, nobody believes her, and then we kind of come full circle to the end of the movie. It's a voiceover on her part, and she's talking about it, and really what we come to find out is she's actually writing about it, and no one's believing what she's writing in her journal.

So the island forever remains a mystery. Okay, the movie was panned. Yeah, yeah. But there are- Just for that ending. Yeah. Yeah. There are a few things I think we could pull from it.

First, the zombies aren't under someone's thrall. Yes, clearly. Second, they're Nazi zombies. Yeah. There are a few things I think we could pull from it. First, the zombies aren't under someone's thrall. Yes, clearly. Second, they're not these zombies. Yes, I mean, you don't mess with the classics. Okay. Third, they're aquatic. Which is a departure? Yes.

You don't see aquatic zombies very often. True. And then finally, the goal was to escape them, not to destroy them or undo them. Yes, they're much more of a force of nature that's native to that particular setting, which both peaks are anxiety about what happens upon such places, but also the relative safely of, as long as I don't go there, they won't bother me. Yeah. It may have been a bad movie, but it sounds like it was.

But it's definitely another in a long line of zombie movies that continues to push them as a corporate malevolence, that gets activated more than it gets directed. Okay, awakened, brought about, not, you know, you don't intentionally make them. Right. You do some kind of like Godzilla.

Yeah. You do something that leads to the Kaiju rising up out of the ocean to, you know, ravage Tokyo. Yes. And when I get to Dead Snow, and I'm not going to get to it this episode for certain, but when I get to Dead Snow, we're going to talk about how greed awakens all the Nazi zombies in Norway. Yeah. And then we'll get to Dead Snow 2 and it gets that that's clearly a comedy where

the first one was tongue in cheek a horror film. But yeah. Okay. So that brings us to Don of the Dead of 1978. And I think that's where I want to stop us here. I think we'll stop. Okay. Next episode with Don of the Dead.

Okay. Which is 1978. So we are now 10 years on. Yeah. Well, and more 10 years on from the watershed, but from 32 to 78, that's 46 years. 46 years, yeah. So, and then from 78 till now,

that's about 43 more years. Yeah. So we're halfway there. We're halfway there. So anything new that you've gleaned? Not really. I think the orange mist part of the aquatic nazi zombie thing is just a lot of ice. Yeah, you know, and you say it may have been a bad movie. No, no, orange mist right there, right there.

Yeah, we could, why I could say, we could conclusively call it a pretty crummy film. That's what's right now. Right now. Oh yeah, no, that's what's sticking with me right now. As an investment, it might have actually been a pretty good one, but yeah, I think just the development of this really weird subgenre that we're talking about. You think about structurally how do horror movies work?

movies work. Right. And what's interesting is there are niches within horror that are very particular. And like if you're trying to make a vampire movie and you wind up making a zombie movie instead. Right. It's just it's not you know people are people are gonna look at it and they're gonna go well it's it's a zombie movie It's not really a you know fill in the blank. I feel like Action movies for example are more forgiving Yeah, comedies like subgenres of comedy. Well, you know is it a romcom is it you know just you know slapsticks you know Screw we don't make screwball comedies anymore as we've, you know, talked about previously. But you know, I mean, look at the subgenres of comedy. It's like, well as long as it's funny who cares. Right, right? But if you're gonna tell a horror story,

you better, you better get the right kind of horror story for what you're doing, you know? If you're, if you're gonna try to tell a vampire movie, the thematic elements that make it a vampire movie had better be on point. Yeah. You know, and I mean, there's all kinds of stuff you could play around with, but, you know, at the end of the day, I better recognize it

as a vampire movie. Mm-hmm. And there's so many things about modern zombie movies that kind of go against type. Like in most horror movies, there is A malevolence. Right. There is the demon threatening possession. There is the ghost, it's defeating reversible.

You know, there is the vampire or, you know, coven of vampires, codery of vampires. You know, there is the vampire or, or, you know, covenant vampires, codery of vampires. You know, there is the witch, whatever. Right. With zombie movies, there is, there is, there is the force of them. Yes. And it is by design, by virtue of the fact

that it has so many faces, it is faceless. And incompetent, ultimately. Yeah. And yet it still overwhelms you. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and it's a weird subgenre within horror. Yeah.

And in the way that it is so different in so many ways from the other ways that we like to scare ourselves. Or that some people like to scare themselves, I, as we've said before, this is not a genre I tend to enjoy. But, I can talk about it forever because it's fascinating. Sure, sure. So, I mean, that's kind of, I don't know, that's my riff on it anyway.

Where are you thought wise in this? Oh, I think... Okay, when I eat my breakfast, I will very often have a bagel and buttered and a cup of coffee. Okay. Yeah, and buttered. Yeah, and a cup of coffee. Okay, and probably 5% of the time will it be the perfect combination of Temperatures. Okay, so that when I bite into the bagel, it's just hot enough Mm-hmm that the butter hits the roof of my mouth and it doesn't burn me But neither am I left going like oh that could have been hotter. Yeah, then I take a sw of my mouth and it doesn't burn me, but neither am I left going like,

oh, that could have been hotter. Yeah. Then I take a swig of coffee and it's just the perfect heat where it doesn't burn me or and I'm not sitting there going like, oh, I'm kind of missing some of the flavor here. And when those things collide, they taste so wonderful. There's just that heat and that savouriness and all that. Yeah. I think a good zombie movie is like that bagel and that cup of coffee. Okay. And unfortunately, through the 1960s and 70s, there were a lot of overhated bagels. Yeah. Well, I was going to say that even over.

Yeah. I was going to say moldy bagels that were instead of dipped in locks, dipped in shit. And then somebody whizzed in your coffee and then spilled half of it on the table for you anyway and then just sopping it up with your shit bagel. Like, that's what a lot of these were. But every once's a while. And I honestly don't think night of the living dead is that bagel and coffee combo.

Okay. Do think though that the dawn of the dead is. Okay. Even though the acting is very 1970s, even though all the stuff is very dated, I think that dawn of the Dead is very much that 5% of zombies that is very well made. So I look forward to sharing that one with you.

Okay. Because Romero is trying to make statements on purpose. Yeah. He didn't fall into it backwards the way he did the first time now. He's like, oh wait, hold on. I'm gonna do this. I get it now.

Okay, yeah. And he's a good enough director that he can make it work. Exactly. So, is there anything you want to recommend to our audience to read? Well, I know I recommended it last time, but I'm gonna do it again.

Laura Olympus, please go check it out. It is on web tunes, if I remember right. And yeah, no, it's, it's an amazing series. And, and yeah, that's my, that's my recommendation. What is yours this time around? Marvel zombies. Okay. So it's a five issue, a limited release. It went from December through December 05 to April 06. Robert Kirkman and was the writer and I forget the artist and I think his last name was Phillips but you could probably find it in a single graphic novel but Marvel's

ambies because I'm mostly gonna stick to Yeah, but the MCU is such a big deal. Yeah, that I I could see just dipping into talking about that for a little bit. Yeah, but it is interesting that in December of 2005, basically in 2005, zombies invaded the Marvel universe, put them over. And we will get into why that is. Why do these movies keep coming out when they do? Yeah, but first I had to get us into the genre itself. Okay, and actually I just realized I have another recommendation. So I can't watch horror movies to save my life. Like I can't get into them, but horror comics, I sometimes regret reading them at 11, 30 at night, when my imagination is taking over.

But I can read the daylights out of them, and one of the best ones that I can recommend is the Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service. Oh wow, okay. Which is a very long title, and Kurosagi is Japanese for black crane. Okay. And the conceit of the comic is a group of Buddhist seminary students who are misfits for various reasons and are constantly broke. One of them, kind of the protagonist, it's an ensemble thing, but one of them kind of tends to be kind of more in the protagonist role.

The kind of protagonist is the son of a couple of people who operate a shrine, so he's going to take over the shrine, and so that's why he's in seminary school. Well, it turns out he, by touching a corpse, he can speak to it and find out what the dead person most wants. And so in a very Buddhist way, he touches the body, and the dead person will speak through him to say, and sometimes it's cryptic, and they have to do detective work to figure out what it is. Like in one of the first episodes, it's the body of a pop idol and she wants they think she wants to be reunited with her father. They find out she doesn't want to be reunited with her father.

Her father was abusing her. And so anyway, and at the very end, he usually winds up touching the corpse and the corpse rises up to get, you know, whatever their final wish is. And another member of the group is able to find corpses by dousing and all this kind of stuff. Sure. Sure. And, uh, anyway, it's a very Japanese take on zombies.

Right. That's actually very Buddhist and very like, because you all have heard me rant about people not getting Buddhism right, because it's done by a Japanese author where Buddhism is part of their culture, he gets the Buddhism right. And it manages to occasionally be really scary and disturbing and a lot of the time

it actually manages to be very darkly funny. Cool Kurosaki Corpse Delivery Service. I was trying to look up the author but you can you can look it up. Published by Kado Kawa Shoten in English you can get it from Dark Horse and so yeah it's a great series it's a lot fun. There you go. All right, cool. Well, where can people find you on social media? I can be found on social media at EH Blalock on Twitter and Instagram, and I can be found at

MrBlalock on the Tiki Talk. Where can they find you? You can find me on Twitter and Instagram at the Harmony, two H's in the middle. Also, every Tuesday night at 8.30 pm, Pacific Daylight Time, Twitch.tv, forward slash Capital Ponds. And of course this podcast,

which drops every Friday. If you found this just recently, you should go hit that subscribe button, rate, review, give us five star that you know we deserve. And check our back issues. Yeah. It's a hell of a buffet. Yes. We touch on a whole lot of stuff. I mean, there's a lot of wrestling in the middle

of it, but we can and a whole streak of bad man. But we touch on everything at least once. You'll find stuff that you like. We're working on touching everything because we're like that. And so, yeah. So Stitcher, Spotify, and the iTunes Store. Tell your friends, get them to subscribe, make listening parties. There you go. Hopefully, you can connect soon with people in person, but until then, keep your mask on and listen to our podcast and take notes.

So, all right. Well, for Geek History of Time, I'm Damien Harmonic. And I'm Ed Blaylock. And until next time, keep rolling 20s.