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StS Episode 239: Halloween Sadists with Joel Best, feat. Mikel Koven on Zombie Evolution

 

Standard disclaimer: All show transcripts—yes, including this one—was AI-generated and skimmed by at least two busy and fallible humans. They offer an overview of the show but you’ll find occasional typos and glitches and therefore should not be assumed to be accurate or verbatim. Readers who wish to quote anything here for any reason are encouraged to check it against the original audio at the time stamps provided. Thanks.

 

KEYWORDS: Moving Rocks, CSICON Recap, Pink Slime Journalism, Halloween Sadist, Tainted Halloween Candy, Mikel Kovan, Folklore, Urban Legends, Wendigo, Zombies, Zombies in Film, Zombie Movies, Kritt, White Zombie Film

0:00:00
Ben Radford: Welcome to Squaring the Strange, the podcast that examines all manner of the mysterious and the mundane through a critical lens. So let’s square the strange.

(MUSIC)

0:00:11
Celestia Ward: Welcome back to Squaring the Strange. I am one of your co-hosts, Celestia Ward, and with me is…

0:00:30
BR: Ben Radford here.

CW: Yes, and we are actually, this is a stunning development, we are in the same room.

BR: It is stunning. We are rarely in the same room. Usually we are miles apart.

CW: Yes, but for episode 239, it just so happens Ben is passing through Las Vegas after going to… where did you go again?

BR: Death Valley.

0:01:07
CW: And you you’re still alive.

BR: I am. It’s a bit of a misnomer. I assumed that any people or entities that entered Death Valley didn’t come out. It’s kind of there in the name.

0:01:21
CW: The Bermuda Triangle of the desert.

0:01:23
BR: Yes, but in this particular case, as I alluded to in a previous episode, I joined with Skeptoid Adventures and our recent guest, Brian Dunning.

0:01:33
CW: Yes, well, tell me a little bit about how that trip went.

0:01:36
BR: You were out there for a few days. Yes, I am very tired. I’m sure you can’t hear it in my voice because I’m sure I sound… Yeah, we actually just got back just a bit ago from when we were recording. It was a fun trip. It was organized, as I mentioned, by Brian Dunning of Skeptoid and we had Jeff Wagg, formerly of JREF, and he was along there as well. And yeah, we spent basically three days and three nights touring Death Valley and seeing all sorts of sand dunes and volcano craters and just wild stuff. It was fun. But the highlight, the highlight was Racetrack Playa.

0:02:16
CW: Racetrack Playa. Is that where you get on burros and you race each other?

0:02:21
BR: No, that’s Racetrack Plaza.

CW: Oh, okay, that would have been cool.

BR: Playa and Plaza are very different. Now, in this case, Playa means beach, as you may know, and it is famous because that is where the mysterious, using air quotes here, moving stones are.

CW: Yes, and we will have to have Brian on to talk about those someday.

BR: Yes, it’s a fun story that the Brian actually has a personal role in so we don’t want to spoil it but it was cool.

CW: I suspect he’s been going to Death Valley at night and pushing the stones one by one in a grand hoax to make it look like they’re moving.

BR: Yes, just for those who don’t know the basic mystery is that there are these rocks of varying sizes from golf balls to soccer ball size, frankly, that seemingly mysteriously move on their own. And the question is how and why?

CW: But never when anybody’s looking.

BR: That, well therein lies the rub, as they say. Anyway, we went there and I saw him myself and it was it was pretty cool.

CW: Okay, and nobody died of dehydration, everybody had a good time, and you stayed in Beatty, Nevada? Charming little town?

0:03:40
BR: Yeah, population I think four or five, including some burros. Yeah, it was fun. You know, for those who want to see more of Nevada than just the strip, and as you know, there’s quite a bit out there. So, what have you been up to while I have been out in the desert regions.

0:04:02
CW: Well, I attended CSICON, the Center for Skeptical Inquiry and their annual get-together, conference, as you say. You know, I can’t possibly go over all the talks. Neil deGrasse Tyson and Brian Cox were kind of the headliners. They both spoke. It made me nervous seeing both of them in the same room because all we would meet is like one stray asteroid or earthquake and there would go astrophysics just up in flames.

BR: Probably not the entirety of astrophysics, but certainly the popularizers I would think.

0:04:34
CW: Yes, science communication would be in trouble if the two of those went. There was some interesting stuff in all the talks. You’ll probably be reading about this later. I bet if you did a search you’d find some people commenting on it. But Steven Novella of Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe gave an amazing talk about the neurology aspect of gender and whether or not it’s binary. That’s been kind of a hot topic. I think I’ve mentioned it on the podcast before. Richard Dawkins has gotten himself into trouble tweeting things, perhaps phrased poorly, about men in dresses thinking they’re women and this is not great for the trans community or even you know people who are studying gender and biology that are looking at it in new and different ways now. So he he utterly stunned the room in my opinion anyway and then there was a buzz as to whether or not Jerry Coyne would change his talk at all because he was kind of coming at it from the old guard perspective.

BR: Now for those who don’t know who is Jerry Coyne?

CW: Jerry Coyne is an evolutionary biologist and he was giving a talk on hot potato subjects. So he covered gender and race. And it was interesting. You’ll have to just see the fallout after people write about it more erudite than I am. So you can take a look on the Googles if you want to see a summary of his talk and I believe these are going to be coming out in about three to five to six months. I think they’re going to be available on the YouTubes so we can see what happens there. But that was just a small sampling of a wide array of subjects from skepticism in the media, the wellness industry, the longevity industry, the changing landscape of how newspapers work, there was a lot.

0:06:31
BR: And Kenny Biddle was there, right?

0:06:34
CW: Many people, in fact, that was one of the things I was gonna mention next is going to these conferences, it’s not just about seeing the speakers, it’s about the social time you get with other like-minded skeptics. And at one point in Dr. Angie’s room, shout out to Dr. Angela Mattkey, she got a rather, not a suite, but a pretty big room. Big enough to the point where we squished almost 40 skeptics in there.

0:06:58
BR: That’s a suite.

CW: No it was not.

BR: I don’t know where you come from, but where I come from, that is a suite.

0:07:04
CW: We were crammed on both of the beds and between the beds and on the sides of the beds and on the floor in front of the TV and we were all there to watch a premiere, if you could call it a premiere, it was a YouTube video, so it wasn’t like an official movie premiere, but there’s a YouTube creator by the name of Coleman Watts. Subscribe to him, I think you’ll enjoy his stuff if you enjoy our show. And he took a look at the Winchester Mystery House.

BR: Yeah.

CW: And he enlisted Adrian Hill, who knows quite a bit about the subject and did a cover story for SI about it, as well as Kenny Biddle who was his charming blunt self and giving some information on various ghost hunting gadgets. And I you know it was for me it was really fun just looking at Coleman Watts as he was in this room of skeptics watching his video because as a YouTube creator or I must say as a podcaster, you don’t really get to see people react to your stuff. You don’t go on the red carpet and have a movie premiere and have people give you a standing ovation like it at the film festivals. We just get the hate mail. Yeah, you just get the hate mail from Cranks, but he looked pretty happy and pleased because everybody was whooping and laughing and clapping at all the right places and it was a well-done video. It was all about the Winchester house and kind of lampooned a ghost hunting show which has since been cancelled on the travel channel Probably for the best probably for the best. Yeah, that’s really all I have to say about CSICON, like I said, it would take me hours to summarize all of it But you know, there’s gonna be there there already are some write-ups about how the whole weekend went.

0:08:45
BR: Let me add as we’re talking about this. I was there, I wasn’t there officially, I was there sort of on my own time and dime as it were, so I was not a speaker or anything, but I did pop in just because.

CW: You popped up to the YouTube premiere in Dr. Angie’s room.

BR: I did and that was super fun, and I did catch one talk and that was of Professor Chris French. Who we recently had on a couple episodes back learn a couple new things so that was fun.

CW: Yes and Jim Underdown along those same lines he was the emcee for one of the days and he did a great job talking about all the claimants that they’ve had for the paranormal challenge out at CFI West and various people who think they can do various things. One of my favorite parts was hearing him talk about how he dealt with a troll, a prank call if you will, who filled out the form wanting to be a claimant and said, I have what is known as big dick energy and I would like my big dick energy measured. You know he wanted to have somebody acknowledge that he does indeed it and yeah and Jim Underdown had some clever retorts for him and they sparred a little bit and it sounds like they both had good fun talking about what one can do and how you would possibly measure and verify Big dick energy.

BR: So we will not be seeing a write-up in SI anytime soon.

CW: I don’t think okay.

BR: Just checking So other than that what are you skeptical of?

(MUSIC)

CW: Well it’s almost election time, and I’m sure everyone is skeptical of political ads and the flyers you get and the claims that are made on either side. This year, I would argue, you’re more skeptical of one side than the other, although everybody is, aren’t they? And I was wondering if you had ever heard the term pink slime journalism.

0:10:56
BR: I have not, I can guess what it is. I wrote an article many years ago for Discovery News on pink slime.

0:11:04
CW: That’s why it caught, one of the reasons why it caught my eye is that term, pink slime, and how it’s being used right now.

0:11:10
BR: Interesting, well I could probably guess the gist of it, but what is pink slime journalism?

0:11:17
CW: Well, here, I’ll summarize the way that Wikipedia puts it. The term pink slime journalism was coined by journalist Ryan Smith in 2012. A related term, news mirage, was coined in 2024 by journalists Miranda Green and David David Fulkenflik, he’s on NPR, to refer to websites that look like news, but in truth serve as mouthpieces for corporations or advocacy groups with a non-journalistic agenda. And now we had a whole show on Pink Slime. I should have looked up which one it was, but it was like our second year or something, so it’s back there.

BR: Ancient history, folks.

CW: But Pink Slime, the meat product, is actually, you know, it’s not as bad as the media has made it out to be. It’s like, if you’re gonna kill an animal, use all the parts of the animal, and the pink slime is perfectly digestible, nutritious, non-toxic.

BR: Is it prime cuts of beef? No. Is it harmful? Not as such.

CW: Yes, but it won’t kill you and it has calories. Now, I wouldn’t say the same of pink slime journalism. It’s basically that stuff that you see that looks like it’s a news article but is totally not a news article. There’s a wide variety of tactics that they use. They conceal their domain registration and so you can’t find out easily who owns it. I think one of the ProPublica articles I read had to track them down via tax records. They often use paid Facebook, Instagram, and you know their social media advertising. They send out, this is rather new, they send out unsolicited print newspaper mail outs. And there’s a lot of, for lack of a better term, there’s a lot of old people who look at something in print and they think, oh well this isn’t some weird thing on the internet this is a printed publication so this must be a real newspaper but in fact it’s got a bunch of biased or misleading or completely wrong news about political candidates and now when we talk about this we’re talking about stuff that’s originated usually from PACs or political campaigns I’m not talking about foreign influence agents.

BR: There’s plenty of that.

CW: There’s plenty of that, but that’s a separate animal. We’re not talking about Russia or Chinese disinformation. Now this kind of thing has a lot of content. There’s a lot of filler content, and it tries to make it look like a legitimate local news publication. Intel 471 has a white paper on this type of pink slime journalism. You can go to Intel 471, which is a cyber security site and you can download that if you’re curious. And they’re looking at it purely from a point of view of like how it’s affecting the 2024 election. So now this is kind of exploding this year because pink journalism and even the paper handouts that look like real newspapers with newsy typefaces and other filler articles, they’ve been around before, but this year, what do you think has made that explode?

0:14:30
BR: Politics?

0:14:31
CW: AI.

0:14:32
BR: Oh, there you go.

0:14:33
CW: Yeah, if you need 15 articles that are just fluffy, you know, whatever, you can have chat GPT do that in about 30 seconds now.

0:14:42
BR: Just spit them out and there they are.

0:14:43
CW: Yeah, so suddenly you have all these newspapers showing up in people’s mailboxes. Now, the companies that produce this, one of the biggest ones is Metric Media and there’s a number of other ones connected to Metric Media and it’s funded by mainly right-wing PACs, political PACs, and these are mainly based in Chicago and run by a fellow named Brian Timpone or is it, it might be Timpone, and his brother Michael Timpone. Now Brian is a former TV news reporter and I guess current shill for right-wing billionaires, but let me read you what Jennifer Smith Richards at ProPublica has to say. In an era of prolific pink slime sites, sophisticated AI concocted fakes, and outlandish conspiracy theories engulfing social media, the papers are a throwback to a low-tech disinformation tactic. Now these have been making the news, and I mean the legitimate news, like real newsrooms are writing about this. In many of the swing states, archdiocese of the Catholic Church have been reporting that stuff titled the Catholic Tribune or the Catholic Times have been showing up in mailboxes of their parishioners.

BR: I’m guessing these are not official publications of the Royal C?

CW: No, these are not so much stigmata red as they are pink slime. Now the church is concerned about this because number one, the church will go to lengths to say that they remain neutral in matters of politics. Sometimes they’ll talk about particular issues, but they don’t want to endorse a particular candidate.

0:16:30
BR: Wouldn’t want to lose that tax exempt status.

0:16:32
CW: Yeah, so to their credit, and we talked about before how the Catholic Church is often on the side of skepticism.

0:16:39
BR: I wouldn’t say often, occasionally, yes.

0:16:43
CW: We give them credit when it’s due. Fair enough. And so they’re putting out statements to warn their members that no, these papers are not affiliated in any way with the Catholic Church and they don’t want to see their flock falling for this and they also don’t like the PR aspect of it because I mean these are these are publications that have headlines like how many transgender operations on illegal immigrants has Harris performed you know and really baddie headlines and they don’t want people who even aren’t Catholics to come across this and think, oh the Catholic Church is kind of full of weirdos. So they don’t like the reputational damage. I wonder if they could sue for defamation or maybe it would be slander because it’s in print. Yeah so just something to consider if your friend or loved one, this is like the last chance I can tell you to look out for it because we’re almost at November 5th. But if one of your loved ones is waving around a paper that has crazy headlines, maybe look up pink slime journalism for them and try and educate them a little bit about the source.

BR: Every little bit helps.

CW: All right, well we’ve got a couple of things to talk about since it’s Halloween. We are releasing this, if all goes well, on Halloween. And there’s a popular myth about Halloween candy isn’t there?

BR: Well there are many certainly probably the the most famous notorious one is the Halloween sadists legend about the the poison Halloween candy.

CW: Yes we are going to talk to sociologist Joel Best about that it’s just sort of a snippet you’re getting a kind of a preview of another interview that we have coming out later. And then after that our main topic is Michael Coven on zombies. Now he’s a friend of yours with an encyclopedic knowledge of zombie movies.

0:18:34
BR: Encyclopedic film in general, as I mentioned in the show, I’ve known Michael for for quite a while. I run into him at folklore conferences now and then and yeah when I when I saw him talk on zombie films I was like this guy needs to be on the show. And part of it is that this is not a film podcast. There are lots and lots of them, but this one focused just on zombie and zombie films, and there are some interesting skeptical angles to it.

0:19:04
CW: Yes. And who doesn’t love a good zombie on Halloween?

(MUSIC)

0:19:07
BR: And we’re here with Joel Best, who is an emeritus professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware. He is a fellow Phi Beta Kappa and author of something like two dozen books and far more articles. I glanced at his CV and I think it ran to like 30 or 40 pages. I just finally, it’s like, I can’t even do this, but.

0:19:43
CW: Now, Ben and Joel, when did you guys first meet each other like in the real world?

0:19:48
Joel Best: I think it was about 10 years ago. We were both at a meeting of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research. I think it was the one in San Antonio.

0:19:59
BR: Yeah, you’re exactly right. You have a better memory than I do.

0:20:04
CW: And and Joel, your work goes way back to like the 1980s. Ben, had you been stalking him prior to that?

0:20:10
BR: Stalking is a weird word.

CW: Had you been a fan boy prior to that.

BR: Well, here’s here’s the thing, right? So I’ve been I’ve been doing sort of, for lack of a better term, organized skepticism, investigations, all the weird things I do for 20, 25 years now. And as you know, I cover a wide variety of things, urban legends, media literacy, weird stuff, and the strangest damn thing would happen is I’d be researching this and his name pops up and then on a totally different topic and there he is again, you know, and it’s just like, and that’s not true of most experts that I know. I have lots of, you know, lots of great books and this and that. And for the most part, the people that I follow and the experts in the field, they’re only in sociology, they’re only in folklore, they’re only in skepticism. But in his case, I just, everywhere I look, if there’s some fascinating topic, he’s written about it.

0:21:08
CW: So you should, so Joel, you really should be the go-to folklorist for all the newsrooms in America when they need to cover some sort of panic-adjacent topic. Can you tell us what your background is? You’re the best person to summarize what got you into folklore.

0:21:23
JB: To begin with, I’m not a card-carrying folklorist. I’m a sociologist, and I have been interested in lots of things that have to do with what we think are social problems and how social problems emerge when they do, why they do, and so on.

0:21:45
BR: Yeah, I saw on your website or one of them, there’s a quote from you which again I think is sort of a really succinct summary. You say, my writing focuses on understanding how and why we become concerned with particular issues at particular moments in time. While we find ourselves worried about road rage one year and identity theft a year or so later. I’ve written about the ways the bad statistics creep into public debates about dubious fears such as the mistaken belief that poison Halloween candy poses a serious threat to our kids. Which again is this is right right up my alley. This is why I was like so excited like we need to have Joel on to talk about this stuff. So this is super cool. I think the first time I ever really came across your name was in the Halloween sadist, which I referenced a second ago. And I know that back in 1983, you wrote a paper framing the contaminated treat stories as best understood as an urban legend. And it’s interesting because like in retrospect, like obviously, I mean, that’s, duh. It’s one of those things that in hindsight, it clearly falls right there. But how was it? How was it received and treated at the time?

0:22:57
JB: Yeah, this I got into this because when I was in graduate school, I thought I was going to specialize in deviant behavior. And one of the things that I did was I read a lot of autobiographies of drug addicts and robbers and people like that. And they were not very interesting books. And I realized that all of these people could explain why they did it. That addicts could explain why they were using drugs and robbers could explain why they were stealing and so on. And around this time people were very interested, this is like late 60s, very interested in the notion that maniacs were poisoning Halloween candy. And I started thinking, you know, I cannot imagine what the reason for anybody to do this would be. And I started talking to friends and I’d say, you know, I’m not sure this is true. And they got really outraged. They’d say, of course it’s true. Everybody knows it’s true. And when I started teaching, I continued to bring this up with students. And they were always outraged. And of course, this is true. You know, how could you say this? And for a long time, I was trying to figure out, how do you study this? Finally, I thought, well, I could look for reports. And the absence of reports in the news would be telling. And so that’s what I did.

0:24:24
BR: One thing that really strikes me about what you did is that, as you began by saying, you’re not a card-carrying folklorist, nor am I, as I’ve often said. And one of the great things about folklore is that when you go to folklore conferences or contemporary legend conferences, you do find a variety of disciplines. So they’re welcoming. I mean, again, I try and stay in my lane as much as possible.

0:24:50
JB: Absolutely. Yeah.

0:24:52
BR: But, I mean, it’s interesting, and before when we’ve had a folklorist, or we wouldn’t have folklorist on the show, I like to parse out what that means and why that’s important. It’s because traditionally, folklorists don’t care whether a legend is true. It doesn’t matter. The important thing is the transmission, how is it told, it’s different variants here and there, whereas, and this is sort of where as a lowercase folklorist, I love legends and stories and folktales and all this is interesting, but as a skeptic and as a critical thinker investigator, I want to know if it’s true or not. That’s one thing I really loved about what you did, and you do not just in that topic, but many others, is you say, hold on here. This is something that journalists should be covering but aren’t necessarily. Something that folklorists would cover as a legend or narrative but not necessarily concerning themselves with whether it’s true or not. And you cut through all that and said, okay, is this true? So, how did you find that out?

0:25:52
JB: My approach in the good old days, the New York Times used to publish annual index and it was so it was about oh I know it’s maybe three inches thick and and it was a wonderful index in that it would include Very short articles this article of a sentence or two would find its way to the index so I thought I’m gonna look at 25 years of this index and look up Halloween see what’s covered and you know covered. And it turned out that there was next to no mention of this happening. And I’m thinking, well, this will be a big news story. I wrote this up. I sent it off to a journal. The editor of the journal rejected it out of hand. That is, he did not send it out for review. He just said, oh, I, you know, I, you know, everybody knows. Basically, he said, everybody knows this is true. And so I thought…

BR: How dare you challenge conventional wisdom, sir? We will have none of that!

0:26:54
JB: Exactly. So I thought, okay, let’s make the case stronger. This was a pain in the neck. The three biggest cities, so New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. So I took the leading newspaper in each one and New York Times for New York had already done that and I picked the Chicago Tribune, which in those days I think had the biggest circulation in Chicago, and the LA Times. They wrote broadsheet papers. Neither one of them had an index that was worth a damn. So what I had to do was get microfilm and I read through the paper for November 1st, 2nd, and 3rd for 25 years. Okay, and you can do this really fast. I mean, you know, you just you just scan the headlines Did it have anything to do with Halloween? No, you know, but it was kind of a pain in the neck to do it old school. Well, this is this is what happens when you don’t have the internet you know, it turned out that when I was done I found a list of incidents and I defined an incident as It told me what town it was in and it told me how the trees had been contaminated. So razor blade in an apple in Buffalo would count. OK. And there weren’t very many of these. I mean, you know, in 25 years, three papers, there were about 100, maybe a little bit more than that. The other striking thing was that nobody was getting hurt. The typical story was, well, in Buffalo last week, somebody found a razor blade in an apple. OK. And so, you know, you’re thinking, gee, for something that is alarming – and in those days, Dear Abby had an annual warning that she published in her column saying, kids are dying left and right. But her exact, she didn’t say that, but that was the implication. And you just can’t be too careful, you need to check the treats and so on and so forth. And there was a case in Houston, Texas that made it into my sample. And this is a famous case, a guy named Ronald O’Brien took out a life insurance policy on his son and fed him a poison pixie stick and he died. And he was arrested, tried, convicted. He was executed in the state of Texas. He never came clean. But I assume that what he thought was that, you know, this happens all the time. This is going to be a perfect crime. Nobody would ever suspect a dad, you know, that kind of thing. But what was really interesting is that this case is in Houston, Texas, and it’s basically front or first three pages anyway, news in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and the LA Times. Okay, so you realize that if somebody actually poisoned a kid, it would be a big news story. And the absence of any other examples was very convincing. Now, actually, over the years, I have found five cases of deaths that were attributed to Halloween sadism. And a lot of times these get big play, you know, when they’re first reported. And then two or three days later, there is a correction, which comes out, you know, usually published on about page 87 of the paper, that says, oh, it turns out this was something else. Congenital heart problem, or one little boy got into his uncle’s heroin stash or whatever. So, you know, the point is, you can’t, I’m not saying that nobody’s ever poisoned a Halloween treat. I don’t know. You know, how could you prove that? But I can say that the press hasn’t covered it and I now I started when I started doing this 25 years ago It was 1958 and I’ve continued to update the research every year so I have you know, what is it 60 some years of of data.

CW: And when you started you were simply a graduate student in criminology and decided that it would well…

0:31:10
JB: Well when I started when I know when I started thinking about this, I was a professor because it took it took some years. I mean, I was a graduate student in the late 60s, and I didn’t get this. This got published in 1985. So time had flitted by. But but and I had to, you know, there was this thing, right? For a long time, I thought, well, you couldn’t ever study this. And then finally, I thought, oh, maybe there’s a way to do that. And then I had to get the paper rejected, had to expand the sample, you know, all this kind of stuff.

0:31:41
BR: Yeah, it seems like a sort of a moribund topic. I mean, both you and I have been quoted over the years, you far more than me, understandably and rightly so, by journalists, you know, here we are. And of course, every year it’s always, it’s always trying to get it sorted out. And then there’s always someone who’s saying, okay, well, maybe there’s a Helm and Kainey, you know, scare here, scare there?

0:32:02
JB: Yeah, what I really learned is how the press works because every year there’s some reporter who gets assigned to do a feature story on Halloween safety. And this poor person has no idea. He doesn’t know anything about Halloween safety. And so they go watch this nexus and they look up what people wrote about it last year. And there’s an excellent chance that I’m going to be recorded. I’ve given hundreds and hundreds of interviews. So they call me up and I give the same interview. I’ve been giving the same interview since 1985. And it just goes on and on. And every year it’ll get to be like the middle of October and I haven’t gotten a call and I think, well, okay, maybe this is the year that it’s going to die. And then the phone starts to ring.

(MUSIC)

0:32:53
CW: So I hope everybody can enjoy their candy a little bit more, knowing that there’s very, very, very little chance you’re gonna run into some poison or a razor blade or a hypodermic needle or what else would go in there?

0:33:22
BR: I don’t even know.

CW: Thumbtacks?

BR: I mean it’s also impractical and silly.

CW: I mean so I do like the memes where they say check your Halloween candy there could be the Spanish Inquisition in there and they’ve photoshopped something into a Snickers bar.

BR: Exactly.

CW: All right. Now let’s talk zombies.

(MUSIC)

0:33:43
All right. Well, today we are here with Mikel Kovan, who is a senior lecturer for film studies at the University of Worcester with a doctorate in folklore from Newfoundland’s Memorial University, where I’ve been, by the way, very nice place. He’s also the author of countless books and articles on folklore, including film folklore and urban legends. And as listeners of the show know, I love film, I love folklore, and I love urban legends. So right up my alley, he is a walking film encyclopedia and a genuine delight. Although I am disappointed that we have not as yet collaborated an article on Chupacabra horror films. Mikel, are you there?

0:34:34
Mikel Kovan: I am indeed. I didn’t know you wanted to collaborate on an article on Chupacabra films. I’m so down for that.

0:34:42
CW: Ben has a way of dropping things on people when they show up here. Surprise!

0:34:47
BR: Yes, well, have your people get back to my people and we’ll arrange that if you’re not busy.

0:34:52
MK: There’s always room for chupacabra.

0:34:54
BR: That’s what I love to hear. So actually, the last time that you and I hung out in person we were in Sheffield, Harlem at Sheffield, Harlem University in the UK, I think in 2023. You gave a talk, which I was like, I saw this on the program. It was when werewolf met Wendigo, a colonial love story. And it was just cool. I’m clearly apoplectic about it.

0:35:21
MK: Thank you.

0:35:22
BR: For listeners who weren’t there, explain it if you don’t mind.

0:35:25
MK: Well, it started off as an essay that was featured in a Blu-ray release of the three Ginger Snaps films. And I was given the remit to write on the third one, which is absolutely terrible, and tries to fuse the werewolf narrative of the Ginger Snaps franchise with the Wendigo of Native North American lore. And in researching for that little essay, I found that the connections were actually much stronger than I initially had suspected, that there is a strong correlation between Wendigo and werewolf narratives centering largely on the figure of the French-Canadian voyageur who would have encountered Algonquin peoples through the fur trade. And they come to the bush with their own narratives of Loup-Garou, the French werewolf of tradition and trying to find that commonality between the French colonialists and the Native North Americans of the Algonquin, finding it in this similarity of the figure of the Wendigo.

CW: For listeners who might not be completely familiar, can you describe what the Wendigo is a figure from Native North American, particularly Algonquin cultures, which it takes many different forms. The most prominent one is it’s a demon that manifests itself in periods of starvation. It’s one of those creatures that needs to constantly feed without ever feeling satisfied. It’s a consumer in that regard. Often it’s attributed to when in periods of extreme famine, people have resorted to cannibalism. And the end product of cannibalism is being turned into a wendigo, one of these creatures that is forever cursed to live on the fringes of society.

0:37:37
CW: That is very creepy.

MK: Yeah, that’s what I do. I do. Call me Dr. Creepy.

CW: Dr. Creepy.

0:37:44
BR: I should I want to just briefly touch on the last time we hung out we touched a box in a plague village in England. Mikel, can you sort of set the stage for those who who unfortunately weren’t there and weren’t able to be near a plague box.

0:38:06
MK: Apparently the plague was brought to this little community, whether it was enclosed that were in the box or something like that.

0:38:15
BR: Yes, that was the story.

0:38:17
MK: The curse of this box is that anybody who touches it will come down with plague. And so Ben and I, being the foolish boys that we are, we touched it.

0:38:27
CW: You guys were like, hold my beers. Did either of you get so much as a cold afterwards?

0:38:36
MK: No, no, I’m plague free.

BR: I, to be fair, I did experience some jet lag because I was flying back. So I, I’m guessing that’s attributable to jet lag instead of the plague. But it was it was and I have to say it was cool because we were doing this tour arranged by David Clark who actually now that I think about we had him on for The Crying Boy. We did yes. Because it was in his hometown we did some tours and it was just super fun. But yes this is, in case you’re wondering what folklorists get up to with their conferences, they tour plague villages and touch cursed boxes.

0:39:16
CW: So, well, see, that’s one of those crossovers where I can kind of, I can kind of be down with superstition when it also coincides with germ theory. Like, you know, don’t, don’t touch that blanket because the plague is on that blanket. It’s cursed because we just had a body wrapped in it that had the plague.

0:39:36
MK: Yeah.

0:39:37
CW: I believe in that curse. That is okay by me. I will not touch that blanket or that box or anything else. But I guess after a few hundred years, the germs had died out.

0:39:49
MK: You say that, but it’s probably a nice segue to just talking about zombies.

0:39:53
CW: No, that’s right. Zombie germs are a whole nother thing.

0:39:57
BR: That’s right, I forgot we’re gonna have them talk about zombie film. You forgot. You reminded us.

0:40:01
CW: You forgot about the zombies, Ben? How could you?

0:40:04
BR: You know, whatever.

0:40:05
BR: So, yeah, so one reason we wanted to have you on was I’d read a book chapter in one of my folklore books on zombie films. And I’ll be totally honest, I’ve never been that interested in zombies per se. I’m much more interested in chupacabras and Bigfoot and this and that. And zombies have always, for me it’s like time travel films, which as listeners know, I find tiresome because they’re do such mocking now. But, you know, we did a previous episode on Haitian zombies, the, you know, and we can touch on that as well. But I was really intrigued by your analysis and sort of zombie films and how they sort of speak to the era in which they’re made. And I’m like, I gotta have mine for this. So.

0:40:54
CW: Yeah, I went through that chapter as well. And I was impressed with the taxonomy you came up with. Cause I have two categories as a film goer. I know there’s slow zombies and fast zombies. But you broke it down in a much more categorized way. So the early, let’s start with the early and go towards the late. The first zombies you categorized in film were what?

0:41:22
MK: Were zombie slaves.

CW: Zombie slaves.

MK: Some degree of verisimilitude with the Haitian zombie tradition. resurrected dead people condemned to live out their afterlife in menial tasks like working in sugar mills or cutting down the sugar cane or something like that as effectively slave labor. Now, these become very different sources of horror for the Haitian than for the American even in the 1930s. Because for the Haitian, this is a culture that fought back against colonialism, that was the first black republic in the world, I want to say. Any Africanists could probably correct me on that. But as far as I’m aware, it’s the first black republic in the world. So the fear is not of encountering a zombie, the fear is in becoming a zombie, because we’ve just won our freedom and now all of a sudden for the rest of eternity, I’m going to be a slave. That’s the horror. The horror is not gut-munching Romero zombies.

0:42:45
CW: Yeah, and they don’t become a zombie slave by getting bit by another zombie. It’s more of the magical tradition that Ben and I have talked about. We actually had a show on the Haitian version of the zombie.

0:42:59
MK: Exactly. And so it’s a very different kind of tradition to where George Romero takes it. Now, the zombie slave motif more or less is the, certainly the dominant form of zombie narratives from about 1932 and White Zombie starring Bela Lugosi all the way through, I think even past Night of the Living Dead by Romero in 68, well into the 1970s. I think it’s after Dawn of the Dead in 1978 that the zombie properly becomes something different. So we can see that zombie slave motif running all the way through the 30s, 40s, 50s and throughout the 1960s. Now, often these narratives, the film narratives themselves, are about raising zombies to act as your own personal security detail, effectively, or to extract revenge on your behalf. So the person who resurrects the zombies is able to control them in some way and then ultimately loses control and they usually attack.

0:44:17
CW: Now, you mentioned in the chapter that they essentially no longer have souls. The idea is that a zombie is a body without a soul. Is that correct?

MK: Yeah, that is correct.

CW: The magician or the what is the word for that? Bokar?

MK: Bokor.

CW: Bokor, like hoards them, like takes their souls and it’s kind of a power thing.

0:44:38
MK: Yeah, keeps it in a jar in their mad scientist laboratory.

0:44:43
CW: See, that’s fascinating. I never thought of a zombie as the inverse of a ghost. But a ghost is a soul without a body, and then a zombie is a body without a soul.

0:44:55
MK: Now, if we’re really going to get into the folklore nitty gritty of it, the American folklorist Stith Thompson wrote this remarkable compendium of an index to folklore motifs. I think it’s eight volumes, and the last volume is an index to the index. It gives you an idea of how huge this thing is.

0:45:19
CW: Ben, you must own this.

0:45:21
BR: It is a whole thing. I have parts of it. It is a whole thing, yes.

0:45:25
MK: There’s a, I’m assuming, illegal website, a Russian website, which has digitalized the entire motif index, which is wonderful for me and my teaching when I get students to look at films looking for these different kinds of motifs. But there are two key categories I want to draw your attention to. Category D, as in dog, D are motifs pertaining to, quote unquote, the dead, and category G represents ogres. Now within the folklore motif hunting world that sometimes we inhabit, ghosts and the dead are linked. We’re dealing with spiritual or monsters of spirit rather than monsters of form. So vampires, for example, are categorized under D as opposed to any of the other letters. Whereas the ogre figure of category G manifests itself in many different kinds of fairy tales. So things like the witch, the ogre, the cannibal, even the devil, all figure under this singular category of G. And what that D to G relationship is, tends to be, like I said, with the dead, spiritual, or monsters of spirit, whereas the G, the ogres, are monsters of physical form. They’re corporeal, they’re physical. Does that make sense?

0:47:13
BR: It does. Let me follow up on that. I mean, so one of the distinctions that I hadn’t really thought of until I read your chapter and sort of saw more of the work there is the distinction between revenants and basically summoned entities. So again, revenants would be vampires, for example, zombies that were originally human and then died and then were brought back and therefore assume human form. And, you know, in my Chupacabra book, I begin by talking about some of the different versions, because of course the Chupacabra is inherently a vampire, but it’s not a revenant. It was never human, so that’s why it’s not seen in human form. But when we talk about these sorts of entities, right, and so, you know, in other contexts, we would have people who might summon supernatural entities to do their bidding. So, in case you’re talking about Bokors raising zombies to work on their plantations and to do their bidding, contrast that, for example, with Djinn, genies and demons that are summoned to do their bidding and controlled, for example, the Ring of Solomon in the case of Djinn and things like that. How do you parse those out?

0:48:27
MK: This is where autism has a role to play in all of this, is I need those categories. I need there to be very clear borderlines here. It depends on the function of the monster in this regard. So Dracula, for example, going by Bram Stoker’s novel, when Dracula is able to influence across time or across space without directly coming into contact, able to influence people, that’s a category D, the dead. Whereas when he’s there as a blood-drinking physical monster that needs to be staked through the heart, then he’s more G as an ogre.

CW: See again, I’ve just had two categories. There’s sexy dead things, which are vampires and non sexy dead things, which are zombies.

MK: Yeah, but but have you seen Nosferatu? I mean, I know Robert Eggers has got a remake coming out, but there is absolutely nothing sexy about Count Orloff.

CW: That is definitely not a sparkly vampire.

MK: Yeah, definitely no sparkles. Yeah. My girlfriend just said, yeah, but he is tall.

0:49:41
BR: Well, there’s that. I can fix him.

0:49:46
BR: Well, I’m thinking like if one is going to create or summon or revive slaves or workers, I personally would prefer a djinn that can grant wishes or fly or things like that, as opposed to a zombie who works a lot. I mean, and of course, in the case of Haiti, and again, I touched on this in the previous episode, the country is just wracked with all sorts of earthquakes and cholera and all sorts of things.

0:50:21
MK: The fact is that in Haiti specifically, labor is very cheap. So it would actually be more work to create a zombie than to just pay your staff. But it isn’t an involved, well, I mean, it’s an involved process, obviously. But from the Haitian perspective, it’s about control.

0:50:44
BR: Right. It’s about colonialism.

0:50:45
MK: And who controls our lives. Right. right? Whether it’s the Loa of Vaudan, the folk religion of Haiti, or whether it’s God within the more Roman Catholic perception of it, that it’s about control. And this you can trace all the way back to slavery days and the French colonial rule of the island, through fear, through fear of being turned into a zombie, are able to then control a population to do your bidding, as Papa Doctor Valier was doing in the 50s, 60s and into the 70s, then Baby Doctor Valier, his son, carrying that on into the 1980s. Their secret services were known as the Tonton Macoute, were used zombie and voodoo imagery in order to terrorize the people into subservience. You know, the Nazi did it one way, whereas the Duvaliers did it a different way. But effectively, what we’re talking about is masters of control.

0:51:56
CW: See, I found it fascinating in the article or I should say chapter that I read, you draw this through line from slavery and subjugation in the Caribbean Islands to zombie films of today. And that is a fascinating evolution to go through. Now, you mentioned that the zombie as slave, the slave zombie motif, the type of zombie, zombie lasted all the way through to the 70s. What was the second evolution after you’ve got this slave population of zombies, and you turn them into your security detail, then what’s the next type of zombie that you’ve observed springing from that?

0:52:40
MK: Well, there are variations in that motif, as it were, because sometimes it’s for a labor force, sometimes it’s raising zombies as an army. I’m trying to remember the name of the film. I believe it’s Revenge of the Zombies from the 1940s with John Carradine, where he plays a Nazi trying to raise a zombie army that will be truly impossible to defeat, right? You know, that perfect army. And this was made during the Second World War. So, there’s that kind of, not just, that brings us into the Nazi zombie motif, which I’ll talk about in just a second. But then into the 70s, you’ve got something like the black exploitation film Sugar Hill, where Sugar Hill, who’s the lead character, uses voodoo in order to raise a zombie army in order to extract revenge on the mobsters who want her to sell them her Nightclub, which is very successful a successful independent black businesswoman. Of course the mafia want in to control it. So she raises this this Army of zombies to to defeat them as well as they murdered her boyfriend So there’s the revenge theme there as well.

0:54:02
CW: That is going on my list to watch right away.

0:54:04
MK: Oh, it’s it’s so cool. It’s so cool. One of the the voodoo queen in Sugarhill is played by I don’t have my notes in front of me, I’m afraid. The I grew up watching the Jeffersons as I’m sure both of you did as well. And if you remember, George Jefferson’s mother was this sourpuss old lady who, poor Weezy, could never do anything right.

0:54:33
CW: I remember, yeah, the classic mother-in-law, yeah.

0:54:36
MK: Classic mother-in-law. Well, she plays the voodoo queen in Sugarhill, which I just thought was really cool.

0:54:43
CW: Oh, nice.

0:54:44
MK: Yeah, yeah. It’s nice seeing, that’s what I like mostly about Blaxploitation films, is these characters that in my very white experience have encountered mostly by television in the 1970s actually had these big film careers in black exploitation films. So it’s nice seeing that kind of connection. Anyway, on to zombies, Nazi zombies.

0:55:09
CW: Nazi zombies.

0:55:10
MK: Yes. So Revenge of the Zombies, as I’ve already mentioned, is there from the 1940s. But come the late 70s, you have a rise of a few European, Spanish and Italian in particular, films about Nazi zombies protecting their gold. So Indiana Jones type archaeologists discover this big cache of Nazi gold, and they’re about to take it home, but then the living dead come up who have been sworn to protect the horde as it were. That becomes a bit of a motif.

0:55:49
CW: So zombies sort of as guardians or as guardians, like curse, like the cursed mummy, if you touch the mummies treasure, it’ll come after you.

0:55:58
MK: Exactly.  I know what you’re gonna ask, and and I avoid this this question like the plague.

CW: Okay

0:56:07
MK: And and that is are mummies zombies?

CW: Yes. Yes. That was my question and and I want you to avoid the question like the plague And and just touch on it Like with that without any fear

0:56:18
MK: I want to keep them separate because you know, it’s it’s my own neurodivergency that wants to, you know, keep my category straight, you know, okay, mummies, stay in your own lane, don’t cross over into zombies. But I also recognize they may very well be a type of zombie. But you really, it’s really not until the early 2000s, I want to say, or mid 2000s even, when a unknown Norwegian filmmaker by the name of Tommy Virkula creates probably the best non-Romero zombie film and that’s Dead Snow. I’m not sure if any of you have watched Dead Snow.

0:57:02
BR: No, I’m thinking of Near Darkers. Anyway, no, Dead Snow.

0:57:06
CW: I have not seen it but the still that you had in your chapter made it look very scary.

MK: Oh, no, no, no, no. And I was watching with my daughter, actually, and she was a good litmus test because she loves scary horror movies. She likes the gore, but she really loves to be scared. And it’s sort of my challenge to find her something that will actually frighten her. I’ve succeeded a couple of times, not all.

CW: Okay.

MK: Anyway, it starts off, I could see her getting very uncomfortable because the suspense was building up. It’s about a group of six, seven, eight university friends who go off to a remote cabin for a skiing weekend, and they discover this hoard of Nazi gold only for the Nazis to pop up out of the snow and proceed to literally tear them apart. Because while the first half is kind of building up the suspense, the second half is, and I love this word, splatstick.

0:58:05
BR: Splatstick.

0:58:11
CW: I’m thinking of like Ricky O, the Japanese film.

0:58:14
MK: Yeah, yeah. It is over the top gory, but played for laughs. Like using somebody’s intestines, you know, stretching somebody’s intestines out, so somebody else riding on a skidoo gets, what do you call it, clotheslined, you know, from their intestines. And it’s just, it’s piss yourself funny, the second half of the film. And as great as that film is, a few years later, Virkula came back with Dead Snow 2: Red or Dead is the subtitle of it, where the Nazi zombies are unstoppable and they’re making their way to across Norway and they can only be stopped as if they resurrect an army of dead communist Russian Soviet victims of the Second World War to resurrect them to defeat the Nazis. As you do and it just becomes so much fun of Zombies trying to out zombie one another as only you know dead Nazis and dead Soviets could could do.

BR:  I’ll have to look in my my back are my back archive issues of Fangoria I’m sure there were some some pretty heavy heavily heavily illustrated features talking about.

0:59:38
MK: There must be, because they’re such fun films. And that pretty much was the last word on Nazi zombies, I think, because where could you take it after red or dead?

0:59:50
CW: You need to get some dead clowns in there somehow, Ben.

0:59:55
BR: I’ll see what I can do. But actually, first, I want to take us on a quick tangent about the Golem. I know you’ve researched that really it honestly deserves its own episode but it is sort of zombie adjacent I would think although you’re you’re the expert. Can you sort of talk about some of the the relations there?

1:00:16
MK: I’ve never really seen the golem as a zombie type figure.

CW: He likes to keep the monsters separate Ben.

1:00:28
MK: The thing with the Golem is the Golem was never human. The Golem is not a resurrection. Well, it’s used revenantially, if I can.

1:00:41
BR: Revenantially? We’re quoting new words. Revenantially. I love it. Yes.

1:00:46
MK: Because the Golem in most of the legends is created to protect the Jewish ghetto and is there as a figure of protection, not necessarily a figure for revenge. So its usage, its function in these stories strikes me as being very, very different to what the zombies used for, even the zombie slave.

1:01:10
BR: Well, for example, I would look at, I mentioned earlier djinn, right? So you have, you have genies and Jyn that have been summoned. And sometimes they’re sent for revenge. There’s lots of stories of Jyn doing horrible things, but oftentimes they are protectors, like the golem. They protect treasure. They protect things like that. So obviously there’s lots of currents and crossovers.

1:01:31
MK: Of course.

1:01:31
BR: Welcome to folklore, folks.

1:01:32
MK: But you’ve also dealing with Djinn being sort of category D and Goems being more category G. I think.

BR: I can see that.

MK: I don’t know. I’m making this up as I go.

1:01:46
BR: I didn’t mean to get us off too far on a tangent. I just wanted to hear your thoughts on that.

1:01:48
MK: Well, see, there’s another figure, and I’ve been playing with this figure in my head for a while. I haven’t done anything with it yet. There is seemingly exclusively in Estonian folklore, the figure of the krit, K-R-I-T-T. The krit is made out of whatever the peasant has to hand, not necessarily Frankenstein’s creature, but you know, old bits of rusted farm equipment or what have you, you then sell your soul to the devil for the magic word to bring the crit to life, and the crit will follow your directions to a T. And it’s great, you know, fantasy for the peasant thinking somebody else could do this work, you know, so long as I sell my soul, which given the back-breaking work of the medieval peasant, you know, one can understand why that would be attractive. Now the thing with the crit, though, is it will keep, much like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, if you remember that story, where unless you give the kritt direct instructions to do something, it will keep doing what you’ve told it to do forever.

1:03:14
CW: I actually, early on, wanted to bring up the brooms from Sorcerer’s Apprentice. I’m so glad you have touched on them.

1:03:20
MK: So the kritt, in order for it to be destroyed, must be given an instruction that is impossible to carry out. So in the one film example, I can give you in a moment, the kritt is told to build a ladder out of bread and it just can’t compute with that and it explodes.

1:03:48
CW: That’s such a trickster thing. I mean, that’s, I mean, just the idea of a creature that fulfills your command in a way that can be very problematic or lead to circumstances you did not foresee that sort of flavored like a gin reminds me of the way a tricky djinn would fulfill a wish. Sure. In a way you didn’t anticipate. And then the the way that you have to defeat the the kritt or destroy the crit with an unfulfillable command reminds me both of the robots in an old the original series Star Trek episode. And the mesies in the episode and the Mie Siekes in Rick and Morty. So it’s all over pop culture.

1:04:32
MK: Absolutely. Now, I encountered the Kritt for the first time in a wonderful, wonderful Estonian film called November. It’s a stunningly beautiful film and also very, very funny. But where the Kritt becomes kind of a tragic figure is the second kritt that’s created in the film is made out of ice. And the way that this kritt is destroyed, is it’s allowed to melt, and its voice becomes part of the voice of the stream. And just kind of very beautiful. It’s sad.

1:05:10
CW: That is, yeah, that’s like Rutger Hauer.

1:05:15
MK: It’s beautiful. Yeah, yeah, it’s very Rutger Hauer. Tears in the Rain, yeah.

1:05:20
CW: Tears in the Rain, yeah.

1:05:22
BR: You know, I was just going to say, when we’re talking about these sort of, these ways of tricking an otherwise powerful thing, I jump back for a second to one of my favorite TV series, The Prisoner, from 1967. And there’s one episode called The General in it, the Prisoner played by Patrick McGowan. Basically, he faces a supercomputer that can answer any question. And in the end, spoiler alert for those who haven’t seen it in the past 50 years, he asked the supercomputer “why.” And at this point, steam starts coming out and the whole thing explodes because the ultimate unanswerable question. So that struck me as being relevant to that.

1:06:06
MK: Now, this should tie us back into zombies a little bit. Through my curiosity about the Kritt in folklore, and where else could I encounter it? November was made 2017, I believe. And there’s a 2022 film, another Estonian film, called simply Kritt. Now I searched around and managed to locate a copy. We’ll just say I procured a copy of the film.

1:06:38
BR: Whatever. It fell off a truck. You know a guy who knows a guy.

1:06:44
MK: And it’s presented more of as a children’s film, but it’s a very, very dark children’s film. It’s about two kids who are sent off to grandma’s house because their parents don’t want to deal with them over summer vacation or something like that. And they accidentally kill grandma and they end up resurrecting her as a kritt.

1:07:11
CW: Oh my goodness.

BR: Wow.

MK: It’s pretty dark. But again, played mostly for laughs, as it were. But there you have the kritt being made out of a resurrected dead body, tying it back in with zombies.

1:07:13
CW: That sounds like the exception to the rule where the kritt becomes a revenant for that one instance.

1:07:19
BR: I want to circle back to White Zombie, although, you touched some on it, it’s sort of one of the, it’s interesting because in some way it subverts the Haitian zombie tropes that we talked about. Can you sort of place White Zombie in the context of the zombie films?

1:07:57
MK: Well it was the first, technically zombie film. So, any patterns it created, it more or less established on its own. And one of the issues when it comes to white zombie is the question of who is the White Zombie of the title. I’ve read a number of things about white zombie, some of which argue that Bela Lugosi Legosi is playing a black Haitian, not necessarily in blackface, but with makeup features on. I’ve never really seen that. And that it is the young woman that murdered Lejean, who is Bella Legosi’s character, she’s turned into a zombie so she can be his sex slave. Basically basically the narrative of the film. So is she the white zombie of the title or is he the white zombie, depending on whether or not we’re going to read his character as being black or white. And so on the one hand, it’s a warning about white people to stay away from Haiti because, or the Caribbean islands as a whole, because, you know, black lust being what it is, they will turn you into sex slaves, the so-called fate worse than death. Or is Murder L’Agent the white zombie of the title? And it’s a warning about for white people to stay away from black mysticism, because it will just corrupt you and turn you into a mean dude.

1:09:38
CW: Either way, it’s a cautionary tale or trying to be. And that makes me think of the parallel between rumors today of, you know, be careful, you know, with young white women should be careful traveling to mysterious, darker countries because you could end up, you know, abducted into the slave trade for, you know, human trafficking and such.

1:10:00
MK: White slave, white slavery.

1:10:01
CW: Yeah, exactly. Now, I’m curious as to the metamorphosis of the slave security detail into the army of zombies, because that’s more getting to what we’re used to if we play video games where we see zombies, or if we just understand zombies as a modern trope of like this unstoppable horde and I’m even thinking of like Game of Thrones technically the White Walkers wouldn’t have been zombies because they were never actually human or were they? I’m trying to remember the way the book explained.

BR: No I think they were yeah because they raised them.

CW: Well the White Walkers were the ones who would touch the the babies or the the human dead and no wait.

BR: I should not try I’m not trying to out nerd you, Celestia. I will fail.

1:10:52
CW: I’m getting it wrong. The White Walkers were abducted as babies and turned into White Walkers, and never really died in the process. But the dead that they raised, the dead army that was raised in Game of Thrones, were zombies from the grave. And I know you didn’t get that far into your zombie research, there’s just so much. But that’s that’s one of the categories you outlined is the zombie army. And I’d like to hear more about that and how that came about.

1:11:20
MK: Actually, Victor Halpern, who did White Zombie in 32, followed up a few years later with Revolt of the Zombies, I believe it’s called. And there you have probably the first the zombie army gets a mention about a megalomaniac dictator who wants to have a zombie army because they’re impossible to kill, right? They’re already dead. How can you kill something that’s already dead? So, they are perfect. If they bleed, they don’t notice they’re bleeding. They’re not going to feel pain or anything like that. They’re just automatons. And it becomes, for the Second World War, a great way of characterizing the image of the Nazi, right? The image of the inhuman killer that is relentless, always marching forward kind of figure. So it becomes a useful motif, I think, in that regard, as a way of dehumanizing the enemy.

1:12:27
CW: Yeah, it sounds logical and it sounds like it. So, I mean, not necessarily consciously, but zombie movies that came out during wartime kind of were a bit of propaganda, helping people to sort of wrap their heads around, you know, we can’t think of the enemy as human. They are a soulless mass of army people that we just have to plow through.

1:12:49
MK: Exactly. Yeah.

1:12:50
BR: Well, in your chapter, you say something interesting, many interesting things, but one of them was you talked about the sense of place and how place of zombie film and setting sort of informs the type of zombies, obviously, their motivation and so on. And you write, it is not a coincidence that most of these films are produced during Republican administrations in the United States, whether it is the Reagan-Bush years or the George Bush years, these films reveal a cynicism towards the American military’s experimentation and transparency, which I thought was really kind of insightful. I mean, I’m familiar, of course, with George Romero and the sort of the consumerism and satire and this and that, but I hadn’t really sort of – I hadn’t really thought about, you know, the zombies in those contexts. Can you talk about that?

1:13:42
MK: To some extent. And really that’s a post 9-11 phenomenon, I think, because of course Night of the Living Dead is during Johnson’s administration just before, what’s his face, Tricky Dicky was elected. And Dawn of the Dead was made during the period of Carter. So, maybe I was wrong in that assessment. But certainly in the post 9-11 environment, there is one in particular zombie film which I don’t want to mention even because it’s so repugnant from an ideological perspective. But it’s O-Z-O-M-B-I-E. Can you see where this one’s going?

BR: Hmm.

1:14:29
CW: O-Zombie sounds like zombies that get a hold of a weight loss drug and all lose a lot of pounds.

MK: No, that would be zero zombies. It’s Bin Laden as a zombie.

1:14:41
CW: Oh, Bin Laden as a zombie. Oh, that’s right. I do remember reading that part. That’s an uncomfortable notion.

1:14:53
MK: Well, I mean what what comes through in the film, I mean, it’s not a very good film is That the enemy is completely faceless and so it’s easy to dehumanize it, right? It just becomes well video game targets. They’re not human. It doesn’t matter if we shoot him in the head or burn them alive or whatever.

1:15:20
CW: My mind is going to that famous photograph of the the prisoner at Guantanamo who had his face covered in some sort of black bag and was being electrocuted by American forces. Do you remember that?

MK: Vaguely. But yeah, it was a Guantanamo or…

BR:  Abu Ghraib, I think.

MK: Abu Ghraib. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:15:40
CW: Yeah, it was someplace with enhanced interrogation techniques. Yeah.

1:15:44
MK: Yeah, yeah. Good old fashioned electro shock. So it becomes easy to do that. You know, I always think about the mask on the condemned, whether it’s during torture or execution, you know, who’s that actually for? You know, the person on the receiving end of the torture or the execution have to have their humanity denied in order for those who are carrying it out to complete their job. This got heavy all of a sudden.

1:16:21
BR: It did. Let’s circle back to the different ways in which zombies are made. We touched briefly on, for example, the Haitian zombies, the original ones, and we can briefly touch on the Serpent and the Rainbow and Wade Davis and all that because we already discussed it to some extent in the previous episode. But yeah, I mean, presumably there’s more than one way to make a zombie. So what are some of the in the zombie genre?

1:16:48
MK: Well, the first kind of, we’re talking about the resurrected dead as gut-munching, unstoppable ghouls. That’s really the invention of George Romero with Night of the Living Dead, although significantly, as a point of trivia, I guess, the word zombie is never used in Night of the Living Dead. They are referred to simply as ghouls. So the, you know, are they technically zombies or not? We don’t know. Um, they eventually Romero says he starts using the zed word. Uh, anyway, there is no explanation given. There is no explanation given in Dawn of the Dead or Day of the Dead. Most of the Romero films, and this is I think part of their strength, is we don’t get an explanation. Well, how did this happen? It doesn’t matter how it happened, it’s happening, and we have to deal with it. That’s what these films are about. The why is pointless. That’s unsatisfactory for a lot of screenwriters, particularly people who follow like screenwriting manuals, where you need the backstory there. You don’t actually, but you know, according to screenwriting 101, you do. So it needs to be explained in some way, whether that be to a, often it’s a biochemical weapon that accidentally gets released. That’s there in the Resident Evil films and the Resident Evil game. It’s there in Ozombie. It’s there in a number of them. Or it can be due to a pollution spill, a toxic waste spill, which is there in one of the earliest of these kinds of films. It goes by two names. It’s a Spanish film made in England. It’s known as The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue. I think it’s also known as Let Sleeping Corpses Lie or something like that, which is a great title, either or. But there it’s an environmental spill that causes the dead to awaken or a toxic spill of some sort. It’s given the explanation in that way.

1:19:00
CW: You know, personal preference, I’ve always kind of enjoyed the zombie films that just do the barest amount of explaining, like you hear the narrator, who’s always focused on surviving day to day, he just said, Well, in the days before the virus, you know, blah, blah, blah. But now I do this and now I have to scavenge and da, da, da. So it’s just like the days…

1:19:20
MK: But you don’t even need the virus.

1:19:21
CW: Yeah.

1:19:22
MK: You know?

1:19:23
CW: It’s just the way it is.

1:19:24
BR: But you have to have some mechanism just from a narrative point of view. I mean, if you’re going to posit there’s this whole world and there’s us and there’s them and there’s the zombies and this is what they do, you have to have some mechanism by which they can either be defeated or not, right?

1:19:39
MK: No, I disagree. And Romero’s films, Romero’s films are evidence to that. You don’t need that explanation. How did they know?

BR: But you have to, but you have the the characters themselves have to either know or find a way to at least potentially defeat the zombies.

MK: Sure. Shoot them in the head.

BR: What if they have more than one head?

CW: I’ve never seen that.

BR: You’ve never?

CW: Yeah. Yeah, there’s no Hydra zombies.

BR: In fact, Celestia, excuse me, there are several people who have two heads. There was the the the the girls I think they’re in Indiana, I think they’re still alive. Let’s not bring the whole show on on heads.

CW: Let’s not dehumanize conjoined twins here.

BR: Never mind, you can cut that part out.

1:20:28
CW: Well, I got to say that the previous scholarship I have read about zombies has consisted pretty much of Max Brooks, who talks about, I don’t know, have you read his work or seen any of his?

1:20:39
MK: I have.

1:20:39
CW: He uses zombies as sort of an opposite example of like, it’s people without society, and zombies, the breakdown of society, that zombies as a massive force, as a giant horde, cause is the scariest thing to him. And it kind of makes you appreciate what we do have as an organized society, you know, people who can cooperate, people who can form together and divide labor and divide skills and function. And I was wondering about what your perspective is on that, because you’re bringing all this historical information about the creation of zombies as a type.

MK: Sure. I think Romero’s Land of the Dead, well, lots of people didn’t like it for whatever reason. I think it’s a film of tremendous merit, which shows that in this post-apocalyptic world, you’re still going to get this imposition of capitalist society with, you know, those who are wealthy or who can grab as much wealth as they can in the chaos, can barricade themselves into what they think are utopic high-rise buildings. J.G. Ballard in his novel and Ben Wheatley film High Rise also shows that as well to some extent. Whereas those who are left outside of the grand apartment building, those who can’t afford it, have to fend for themselves against not only the hordes of the dead, but also each other as well, living in that scavenger kind of world. But as a point of identification in that film, it’s not so much the paramilitaries who are running around with their guns, it’s actually Big Daddy, the zombie that’s starting to learn and starting to recognize, actually we outnumber them. They cannot stop us as a kind of, dare I say, left-wing uprising against capitalism. And so I find it from Land of the Dead to be almost optimistic. You know, the sky towers will fall. They’re not going to be protected in Trump Tower when we come for them.

CW: See, and in that scenario, are we the zombies, but and that it goes all the way back to enslavement like you mentioned is the original first mover.

BR: Okay, well this has been fascinating and I say that as a film buff and a folklorist and all sorts of things, so this has been super cool. Thanks again for joining us and conveying your expertise. Now, so in the realm of zombie films, what are some of your favorite and or strangest and or overlooked, you know, you’ve never heard of this, but you need to check this out in terms of zombie films. You’ve mentioned a few, but for people who are doing a Halloween zombie-o-rama, what else should they add to their list?

1:24:01
MK: Most of my recommendations would be fairly standard, like Night of the Living Dead, like Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Land of the Dead, Diary, and I can never remember the last one because it’s terrible. But you know, the Romero zombie films, I certainly would always recommend. This isn’t so much an obscure film as an obscure reading. I have coming out, hopefully within the next couple of months, another chapter in a collection on zombie films, talking about one of my favorite horror films of the last 10 year, Get out, The Jordan Peele film, as a zombie film. It’s so rooted within the idea of the the white pecor again and the re-enslavement of African Americans. I find quite fascinating. So I would always include that as a zombie film as well.

1:25:04
BR: And you’ve talked about the crossover between black exploitation and zombies.

1:25:10
MK: Yeah, but I don’t consider Jordan Peele’s Black Exploitation though.

1:25:15
BR: I’m just hearkening back to the one you mentioned earlier.

1:25:19
MK: In terms of perversity, I think the Italian film by Andrea Bianchi, known probably most famously as Burial Ground from 1981, also known as Knights of Terror, Le Notte di Terrore, his original Italian title, is in terms of perversity, like right up there. It features a character who’s supposed to be a young boy, not quite sure how old he is, but he sort of seems like he’s a 10 year old, but he’s still being nursed by his mother. But he’s played by an obviously late 20s, which are the politically correct term here, person of smaller stature.

CW: Oh, they got a little person to pretend to be a ten year old.

1:26:06
MK: He’s a little person. Okay. If he’s ten, but keep in mind he’s awfully infantilized as well. And it isn’t just the fact that this is a truly annoying character. We root for the fact when he gets bitten and becomes a zombie. But his mother is so overcome with grief, she tries to nurse or to soothe with her breast this zombie child of hers, which I’m just going to leave as sort of a dot dot dot. You can you can anticipate where this this film goes. It’s just like, I don’t know if I can say this, but what the f***?

1:26:48
CW: You’ve set the stage quite well. Okay. That’s an interesting one.

1:26:55
MK: Hmm. Yeah. Bianchi’s films are very much WTF films.

1:26:59
BR: And this is not a John Waters film.

MK: No, no, no.

BR: They probably know each other and hang out. I would guess.

CW: Those sound like a few good recommendations to throw on the pile for various different reasons. I never even put that together until you mentioned Get Out by Jordan Peele. And have you heard any interviews from him that maybe he’s consciously drawing on all the history of zombie films from the 30s and 40s? Or do you think he’s just doing his own thing and it just happens to parallel up like that?

MK: As an academic, as a film academic in particular, I have learned the hard way to not put too much stock in what filmmakers say their work is about. I prefer let the film speak. And if I can interpret it in some bonkers way, then I do. But directorial intention has never been an important facet for me.

1:28:04
CW: It lives in its own universe. It’s not something that you have to tie completely. That allows people to enjoy the films of Roman Polanski. If you just take the director right out of it and you enjoy the thing as its own thing.

1:28:17
MK: That’s a strange connection to make, but I’ll go with it.

1:28:20
BR: So speaking of which, you have lots of projects, you have lots of interests. Number one, where can we find you on social media? People want to hear more about you and your work. And what else are you working on?

1:28:35
MK: I’m not terribly active on social media. I try to keep it only for like actual friends rather than just sort of random connections. But I am on Instagram. I believe I do have an X as well as a threads account, but I never check it. I’m always open to emails. If somebody wants to talk about some aspect I’ve written on or something like that, I’m always happy to chat. If you Google my name, contacts, connections will present themselves.

1:29:08
CW: Okay.

1:29:09
BR: And if you’re not smart enough to Google his name and find it, then you probably shouldn’t be contacting him. I’m just saying.

1:29:14
MK: Oh yeah, there’s that too.

1:29:16
BR: So, Celestia, before we go, is there any way that we could add to our intro him saying in terms of perversity? I love the way he phrased that, the syncopation.

CW: He said it twice too, yeah.

1:29:30
BR: He did. So, see if we can cut that and add it to the intro. That’d be great.

CW: I’ll send it to you for your voicemail sound. So yeah, thank you so much for joining us. I had a blast.

MK: Cool. Cool.

(MUSIC)

1:29:43
CW: All right, thanks for hanging out with us everybody. I know that was a long one. We had a lot of content. And enjoy the rest of your autumn. Enjoy Halloween. Try to enjoy Election Day if for no other reason it’ll make everything stop in terms of this news landscape. Are you a little bit burned out on political stuff?

BR: Yes.

CW: And that’s all he’s saying folks. Alright everybody, take care.

BR: Bye-bye.

 

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1:30:31
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1:31:22
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1:31:54
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