Stuff You Should Know - Do zombies really exist?

Episode Date: September 24, 2009

In movies and stories, zombies are undead menaces that lurch around mindlessly, in search of flesh -- and braaaaaains! Where did the idea for zombies originate? Do they exist outside of fiction? Tune in to this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com to find out. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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amount of ink. You can finally kiss expensive ink cartridges goodbye. Yeah, so check out the Epson Eco Tank. Just fill and chill available at participating retailers and at epson.com. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com Chief, Chief McClelland, how's everything

going? All things aren't going too bad, men are taking it pretty good. Chief, do you think we'll be able to defeat these things? Well we killed 19 of them today right in this area, those last three we caught trying to claw their way into an abandoned shit, they must have thought somebody was in there. We heard them making all kind of noise, we came over and beat them off, blasted them down. Uh, if I were surrounded by six or eight of these things, would I stand a chance with

them? Well there's no problem, if you had a gun shoot them in the head, that's a sure way to kill them. If you don't get yourself a club or a torch, beat them or burn them, they go up pretty easy. Well Chief McClelland, how long do you think it will take you until you get the situation under control? Well that's pretty hard to say, we don't know how many of them there are, we know when

we find them we can kill them. Are they slow moving Chief? Yeah, they're dead, they're all messed up. And with that, uh, Mr. George A. Romero pretty much set the scene for all zombie movies to follow. Thanks for tuning in, this is Stuff You Should Know, I'm Josh Clark, this is Charles W. Brain Eater Bryant. Hey and welcome to the podcast.

Yeah, thanks Chuck, somebody had to say it right? Yes. So how are you doing? I'm on the zombies to say it. That'd be pretty cool. I'm still wet, it's still raining in Atlanta. Good Lord. I feel like we have, remember that picture of the supercell I printed out for the webcast?

I feel like one of those is hovering over the perimeter of Atlanta. You carry that picture in your wallet with you and show it to people like it's your kid. Did you know that in I believe Ecuador once a year there's a heavy storm and after about two hours the storm subsides and everybody goes out and there's fish, dead fish laying everywhere. They're still alive. The rain of fishes. The weird thing is is that they aren't found in any surrounding body of water, nor are

they saltwater fish. They are blind underground dwellers. Zombie fish. Yeah, let's use that as our segue. Cool. Chuck, let's talk zombies. Alrighty. Let's go with the real stuff first.

Did you know that there may be such a thing as real zombie? Yeah, I didn't know until I read this. Where are you going to go if you want to find a real zombie? You go to the horse's mouth. You go to Haiti. Yes. That was serpent in the rainbow, right? Yeah.

What was it? 1987? Yeah. West Craven flick. Mid-high school for me. Very scary. Bill Pullman. Yeah.

The weird thing is West Craven's not known for making movies based on true stories, but that one was. It was one of my heroes, the ethnobotanist and anthropologist Dr. Wade Davis who is Harvard grad. I think he has his doctorate and two bachelors from Harvard. Two more than me. Right. Yeah.

And he went down to Haiti in the early 1980s for what was called the zombie project. Yes, because of a certain man drew his attention, right? Yeah. How do you pronounce that? Clareus Narcisse? Yeah, that's how I pronounce it. Yeah, he started poking his head around in 1980 in a Haitian village and said, hey, I died 18 years ago.

Yep. And apparently the similarity to his original self and the facts that he knew about his former life. Yeah, passed a battery of test. Questions. Yeah. It was enough to make his friend's family, I guess the estimates about 200 people who saw him say, that guy's a zombie.

Right. And he claimed a bokor, brought him back to life or brought him back to the undead state. Right, Chuck. So Clareus shows up in 1980, the thing that makes him significant is that he had been pronounced dead by American doctors who apparently carry more weight in the field of medicine and science. Right. It was documented.

Yeah, they documented his death. Sure. And when he showed up in 1980, he presented a substantial case for the existence of zombies. And a guy named Dr. Lamarck Duann, who's a Haitian psychiatrist, interviewed him, started interviewing bokor, and got his hands on some zombie powders. Right. And then entered Dr. Wade Davis. Right.

Now, he wasn't the guy that originally said to go get these powders, right? No, that was Nathan Klein. Right. He wanted some of these powders to see if they could be used as anesthetics and surgery. Yeah, which I don't get that. Why not just use anesthetic? Unless, I guess he found some like cheaper, safer, maybe anesthetic. Sure.

I mean, if you come up with your own anesthetic, I imagine there's some dollar amount attached to that. That's true. So let's talk about this. He sends Dr. Davis down to Haiti. And Dr. Davis kind of takes up where Dr. Duann left off or maybe kind of takes over his research and he himself interviews bokor, which are, again, those voodoo priests, and interviews some of the zombies, some of these undead people.

Right. That's what they said in return. Yeah. And he comes to find that he concludes that there is, in fact, such a thing as zombies. Right. They're specific to Haiti, though, as far as he can tell. Sure. And it's a two-step process, Chuck.

And how to make someone a zombie. Mm-hmm. Well, first they have to die, I would think. No. Or is that a three-step process? No. I thought zombies had to be dead first. We're talking Haitian zombies.

We'll get to the Hollywood zombies soon. Okay. Well, the bokor has to capture their soul. What's that? T-bon-age. Sure. I suppose it's French, right? Yeah.

That's apparently the part of the soul directly connected to the individual. And once he captures that, they are a zombie. Yeah. Right. That's Haitian folklore. Yeah, sure. Dr. Davis, being a scientist, tried to get beyond that. He found that most Haitians, most educated Haitians, we should say, in those who live

in the city, don't tend to believe in zombieism. Right. Even though it's part of law. It is. That's not interesting. There's a, what, back to 1835, right? Yeah. Article 2, full six of the Haitian penal code basically says that you can't make someone

a zombie. Right. That you'll be charged with attempted murder or murder if the person actually manages to get buried even if they're not dead yet. Right. For all intents and purposes, it's still considered murder under Haitian law. Thank God. So, okay, so Dr. Davis gets past this, this belief that's mainly held by rural, uneducated

poor Haitians. Right. That the bokor are capable of sorcery that can steal your soul. What do they get out of this? That's what I could never peg. Is there some money on the back end or something? No. No.

There's precisely no money involved and it's not for any personal gain. There's status as a bokor? No. What it is, is there is a secret Haitian society called Bizango. The Freemasons? No, they're not the Freemasons, but they might as well be. Okay. Basically, this is the group that de facto runs the country supposedly, but I mean, this

is documented. This is from Davis' research. Right. So the Bizango, there are not necessarily voodoo priests, but there are voodoo priests who are part of the Bizango. And zombification is only used in cases of punishment where a member of the Bizango, say a family member, has gone against the will of his or her family or the will of the Bizango community as a whole.

It's just a severe punishment. So you would have been zombified in our House Star Works culture? Over and over. Over and again. Over and again. And actually, Clairvius? Yes. Clairvius Narcisse said that he was zombified at the behest of his brothers because he wouldn't

go long in selling the family land with them. Another documented zombie named T. Femme, she's a woman. She said that she was zombified by the will of her family because she refused to marry the man they wanted her to marry, and she had a baby by another man. So generally, it's retaliation, it's punishment for transgressions against Bizango society or a person's family who is a member, that is a member of Bizango society. Yeah, it's got to be a little money on the back end for the old book. You would think so, but Davis was adamant in his research that that's not the case,

right? Right. So okay, so let's get to how you make somebody a zombie. Well you've got the powder, right? You have the powder. The magic powder. What Davis found was that this powder, he took, I think, eight samples and found that seven of them had some ingredients in common, right, Chuck?

Yeah, let me go over those. You found the puffer fish, which contains a deadly neurotoxin called tetrodotoxin, found a marine toad, which also has a bunch of toxins, numerous toxins. Yeah, you don't want to lick this. You don't want to lick that one. A Hila tree frog, which secretes in irritating, but not deadly substance. Some human remains were in all of these, those were the common ingredients, and then things like skin irritants, they figured like spiders and lizards ground up in there, would irritate

your skin. Same with the Hila tree frog, so basically the reason you would want to have a skin irritant is because the zombie powder is traditionally applied on the skin. Sure, it's topical. Right. So what happens is it's applied to the skin, and it creates cracks and breaks in the skin, and then it seeps in through there, right? Gross.

And then it produces this zombified person. Basically, you start to have trouble breathing. Don't respond to stimuli. No, you become paralyzed, you have a glassy-eyed stare, but you're still maintaining your normal mental state, you're still aware of what's going on, you just can't do anything, right? Start putting the rainbow. Exactly. You know you're getting buried alive and having the sheet pulled over you.

Right. That's actually what Narcisse said. He said that he remembered and saw the doctors pulling the sheet over his head after they pronounced him dead. I want to know if that's what that felt like. How was that for you? I imagine it probably wasn't very good, right? Yeah.

Creaking moment. Right. So, yeah, so you know what's going on, you just can't do anything about it, and this struck Davis as particularly interesting because what does it check, the tetrodotoxin? Davis started researching and he found that in Japan, there's this stuff called Fugu, which is a kind of sushi delicacy that's made from the puffer fish. It's very dangerous, but it apparently tastes like a Twinkie, right? Nice.

Yeah, a raw Twinkie. But if you make the cut wrong and too much of this tetrodotoxin ends up in it, you get it, you're poisoned, and the symptoms were virtually the same as what people who were zombified reported, right? That's awesome. Should we trust our sushi chef and order some up? I guess. I imagine that with Fugu, you get what you pay for.

You don't want to cheap out with Fugu. You don't want to go dollar sushi on the Fugu. So that's step one. You administer the zombie powder and then the person is pronounced dead. Yeah, you bury them. Then you go get them. Well, that's the revelation moment, that's what makes the bokor look like they've done their thing.

A nice reference to our brainwashing podcast. Ah, thank you. Yeah, and I love the back door there for the bokor. If it doesn't work, there's a little loophole where he says that if the procedure doesn't work, that divine intervention can always prevent this from happening. Right. So anytime it doesn't work, that's his go-to. Or if the powder is prepared to kill too strongly.

Right. Right? So you've got somebody. Right, exactly. It's like, well, hey, it didn't work this time. And plus anyway, if once you've administered the zombie powder, I guess under Haitian law, you're in for a penny, in for a pound anyway, right? So that's step one, right, Chuck?

You've zombified the person. Step two is to get to their grave within about eight hours. And you exhume them. And when you do, you feed them something called a zombie cucumber. Was that the salt? No, you don't want to feed them salt. That restores their senses. Right, right, right.

The zombie cucumber is a combination of sweet potato and detura. That sounds nice. Jimson weed, which is one of the more hallucinogenic plants available to man. That sounds real nice. Yeah. So when you've got somebody who's already half paralyzed and has been buried, that's a pretty traumatic experience, right, Chuck? I would imagine.

Yeah. So the next step is to feed them a highly hallucinogenic concoction and watch them go. So that's step two of creating a zombie. What Davis came up with was that none of this would work, Chuck, unless you were in Haiti because all of it had the social support for belief that zombies can exist. Yeah, the cultural belief. So once you've gone through this process, you're not an American thinking about, oh, I'm a zombie.

Right. As Tracy Wilson put it in her How Zombies Work article that we're basing this on. She said, you know, in another culture, if you have tetra-to-toxin poisoning, you're just a toxin poisoning victim. Right. But in Haiti, because of this belief among some people that there is such thing as zombies, that supports the experience and all of a sudden this person is spending X number of years as basically a zombie slave.

Right. Like snake handlers. Sure. Most people would think you're just a redneck that got bit by a snake and they think that, you know, it was all divine. Right, yeah. That's actually very much the same. Nice one, Chuck.

I just pulled that one out of my Easter. That was great. It smells delicious. Thanks. So a lot of people, do you want to get to where people think Davis wasn't exactly on the level? Sure. On all levels?

Yeah. Because it all sounded good until the article turned a little bit and said, no, not quite. Well, yeah, it definitely depends on where you're coming from, but there's a tremendous amount of criticism for somebody like Davis who's saying, yeah, zombies exist. Right. Because one thing he did, which you mentioned, was dig up bodies or supervise the digging up of bodies. Well, he was there, at least.

He was there. And a lot of scientists didn't like that. No, I think that kind of goes against the code of ethics somewhere. Across the boundary. And I think I might agree with that. They also questioned the initial experiments with the powder, and if they were scientific enough, because he practiced these on monkeys and rats when he got back to the States, right? Yeah, he made zombie rats.

Yeah. It was pretty cool. Yeah. So they questioned the initial experiments. They didn't know if he had added anything else to the powder. I guess he says he didn't, but they weren't there to witness that, so they questioned that. Right.

What else? Oh, yeah, this one. I found odd. They found samples contained, no tetrodotoxin. Yeah. And he said that you guys are putting it in some sort of solvent to carry out these tests, so you may have destroyed it. It's a little iffy, though.

Maybe. I think one of the big points about this in Davis' defense is that his reputation academically is still very much intact years after this. Yeah. He survived. I mean, he published two books on it. The Serpent and the Rainbow came out, and he survived that. Right.

I can't imagine that made him look really good among his academic peers, and this guy's still doing more and more research. He's a National Geographic Explorer in residence, which, as you know, I think is one of the coolest things ever. Yes. So his reputation's still intact, and he's still a respected ethnobotanist and anthropologist. Another point that people made, though, Chuck, was that a lot of these people who were supposedly zombies were chalked up to mistaken identity, cases of mental illness, kind of like Jerusalem

syndrome. If you live in Jerusalem, you're going to have a much higher tendency of believing that you're a reincarnated saint or prophet than if you live in Detroit. Right. What were you going to say? Denver. Okay. Yeah.

I'm glad you said Detroit, though. Are we moving on to Denver now? Maybe. All right. Yeah. Got West young man. So Chuck, that's the Haitian zombie. That's the real, quote, unquote, real zombie.

We should say as far as I could turn up, there's no one who satisfactorily debunked Clarevius Narcissus story. Right. And also, I should also say that at no point did Davis say that these people were dead in any way, shape, or form. Yeah. Or undead. They were strictly poisoned by the specific toxin that brought them, that lowered their

vital signs, they were pronounced dead, and then they were revived by Dutura, and then believed that they were zombies, but that they were not dead and brought back to life. So those are real zombies. Let's do fake zombies. The, that started, not started, but very much kick started with George Romero's classic that we played earlier, Night of the Living Dead. Reigns. Oh, did you hear that?

That was our, that was our colleague, Chris Palette. Did you hear that? Uh-huh. Brains. I was going to do that, but I didn't. Apparently Jerry said, Chris nails it. So. Yeah.

He does. Can you tell? Brains. Right. That's, that's pretty good too, Chuck. Yeah. Uh, yeah. So Romero starts the whole thing off, basically.

He comes up with all the rules of the game, like we heard at the beginning of this podcast. Right. Actually, Tracy did say that movies as early as 1919 had zombies, so save your fingers on the keyboard from typing in. No, no, no. He wasn't the first. Nice one, Chuck. But he definitely brought it into the mainstream.

And zombie movies forever after were based on, like you said, his world and his rules. Uh-huh. Like for example, he was the one that said, if you can get, if you can destroy a zombie's brain or detach its brain from the rest of its body, that's it for the zombie. Everybody knows. If you want to kill a zombie, you got to cut their head off, basically. That's Romero. And blow their head off with a, you know, a gun.

I should tell you that our colleague and sometimes, uh, stand in producer Matt Frederick, uh, got really excited when he found out we were doing a podcast on zombies. He thinks that a Remington pump action shotgun is the best weapon to have against a zombie. I would say that in one hand and a samurai sword and another would be pretty cool. You'd be doing well for yourself. I'm more a battle ax man myself. So that, uh, we're going to talk about the Canadian mathematician study. Eventually.

Okay. We don't stand a chance if there's a real zombie attack, dude. Well it depends on what we do. Let's talk about that. Yeah, we might as well. This is the one with Robert Smith. Oh, yeah, with a question mark name. That's right.

Yeah. The guy has a question mark at the end of his name. Robert Smith and one of his colleagues, uh, both mathematicians at the University of Ottawa, they used, um, like contagious disease models. Yeah. Pandemic models. Yeah. They found out the math of whether or not we could actually survive a zombie attack.

A slow moving zombie. Yes. They specifically picked the classic slow moving zombie and they still found that unless humans strike fast, strike often and strike increasingly escalatingly, um, we're in big trouble. Right. So that you can't do the, uh, oh geez, we got to learn a humanitarian way to put these, uh, zombies down like district nine.

You can't do it. No. You got to go in. You got to figure out how to, uh, how to cure it. You just have to kill everybody you find. Exactly. Um, and that, that was another thing that Romero established with nine of the living dead was that zombies beget zombies, right?

Yeah. In his version, what happened was a zombie was, uh, somebody who was killed by a zombie was brought back because of this radiation. Right. Uh, from a satellite that had returned to earth that was causing the dead to rise in the first place. So if you were killed while that radiation was still around, you were inevitably going to come back and also did you know that George Romero got his start shooting segments for

Mr. Rogers neighborhood? I think I did know that. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, he also established some other rules about their strength. They're very strong, but typically slow moving, although there have been a movie offshoots with the fast moving zombie, of course. It depends.

Well, for their faster, slow. Well, like 28 days later is technically not a zombie movie because no one who is a zombie is a zombie is actually dead. No, they're infected by that. Whatever that was that disease. Yeah. The infection. Yeah.

I don't remember what it's called. But there were some other fast moving zombies. I've seen in other movies. Resident Evil, the game. They had some herky jerky fast moving zombies, right? Yeah. Yeah. Again, Matt Frederick thinks is the perfect zombie, uh, motion.

What? Herky jerky? Herky jerky. Whatever is in Resident Evil, he's hip with. Oh, okay. So that's where, uh, the, uh, pump shotgun is found as well. I like the slow movers. Yeah.

The classic. I mean, they're a lot more, they're a lot more comforting. Yeah. But it was always funny to me to watch those movies and think you're all faster than the zombies. Yeah. How could you ever get caught? Briskly.

But you get surrounded. That's what happens. Surrounded is the big problem. Whoa. Are we going to get into that? How to avoid getting eaten by a zombie? Yeah. Okay.

Well, we should, we should wrap up the rules first. They're not, uh, they're impervious to pain. Yeah. Like you can hit them in the face with a baseball bat and they'll just keep lumbering forward. Yeah. Um, so you really have to, um, cut their head off. You can cut their arm off and they'll walk with two, one arm. They'll cut a leg off and they'll hop at you.

Oh yeah. Their arm will come at you. Yeah. I'll, um, return to the living dead. Yeah. Or, uh, evil dead. Yes. Two.

Dead by dawn. Dead by dawn. You will be dead by dawn. And they are driven to eat, relentlessly driven to eat. They're afraid of fire and light. So they'll come out at night. They want to eat your brain. That actually, uh, came later.

That was largely, uh, return of the living dead from 1985 where they actually have a zombie pinned down and it's just this woman's torso and arms and head. And, um, this medical examiner doctor, um, says, why do you eat humans? She goes, not humans, brains. That's the clip you sent me today. Let's hear a pull out. Brains. Nice.

Thank you, Paulette. So good. Um, yeah, that was that clip I sent you. That was awesome. Isn't it? Yeah. Um, and what else, Chuck, are there anymore? How are zombies created?

In, uh, Romero's version, it was, uh, radiation from a satellite, a returning satellite. Yeah. And night of the comet, it was a comet, uh, and 28 days later, if you want to consider that zombie movie and resident evil, it was a virus that was passed around. I love night of the comet. By the way, I just want to go on record. Yeah. I love that movie.

That was a good movie. Well, it's, it's off. It's very dated and kind of very awful 80s movie, but it was dated the second it came out. It was, it was really for a 13 year old, you know, watching HBO on a Saturday afternoon. It was pretty perfect. Did you have a crush on the younger sister too? I had a crush on both.

Yeah. A couple of hot cheerleader chicks. Yeah. It was nice. I learned, I learned a lot by watching that film. I'll bet you did. Chuck came of age to know the comet. I did.

All right. So, uh, how do you find them? Yeah. I mean, Chuck, let's say that, um, Robert Smith, uh, his prediction comes true. And by the way, we should say their paper is called when zombies attack and there was an exclamation point. Yeah. And Robert Smith, he's big on punctuation.

You now include an exclamation point at the end of your name and your email signature. Don't think that's this fast. So right. Let's say we were getting attacked. Let's say Robert Smith, uh, is, is right on the money. What do we, what do we do? Uh, well, first of all, you want to go to a place. If you're going to retreat, you want to retreat to a place that has plenty of supplies, preferably

one of those Walmart. I don't know if they're still around or not. That also sells guns and ammunition. In groceries. Yeah. The super store. Super center. Super death center.

Yeah. Um, you want one of those because you want a hole up in there. You can last as long as you need to. Yeah. There's probably communications equipment in there. And again, you've got guns, hoes, machetes, anything. It would be your favorite weapon. I told you a battle axe.

Oh, that was yours. Yeah. You know, I've changed mine. What? Crossbow with those, uh, Rambo exploding arrows. That would be sweet. That would be awesome. Wow.

I would like to kill them before they even get close to me. Yeah. I think it'd be unsettling to be face-to-face. Yeah. So where are we? We're, uh, we're in the Walmart, uh, or Costco or Target or wherever, you know, sure. And the zombies are attacking. Uh, you want to stay away from where there's people.

So that would be a good place. Yeah. That was a really good point that Tracy made that the, the, if you're in the midst of a zombie epidemic, just like any other epidemic, it's going to spread more quickly and have more casualties in a populated area. Yeah. If you live in Manhattan, you probably want to get the heck to Long Island, I would say. Sure.

Too sweet. But as anyone who's seen 28 days later knows, you still want to be on your guard even out in the sticks. Yeah. The old, uh, cottage in the, in the marsh, that's not a good place to go either. No. Because they're going to be waiting for you in the movie version. Yeah.

Uh, you want to barricade everything. So Michael Jackson and his cohorts can't get in. Nice. You like that? Um, you never actually, that's, that's more applicable than ever, Chuck. I know. Uh, you want to not back yourself into a corner because that's what we talked about. You always end up getting surrounded and just like in thriller, I believe she backed herself

into a corner. Literally. Yes. She did in that house. And they send it upon. Like walls came or hands came out of the wall. Yeah. She was in trouble.

I don't know if I'd want to be inside at all, come to think of it. I'd want to get my supplies and like go to the mountains. That's what I'd do. Yeah. Like getting a tent. I don't know if a tent offers that much protection. You want to be able to barricade. Well I would just want to be in the open so I could run.

I would never want a wall around me anywhere. Yeah. That's just how I do it. That's how I party. Give us some room. That's how you party with zombie death. Well Tracy said wait for rescue and make long-term preparations for your survival. I guess so.

But what if you want to fight the zombies? I think you can do both at the same time. Hers was kind of a run and hide mentality. Yeah. Yeah. I think Tracy would be good to have on your team. It'd be good to have somebody like us armed with battle axes, crossbows, pump action shotguns.

But then have Tracy, you know, maybe behind the semi-circle thinking about what we need to be doing a year from now. Maybe. Mix it all together. Because you don't want just, you know, bone-headed, you know, thick-mick rock skulls, you know. Woody Harrelson. Battling. You heard about him?

He was during the making of Zombie Land when he blamed, remember, he attacked those photographers? Huh. He got all in trouble because he attacked some photographers and his excuse was that he was playing a zombie hunter in this movie that I think was actually shot in Atlanta called Zombie Land and he told the judge that he was so caught up in that character and so in character is a zombie hunter that he reacted too aggressively to the photographers. Wow. Who followed them around like zombies, I guess.

That man is a pro, yeah. Yeah, he's a pro. He would often smoke a huge joint and got off Scott Free, probably. Probably. At least he didn't play bongo snake or anything like that. Yeah. Who was that, McConaughey? Yeah.

Nice. Didn't you hang out with him? Yeah. McConaughey. Actually, speaking of Zombie Land, I just saw today where the director of that film was going to have Patrick Swayze play a Swayzee zombie, like as himself, come back from the dead Swayzee zombie, originally it was written into the script and this was before he got sick or anything.

Oh, okay. So obviously- It was so good. It's pretty tasty. No, no, no. I mean, the movie's just coming out, so this is a while ago and then he got sick. He contacted him and everything and he had fallen ill and couldn't do it and I think he got some other big star to do it and they're trying to keep that a secret or something.

Who is it? I don't know. Dish. I tried to find out. I couldn't. When did it come out? I don't know. Soon.

Chuck, basically there's some pretty common sense things you want to avoid in a zombie attack, like don't lock yourself in a car that you don't have keys to- We'll call these movie things because this is what always happens. Movie things? Yeah, in the movie. They get in, they don't have the key and then you're thinking, why did you get in the car if you didn't have a key? Right.

You don't want to leave any implements that a zombie could use as a weapon out for them to find and pick up. Yeah, because they can use basic weapons only. Do not give a weapon to an hysterical person. You have no idea what they're going to do. At the very least, they're not going to use it properly and you'll end up really regretting that. There's other stuff, like getting into an elevator and building infested with zombies.

You don't want to go on a retreat to like a cellar or something without taking supplies with you because God knows how long you're going to be down there. I got one. How about you fight the sudden urge to make out with a zombie? Yeah. That would probably be a good thing to do. Sure. That happened in Night of the Living Dead, wasn't it?

Oh, really? Yeah. The girl was like, Johnny. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And he was like, yeah. So that happens sometimes. Awesome. Chuck, let me talk about one of my favorite zombies.

Okay. Reanimator. Did you see it? Yes. You know that was the Lovecraft story. Yeah. It's based on a Lovecraft story. It's a classic, classic film.

Yeah. B-movie. It's either his mentor or the dean of the school. I can't remember. Herbert West. He decapitates him with the shovel. And he's like, awesome, I've got another specimen to work on. And he uses the serum to reanimate both the head and the body, which is highly unusual

because in most zombie films, once the head is detached from the body, that's it. But he was reanimating it after it was detached. So hence, that's how you break the rules. Oh, okay. You know? There were sequels of that, too, I think. There were. But do you know what's particularly unsettling about Reanimator?

What? That there's actual research into that very stuff going on right now. Into human reanimation? Uh-huh. Cool. Max Planck Institute. I was reading an article that was linked from a crack blog post. You loved that website.

I do. It's great. And it was, I think, from 1999 or 2000. Uh-huh. And they're like, we're getting close, actually. We found out that, you know, it's not cardiac arrest. And your brain doesn't die as a result of cardiac arrest. Like we thought, instead, we destroy it when we try to reanimate it.

So now we're trying to be a little more gentle. And actually, we've gotten a brain to kind of function after it's been dead for an hour. We didn't get the whole organism reanimated, but we're working on it. Right. And I just went, bleh. And that was it. What kind of makes sense? You know, was it Futurama that had the different heads in the jars, and they could actually

still talk and everything? Sure, yeah. And from the neck down, it's really not a lot going on besides, you know, organ function and moving. If you could find a way to wire the brain up and keep it from decaying, you'd keep partying, man. Yeah. Keep on truckin'.

Well, let's see, if you want to keep on truckin' with zombies, you can go read the article written by our esteemed colleague, Tracy Wilson, who knows a lot about zombies, probably more than she should know. That's a good one. We're keeping zombies in the handy search bar at HowStuffWorks.com, which means it's time for Listener Mail. Yes, the return of Listener Mail. Josh, I'm going to call this Listener Mail from The Dude in the Band that you know about.

And Jerry. I like this guy. Hey there, Chuck and Josh and Jerry. I'm riding on behalf of my band. We're an indie rock and roll band from Eagle Rock, Glendale, California. This is where I used to live. We've been lucky enough on our tour for a good chunk of the year, to be on tour for a good chunk of the year, opening for bigger acts, while on tour we constantly fight over

who gets control of the CD player in the band. It's nasty sometimes, and we frequently run in opposite directions to our trusty iPods. It's pathetic. Five guys in a smelly van, each in our own little world, not talking, tired and cranky. I quickly learned to resent touring, and the 45 minutes on stage wasn't worth the hours of driving and sleeping in dumpy motels and on couches. So, they were not having a good run of it, sadly. I like this exposition.

Right. He's a good runner. Well, as we were headed back on the road, our old bassist sent us off with a spindle of stuff you should know podcasts were into a CD. They were reluctant at first to throw it into the CD player, but find ourselves intrigued by how cannibalism works. It's probably good to start on. That are body farms that say we could be in, for indie rockers.

It was one of the first episodes we listened to. We were hooked after that. The iPods went away. The band started talking more in the van. The podcast ignited debates. We joked about our favorite lucid dreams, cringed at the image of a dog eating its owner's face, drooled at the thought of a banana cream twinkie. I also panicked because my girlfriend recently dyed her hair red.

So he just wanted to say thanks for bringing the spark back in their touring. They listened to 20 hours of the show driving through Kansas and Montana, and we've been all around the country with them. They burned another CD for the next upcoming tour. Did you just have a stroke a second ago? I did. So they're playing here in Atlanta actually soon. The Henry Clay people, right?

The Henry Clay people is the name of the band, and they are actually awesome. Yeah. And we get bands. I haven't listened to them yet. You have their music, right? Yeah, they're great. I like it a lot, and we get people that send in their band stuff sometimes, and it's not very good.

Are we going to go? I'm going to go. I wrote him back, and he still has not responded, so maybe he's on tour and can't get to it. Put me down for a plus one. Jerry, you going? All right. Yeah, we're going to be there. The Variety Playhouse in Atlanta, October 7th, rocking out to the Henry Clay people.

Nice. Opening up for Airborne Toxic Event, which is a big tour for Henry Clay people. That's good for them. Yes. It's a good rock and roll. Rockus, rock and roll. You know, it's funny, that's exactly what Chuck said in the email to me and Jerry, when he's like, I like these guys.

Rockus, rock and roll. It's good. It's like good drinking music, like early stones or something. Right on. Let's go. October 7th. All right. Well, if you want to see if you can entice Chuck, Jerry and I to come out to see whatever,

or if we left out your favorite zombie movie, which we inevitably have, you can send an email inviting us and or chastising us to stuffpodcastathowstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Want more HowStuffWorks? Check out our blogs on the howstuffworks.com homepage. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you?

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