5.3 - ZombEaster 2026 pt 1: Night of the Living Dead (1968)

It's Spring time at Speaking Cinema and we all know what that means. That's right. It's another theme month. Welcome heathens and heretics to the inaugural Zombeaster. This month we'll be covering three zombie classics from some of cinema's most celebrated filmmakers. And what better way to kick off an ode to the zombie film than covering the granddaddy of them all; George A. Romero's 'Night of the Living Dead'. What happens when a group of ragtag filmmakers from Pittsburgh get their hands on some money and gear? Well, you get a film that feels just as relevant today as it did nearly 60 years ago. Topics include the incredible performance of Duane Jones, the film's deep social commentary (even if it isn't what the filmmakers intended) and why this film still holds up after all these years. So kick back and let the Zombeaster season into your hearts. This is George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead!

Like the episode? Leave us a comment, or send us an email at SpeakingCinemaPodcast@gmail.com and let us know what you would like to see with this new iteration of Speaking Cinema!

Thank you for listening! 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

The year is 1968, and a ragtek group of survivors barricade themselves in an old farmhouse to remain safe from a horde of fleshy and ghouls that are ravaging the country. This week we're talking about the modern zombie, the early indie film, and the 60-year legacy is still casts a shadow to this day. So board up the windows, light the Molotov cocktails, and pass me another round of human flesh. This is George Aramaro's Knight of the Living Dead.

SPEAKER_03 1:02

Doing great, Adam. I am so stoked to cover this movie with you guys.

SPEAKER_00 1:08

I uh I gotta say though, I know you got some trepidation about it. Oh, do I? Oh boy, do I. My my fiancee, my very Catholic family, my very Catholic aunt, who is a part of the Catholic Daughters, who I'm hoping that nobody in that group gets to listen to this episode, because that's gonna be that's gonna be a fun conversation, man. Uh, Fran, what does your nephew do again? Oh, it's great. You know, he does his podcast with his friends. It's so wonderful and wholesome. Yeah, they're they're doing a segment called Zomb Easter. Oh, for God's sakes! Adam, you're supposed to be the normal one of the bunchy is, and now you're doing this shit. Love you, thief.

SPEAKER_02 1:50

In your defense, so much. In your defense, we did hold you at gunpoint. You did, yes. You absolutely do.

SPEAKER_03 1:57

You guys can't the listener can't see that, but we all have guns pointed at Adam through our riverside FM screens right now.

SPEAKER_00 2:04

Zombies are love it, love it, absolutely love it. Great idea, guys. Uh terrific. Please don't fucking kill again. Like I'll I'll say this outright. The the fucking one battle after another episode may very well get us all sent to Seacot. This series is gonna send us right to hell. Telling you that right now. If there wasn't any you know, second thoughts, you know, we're all all going. I tried, man. And so I've got like I'll feel like we knew that.

SPEAKER_03 2:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:36

You two, yes. But it's okay. You want to know why? I plan to make amends at the end of this series, and we're covering a nice wholesome faith-based film. Now mind you, that faith-based film has a poop monster in it. But hey, you know, beggars can't be choosers. What? You don't know about you don't know about the Golgotin? Is that in Dogma? In dogma, yeah. There's a shit demon in Dogma.

SPEAKER_03 3:00

There's a long time since I've seen Dogma, but like, Adam, you can't put this all on us, buddy. You how we're going to hell, you're you're on that same hot water slide.

SPEAKER_00 3:10

Yeah, it's true. I just that that's how I tried to sell dogma to you. It's like, yeah, there's a shit demon in it.

SPEAKER_03 3:16

Yeah, we've got a lot in store for you guys with Zombie Store. Of course, we understand that maybe it's in a little bit of poor taste to do a zombie movie run to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. We understand that that might rub some people the wrong way, but the thing is we're very unserious people, and we're not gonna we have no intention of disrespecting anyone's religion. We just thought, oh, what should we do for a nice springtime segment where things are coming alive again, and for some reason our stupid brains went straight to zombies, those come alive, right?

SPEAKER_00 3:55

Right? To be fair, we're not the only ones to do the equation because I think Robert Eggers literally referred to Christians in the movie The Northmen as like you know, their their god is a zombie that was hung by a tr hung by a tree. I think that was the exact line from from Northmen that they used. So we're not the only ones. We're not the only ones.

SPEAKER_03 4:18

We're not the only ones. Still going to hell, but not the only ones. So let's get into it. Adam, why did you pick Knight of the Living Dead for the first film in our zombie 3fer series?

SPEAKER_00 4:32

Few reasons. One, between the three of us, I feel like I'm probably the biggest zombie neophyte. And it's funny because I'm such a horror guy, but like zombies never quite did it for me, like you know, Frankenstein or Vampires or even the creature from the Black Lagoon, but I still enjoy a good zombie movie. I also thought back to our slasher film, we did the prototype, the deconstruction, and then the subversion. And we tried to do that again here. So obviously, you can't get more the template than Knight of the Living Dead. This is literally the one that started what we know as the modern zombie. Sure, there were zombie films before that, you know, white zombie is arguably the first. There's a lot of films that involve the Haitian tradition of the zombie. But George A. Romero and his team of collaborators came up with something that we think of as the modern zombie with Knight of the Living Dead.

SPEAKER_03 5:27

Yeah, I would agree with that. This became like the definitive idea of what a zombie is, and nowadays people um are actually more like put off when it breaks from this mold.

SPEAKER_00 5:41

It does. And it's funny because I was torn, because I do prefer Dawn of the Dead in a lot of respects. I think it's a better film. Romero gains his cli collaborate with Tom Savini with Dawn of the Dead, and that movie very much becomes the master mold of what the zombie film is. But the reason why it shows night as opposed to Dawn is because while Dawn is very much the prototypical zombie film, not only does that start with Knight of the Living Dead, but Night of the Living Dead doesn't just change horror films or create the zombie film. It it's one of those turnkey films that changes everything afterwards.

SPEAKER_03 6:19

When you think independent filmmaking as a whole changed because of Knight of the Living Dead.

SPEAKER_00 6:25

Yeah, when you think of literally what an indie film is, you know, a bunch of friends getting together, pulling together some cash, maybe scamming a local dentist who's looking for a tax break. Your mind comes to Night of the Living Dead. You know, that's literally the version of that story that so many young filmmakers, such as ourselves, aspire to. It starts here. So that's that was probably the one that separated everything. Because again, I could have done Dawn, I could have done Lucio Fulci Zombie, but instead, why not start the beginning? Night of the Living Dead.

SPEAKER_03 6:58

Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, we offline, you know, had many conversations about like how we should present each of our segments in this, and I don't want to necessarily spoil what we have for the next couple episodes um specifically, but like what shows the best three-part evolution of it. And I like I agree with you. I love zombie movies, I always have. I think that Dawn of the Dead is overall a better film. But if you're gonna talk about like where it all started, like it's it's not here, but like really it is, you know?

SPEAKER_02 7:35

Yeah. You don't get Dawn of the Dead without Knight of the Living Dead. First time I saw this was college. Uh, this was part of the horror genre block that I took uh that was taught by uh my friend and mentor, uh Rodney Hill over at Hofstreet University. And this was one of, I think the earlier films. No, it was like sort of right in the middle because we followed chronologically. And funny enough, another film in the genre block that we've watched as well was Val Luton's I Walked with a Zombie, which is like brief film history. You want to go all the way back. That's probably the first zombie film ever made, but that was back when zombies were more about voodoo magic, uh, as opposed to the dead coming back to life and feasting on your flesh. Yeah, so I saw I first saw Night of the Living Dead when I was in college. And the things I found really interesting about it was A, it was made much later than I thought it was, because it comparatively for the late 60s, it looks like a film from the late 50s, early 60s. And that's partly due to the low budget nature of it. Um, but I thought that was that was really interesting that the film came much, much later than I'd expected.

SPEAKER_03 8:51

You'd be right to think that because like color film became a lot more common in like the late 50s, so like 1968, 10 a decade later, like it might have been black and white for the cost reasons, like you're saying.

SPEAKER_02 9:04

Which is which is almost always what it comes down to with shooting black and white. And then, yeah, the other thing too is, you know, like some of the unintended decisions made with the film that ended up making it considerably more progressive than I think the filmmakers had initially intended for it to be. And that's something we'll dive into. I don't want to spoil those details here. For sure. Yeah, we're gonna talk all about that.

SPEAKER_03 9:31

All right, Adam, what about you? What was your first time?

SPEAKER_00 9:33

I almost wish I didn't do this. I I did a small DVD purge before I kind of did my move last year. But for the longest time, I had a set of public domain 50 films that Milk Creek put out like back in the early 2000s. And this thing had a lot of shit on there, but it had some really like classic films that you're like, wait, how come this is here? Like Knight of the Living Dead was on there, White Zombie was on there, the Lagosi film. Um, I think Carnival of Souls is on there, a film that I'm gonna be referencing a couple of times during this show. And I was so taken aback by like, why is Knight of the Living Dead on this set? And I bought it based on the strength of like, well, I don't have Knight of the Living Dead, I should have Knight of the Living Dead. And the one thing that struck me after I watched it, which may speak to how this country thinks about things, on the back of the box it had like the title and then the star of the film. So White Zombie, Belagosi, The Walking Dead, Boris Karloff, which there is a Karloff film called The Walking Dead, Night of the Living Dead, Judith O'Day. And there's nothing wrong with Judith O'Day or the character of Barbara in this film. That's a choice. She is not the star of the film.

SPEAKER_03 10:49

I I think we all know what happened there.

SPEAKER_00 10:52

Yeah. I am not casting stones at Mill Creek. I don't know what their practices are. The star of this film is Dwayne Jones. Do not forget that.

SPEAKER_03 11:02

Yeah. They put the blubbering white lady, which is, you know, like she's she's great and she's an important part of the film, but like she spends most of the film non-verbal. Yeah, Dwayne Jones carries the movie, but again, they put her, and that is sort of a weird thing because of what a lot of people interpret this movie to be about.

SPEAKER_02 11:26

Adam, when was that released? What was what was the date of the distribution?

SPEAKER_00 11:30

I forget. I feel like it was early 2000s. I know that.

SPEAKER_02 11:34

That's a choice. That is a choice. That is a choice.

SPEAKER_00 11:38

I that's again, it could have been late 90s. It was definitely that wonderful kind of shit lord, edgelord kind of era. Again, not accusing Mel Creek of anything, but it's like somebody blew the assignment there.

SPEAKER_03 11:53

Yeah. It's like in uh like the release of Black Panther in China, where the poster has Martin Freeman as the biggest face on the poster. No fucking way. Oh, yeah. It's good. It's true, dude. It's alarming. Fuck. Yeah, right. And that was in the Lord's Year 2018. So my first time watching Night of the Living Dead was in high school. I was, you know, like a morbid sort of kid. I was making my own movies at that time. And part of like the craft of it, because I was a kid in high school, was like I liked the hands-on sort of like building props and pyrotechnics. Like I used to build explosives for like you know, booms in in movies. So one of my friends at some point showed me Knight of the Living Dead as a fan of horror and like homemade sort of film. And, you know, at that time, like there was The Walking Dead on TV in the comic series, and I believe uh the zombie survival guide came out around that time by Max Brooks. So like zombies were like very much coming into the culture, and somebody showed me this film or this original film, and I loved it. I loved like the old school sort of camp of it. I loved the like homemade elements of it, the simplicity of it, and it's something that, you know, like it just spawned a whole interest for me. I went and watched every other Romero film that was out at that time, which um around that time was when Diary of the Dead came out. So I watched, you know, everything from night to diary. And, you know, we could talk about the diminishing quality of those those later films. But it also is what, you know, launched me into Sean of the Dead, which would become one of my favorite films ever. And it like it had a huge influence on me throughout the rest of my at least through my college film experience, where I was also making movies with exploding heads and blood effects and special effects makeup and all of that sort of stuff, and all of that interest was sparked from having watched Knight of the Living Dead in high school.

SPEAKER_00 14:22

Romero's always been an odd filmmaker because I always wanted to get into the more not zombie films of his, but the only one that really stands out as a true classic is Creepshow. Like the guy had a thing, he was very good at that thing, and I think that's the reason why he kind of always came back to it to some degree.

SPEAKER_03 14:41

I think yeah, I mean, like he just became the guy. Like he became the authority. I think he tried to cook in more social commentary with each subsequent film. Like Knight of the Living Dead. I think we, you know, not to jump too far into the show, but like I think we could say that there wasn't as much intended social commentary, like intended versus perceived, right? Like the perceived commentary of this is astronomical. The intended when they made it, I'm gonna say is minimal compared to dawn and day and land.

SPEAKER_00 15:17

It's funny because Romero, in an interview I watched, that I'm gonna be citing a couple times during this show, he said night was the last time he tried to just make a movie just to be scary. Like obviously, as he got older and better at his craft, more social commentary kind of came naturally, but this was the first time the one made a film, and the last time that he was like, I'm just making something that's scary and that's it. And we were gonna get into this. He did make something very scary, but I think he failed at the and that's it part. And thank God for that.

SPEAKER_03 15:54

Alright, so let's get into the overall takes here. So at this point, we like to try to sum up what do we think this film is actually about. What is the filmmaker trying to tell us in the most simple way possible? Adam, it's your pick. Why don't you tee us off here?

SPEAKER_00 16:13

Ultimately, I had a tough time coming up with a take for this that wasn't obvious about, you know, man tampering in God's domain and the rot of, you know, because obviously the whole thing behind this film is a satellite comes crashing out of there, it's filled with radiation, that's why the dead are coming back. You know, there's also a very it's very easy to make the ending of this film the entirety of the film itself, and again, deservedly so. But I do think ultimately this film is about leadership for an unwinnable situation. If you think about, you know, Ben as a character who seems the most level-headed and the most, all right, I have a plan and this is what we're gonna do. And then you have Harry who's trying to wrestle leadership away because he doesn't quite trust Ben's judgment. And it's the the push and pull between the two of them. And then you have the sheriff leading his posse at the end of it, where that's leadership in a desperate situation that's given over to everybody, where it's like, all right, the world's kind of collapsing in and of itself. He's already an authority figure. Let's kind of give away our autonomy to this guy and follow him blindly, no matter what he may be thinking, what motivations he might have, apart from just killing zombies. And I think a lot of the film revolves also around, like I said, it's leadership, but in an unwinnable situation. Ben does a good job by and large, but even at the end, he's kind of enveloped where he does start making bad decisions by the end of the film. Not bad decisions per se, but like, because I think that him shooting Harry, I don't think that's a bad decision per se, but it's definitely a decision made out of not thinking straight and just letting his emotions get in the way of things. But his decisions ultimately do lead to everybody dying, unfortunately.

SPEAKER_03 17:57

So I have a question. Is Ben ultimately proven right about how to survive, or is the film suggesting that no strategy actually works?

SPEAKER_00 18:04

I think it's no strategy actually works. And this is a situation, like I said, it's hopeless. You know, you're trying to get through it, you're trying to get to tomorrow, but ultimately, even if they survive the night, the entire group of them, there's no guarantee that they're gonna make it much farther beyond that. This is a situation where we're all kind of screwed. Humanity by and large is kind of screwed, and us kind of almost proceeding forward in spite of ourselves.

SPEAKER_03 18:31

John, what about you? What is your take on this film?

SPEAKER_02 18:35

Yeah, so I have a take that I think is informed more through a contemporary lens as opposed to what I think they were going for back in 1968, which may not necessarily be fair, but I saw some alarming parallels uh between this and the way that the nation reacted to COVID.

SPEAKER_03 18:57

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 18:58

Heard, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Keep going. What got me was you had several people who all had an idea of what they thought was the best idea. You had one person who was very clearly and very intelligently saying, like, this is what we gotta do. And he clearly wasn't panicking as he was putting his plan together. He's like, We're gonna survive if we do this. And you have some other incredibly hot-headed person who just refuses to listen, wants to take over, and while he at one point comes around, he showcases that he's in it for himself when the screws start to get put to him, which is the the character of Harry. He turns on Ben the moment that a plan doesn't work that Ben proposes. And so I think on a grander scale, I mean, the the zombies aren't a virus in this film like they end up becoming in later films, but in a sort of sense, it they function like a virus. Not in explicit sense, but they are infected in a way, and they do come after living people.

SPEAKER_03 20:10

And I'm gonna say they're quite literally infected, like in zombie lore that came from this film, like it is a virus and they are infected. But key, yeah, say more.

SPEAKER_02 20:18

So you have all these people trapped inside, sound familiar, and they're just they're just struggling to to get through this while everybody who has a different idea of what to do is fighting at each other's throats. Nobody's safe, and even the government is proving that they are not exactly, you know, competent or like they have any idea what's going on. And I think that it's I know we said that Romero had set out to make something, you know, that was just scary and ended up making something with a hell of a lot more to say, but I I don't know. I think that there's a lot more cynicism underneath the lens here with this film than Romero was letting on, because at the end of the day, the film is about how Americans react to a nationwide crisis. And, you know, almost 60 years later, did we react that much better?

SPEAKER_03 21:09

Well, yeah, I mean, I have a really poignant sort of mentality on exactly what you're saying, because I did read the zombie survival guide, and when COVID hit, I was thinking a lot about that book because they described in it how a zombie apocalypse would start. It was like a chapter of like what to look for, right? How to like see it early on. And they said it's gonna be a random sickness that starts in a village on the other side of the world, and then someone gets on an airplane and all of a sudden it's in a major city and it's spreading rapidly. And then it gets on to your country, and then it's in your city, and then it's in your building. And that is exactly what it felt like watching COVID spread from Wuhan to Europe to Canada. California and then New York City. And you it's documented online, my experience of uh March 11th, 2020, where I was at work. We were recording an episode of our TV show, and while we were recording, the entire building was evacuated because two cases showed up in that building. So we saw it, Wuhan, Europe, California, New York, CBS Studios. And it felt like it was like a dead ringer for what Max Brooks described in that book. So I fully, I'm so on board with your take. Mine is very similar to that. I tried to simmer it down into a very simple thing, ignoring the many different takes of like different social groups that you could put into Night of the Living Dead. My take was a society that cannot cooperate in a crisis will destroy itself long before the monsters ever do. And like, you know, we're past COVID, but right now, you know, if we're as Americans bickering over our own bullshit at home, you know, and we have the monsters outside, whether that's a foreign enemy, whether that's our own government, if we're so busy fighting each other, we're not gonna be strong enough to face the actual evil, whatever that might be. We're not a political podcast.

SPEAKER_00 23:29

We say that every time, and yet here we are. Every time. And I'm all here for it. It's also a nation that's fragmented, usually tends to fall, but it's also uh again, I'm I'm hesitant to say decadent, but a decadent nation is I feel like a lot more prone to fall because guess what? We're all kind of spoiled rotten, and the second that there's any sort of inconvenience, we will eat each other alive, you know, pun very much intended.

SPEAKER_03 23:53

Alright, so how about the title take? So what do you guys think about the title, Night of the Living Dead? What does that mean to you?

SPEAKER_00 24:00

It's a fucking great title. I feel like we've had a stretch of like direct titles, and this is another one, you know. It is the night of the living dead. The Dead have come back to life, and this is the first night of that, and these ragtag group of individuals are trying to survive the night. Because I knew this was a direct title. I did a little bit of homework on this actually, and because it does play into why the film fell into the public domain actually, and why you can screen this anywhere with no consequence to this day. So initially Romero wanted to call the film Knight of Anubis, and he's like, Anual Anubis, the Egyptian god of the dead, and somebody, I don't know if it was a distributor or if it was somewhere in the crew, went, What the fuck does that mean, George? And he went, Oh, well, you know, and then they quickly pivoted away from Knight of Anubis, and everybody settled on Knight of the Flesh Eaters. That was and that was the title through production. And that, but that was the title they had copyrighted. Knight of Anubis? No, Knight of the Flesh Eaters. They had the copyrights up and everything. And then when they finally went to a distributor that was, you know, gonna leave the film as is, not make them cut the ending or reshoot the ending, but was gonna let them just put the movie out as they shot it. He's like, Yeah, but the name Knight of the Flesh Eaters isn't great. How about Knight of the Living Dead? And everyone was like, wow, great title. So the distributor actually came up with a much better title, in my opinion. The issue was they never copyrighted Knight of the Living Dead. And after about three or four years, people noticed, hey, there's no copyright on this film. And that's how basically nobody really makes any money off this film at all. And for the sake of argument, if we wanted to show this on the Speaking Cinema YouTube page, we could and not really get into any trouble over it.

SPEAKER_02 25:40

That's so crazy.

SPEAKER_00 25:41

I know. It's one of the most important films, you know, of the past, you know, 50, 60 years. And again, we can distribute it. But it's also a double-edged sword of like, alright, can't, you know, movies in public domain, that sucks, but obviously the dead suffix, that's interesting, instead of flesh eaters. And then Night of the Living Dead. What about Dawn of the Dead or Day of the Dead? Or do you think that was like conscious thought when they started that? I'm not sure if it was, but I think it became after the fact. And it's just, again, it's it's catchy.

SPEAKER_03 26:15

I know that the movie originally came from three short stories. Like, there's a whole different the whole bunch of different iterations of how it was written. Like at first it was a comedy, and then it was like something about a bunch of bodies in a field that were like dropped by aliens or something like that. And then there were like a handful of short stories, and this was the first one, and then the second one would become Dawn of the Dead, and the third one would be Day of the Dead. Alright, Adam, you're definitely talking a lot about like the nuts and bolts element of like title evolution. John, I want to know, do you have more of like a subtextual meaning that you pull from the title?

SPEAKER_02 26:51

You know, I didn't think about a subtextual meaning to the title when I was watching the film and then reflecting on it afterwards for the episode. I was in the camp that it's a pretty straightforward title, especially since the title came after the working title. But I think I could, you know, pontificate a brief deeper meaning into the title. So I thought it was a pretty straightforward take. Because it at least on the surface level has this kind of B movie quality to it. When you you like when you first hear about it, and then when you watch it, you realize this is a very, very much an A tier film. But, you know, the idea of, you know, the country basically being asleep at the wheel and panicking and not knowing how to react in the face of, you know, conflict or adversity. What is the difference between us and the living dead in that regard then? If we're not going to use our brains and think critically about the situation and how it affects us as a whole.

SPEAKER_03 27:57

We're in lockstep this episode so far, um, because my title take yeah, I I understand that it like it is fundamentally sort of like a drive-in pulp title. Like it was, you know, workshopped and like attributed for like marketing reasons, but where it landed, it's a descriptive title, Night of the Living Dead, like on its surface, you have night, it segments this whole story to a singular night. Knight of the Living Dead, you assume the Living Dead are the zombies. But like the first person perspective of the film is through the survivors who, over the course of that night, you see them, their stress increasing, and you see them losing their ability to think, to cooperate, or even recognize each other as allies and fellow humans. And like by the end of the movie, the line, especially because of the way it ends, all every character in the film is doomed except for the militia. The line between the living and the dead feels a lot blurrier as the as the credits roll. I have a question, just like a wild question, throw out there. If this movie had a more modern title, like The Dead Rising or The Farmhouse, do you think the audience would interpret the story differently?

SPEAKER_00 29:18

I don't think as many people will have seen it. It's kind of like the Halloween thing of if you call Halloween the babysitter murders. Do I think that people discover it later as a cult film? Absolutely, because you know, cream always rises at the top. But I do think that, you know, what you name your film is wildly important. And I think that Night of the Living Dead looks really good on a poster.

SPEAKER_03 29:41

Alright, next up, let's go through the opening images. Adam, please walk us through the first few minutes of Knight of the Living Dead.

SPEAKER_00 29:50

We open on a car driving on a deserted country road up to a cemetery. The score in the opening credits foreshower what the filmmakers have in store for the audience. Two siblings, Johnny and Barbara, arrive at the cemetery. Johnny complains about having to visit their father's grave on their mother's behalf. Johnny and Barbara arrive at the grave. Barbara prays as Johnny gets restless. Johnny reminds Barbara of a time where he scared her in this very cemetery, and it turns out Barbara is still very much afraid of this place. Johnny starts teasing his sister. They're coming to get you, Barbara. Johnny points out a disheveled man lumbering through the cemetery. Look, there's one of them right now. Johnny runs off. Barbara goes to approach the man to apologize, but the man attacks Barbara as she cries out for Johnny. And the reason why I don't want to go too far into that is because this is actually one of the scenes I want to talk about more than anything else, because the two most important scenes of this film for me is the opening and the closing. The opening is what makes this film a hit. Now the closing is some makes this film very much a classic film that is studied from now until the end of time. But this is the scene that grounds the audience.

SPEAKER_03 30:58

So let's talk about it. Why I mean we we might as well just combine this right into the beginning of Scenic View. It's the perfect opportunity to just blur the lines here. So, Adam, why this scene as one of your picks and what does this scene as an opening image of a film mean to you?

SPEAKER_00 31:18

There's gonna be the the intellectual reason and then the personal reason. I'll give the personal reason first. I love cheesy horror shit. I love a cemetery. I love siblings kind of like poking at each other a little bit as there's a zombie clearly walking in the background. Reminds me of a good old-fashioned Carnival Spookhouse. So every time I see stuff like this kind of iconography, I just, you know, I just get giddy a little bit. The intellectual reason why is because this is the reason the movie became a hit. Whereas other kind of indie horror films before it didn't. Because this is a very realistic setting for as campy as it could be. We've all been to cemeteries, we've all had to kind of go up to the country to visit, you know, a relative on another relative's behalf. Like we've all done stuff like this before. There's no supernatural element at the start of it. Where, you know, Johnny, for as much a pain in the ass as he is, is a funny character and kind of likable to a degree. And it rolls the audience into a sense of security. It doesn't drop you in media res. The zombies don't show up the second that the camera starts recording. It eases you in in a way that makes you go, I know this is scary, but it's also relatable. And that to me is what made this movie a hit was his first scene. Now, again, the final scene is what makes it a classic.

SPEAKER_03 32:38

Yeah, I think it does, like you said, it sets up Johnny. He only has this one scene, but it sets it up in an enough of a way that you care about him, and you care when he meets his fate. It was simple and elegant for it, right? In like getting you straight into the action of the movie in a situation that's believable, relatable, and legitimately scary. My fiance was watching with me. She, you know, screams when the first zombie lunges for Barbara.

SPEAKER_00 33:12

William Hintsman.

SPEAKER_03 33:13

Is that zombie number one?

SPEAKER_00 33:14

That zombie number one, and now I have him credit in our run of show is Karloff zombie, because he talked about on the the making of Doc I watched, talking about, you know, he'd watched Karloff in the aforementioned, you know, The Walking Dead, where he's like a frame musician who gets killed by accident, then brought back to life. And he kind of styled the performance around that. And if you look at how he's, you know, the makeup-wise, he looks a lot like Karloff, you know, big old white, spiky hair. He's got kind of like a weird thing with his tooth, but he looks like Karloff.

SPEAKER_03 33:48

I thought he looked like somebody else. I'm dropping in the Discord.

SPEAKER_00 33:52

Oh, for God's sake.

SPEAKER_03 33:54

He looks like Tom Kenny, the voice actor of Spongebob. He looks just like him to me.

SPEAKER_00 34:00

Uh right. Here I was again talking more about grounding an audience. I'm so sorry, Adam. Keep going with your play. And again, with my fiance, again, are my fiance and I bonded strongly over Spongebob. Strongly over Spongebob, and you invoke Spongebob on the podcast that she ain't gonna listen to. Christ. So Carlov, Carlov zombie. What about the Karlov zombie? Cultural shorthand is very much a tool that filmmakers use to kind of get an audience to buy into something a little bit outlandish. Do we know this is a zombie to start with? No, we don't. No. But you look at how he's styled, you look at the hair, you look at the teeth, you look at the eyes, you look at he looks a lot like Boris Karloff, who was at the time and still is, maybe the most iconic horror actor ever. So if you want to get an audience to jump on to all right, maybe this guy's not a member of the Walking Dead quite yet, but that this guy is some sort of subnambulist or just a lunatic, style him like Karloff. I know that this is a scary movie. I walked in, I know it's called Night of the Living Dead, I have a grounding already with these two likable kids. Oh my god, one of them just got attacked by a guy like Boris Karloff. All right, I know what this movie's going for.

SPEAKER_03 35:18

Yeah. So, like you, the audience, because of your familiarity with a certain type of imagery, can tell that something is not right with this person, even though the characters within, and to some degree the audience doesn't really know what's wrong with him, just that for whatever reason he is violent and he looks off.

SPEAKER_00 35:42

Exactly.

SPEAKER_03 35:43

Yeah. At the start of the film, what exactly do you guys think the characters think is happening?

SPEAKER_02 35:50

I guess I could assume from the mindset of the characters that they wouldn't automatically jump to the dead have come back to life when this guy attacks his sister. But there's something very graphic and really unsettling on its own in that first scene in the graveyard when Karloff Zombie is attacking Barbara. Like I think that was that was the thing that got me, is it's a very visceral assault.

SPEAKER_00 36:19

And also you think about how that scene ends. Not with the chase, not with, you know, Barbara trying to drive off, but how Johnny dies. It's not a strangulation, it's not, you know, the monster picking up over his head and breaking his back. Johnny almost dies by accident, you know, by hitting his head against the tombstone.

SPEAKER_03 36:36

Yeah, it it it does seem ambiguous, right? As to like, is he just attacked by like, you know, some drunk stumbling through the cemetery? You know, like, yeah, you're right. Nobody is going to immediately go straight to, oh man, that's a zombie. That's a zombie if I ever seen one. We probably would, because we grew up with this. Yeah. We've we have the luxury of uh of knowledge from documentaries like Knight of the Living Dead.

SPEAKER_02 37:07

We have we have the luxury of being allowed to say the word.

SPEAKER_03 37:11

Yeah, what do you guys make of like how the first zombie moves and behaves compared to the the zombies later in the film?

SPEAKER_00 37:17

It's weird because it's almost like he moves with a purpose, whereas the other zombies feel like they're almost like going based off of sheer animal instinct. And maybe it's because we don't really see them attack as much. The other major attack is obviously when the horde converges on the house, but it's not like an individual zombie seeing a person and going after a said person. It feels like the Karlov zombie, at least, upon seeing Barbara, he does lunge after her. He is a lot more violent with her. Whereas the other zombies, like it feels like they're they're on autopilot.

SPEAKER_03 37:54

Yeah, I feel like the other ones come off as more mindless, where this one definitely seems to be more, let's say, goal-oriented. He also breaks one of the zombie rules, as we would come to know as George Romero's rules for zombies, which is that zombies are slow moving, they don't run. He for uh at least a second, you know, breaks into a little jog there. And it makes me think that maybe this scene was filmed before anything else, you know, and he sort of rewrote his own rules for like the second part. But you can definitely see that him as an artist, like he's still figuring out his own medium, like knowing from the context of other movies that he would make.

SPEAKER_00 38:41

Right. I mean, I know that there was a break in production, and I don't know if it was just a simple matter of we hired this one guy who because like this is a movie that was made with a lot of love and a lot of spit and polish, and a lot of, hey guy I know, we're making a movie. How would you like to be in it? We'll give you, you know, a hamburger and ten bucks. And I don't know if that was a lot of just this guy who played the Karlov zombie is an actor actor, but the 30 people from around Pittsburgh that they got, not so much. And it's like, all right, I can't ask them to emote because I got my sister over here who is self-conscious of being on camera. All right, just walk around and maybe you do the the Frankenstein arms and you just you you're eating like a bone for some reason, and you just walk into the wall a bunch of times. Little things that again, non-trained actors can do and do well enough.

SPEAKER_02 39:35

Did you say that the horde zombies were basically just like random people that they got around the Pittsburgh area?

SPEAKER_00 39:42

Yeah, just a typical, like, hey, we're making a movie. The guy who plays the field reporter who interviews the sheriff at one point is actually a local horror host that they recruit just to like, hey, come in BC and it'll be fun for you to be in this.

SPEAKER_02 39:55

So there's just one random woman in Pittsburgh that when they filmed this was like, yeah, I'm down to do this movie. You want me to take all of my clothes off, too? Good for her.

SPEAKER_00 40:06

I don't know the exact story, but I'm sure it was like uh, all right, I mean, oh shit, I'll show my bare ass in the film. Why not?

SPEAKER_03 40:13

Dude, she literally was walking around the whole movie naked. Yeah. I mean, sometimes you don't even have to ask. That might have just been how she showed up. I mean, it is Pittsburgh.

SPEAKER_01 40:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 40:26

One thing I want to say about this opening scene is that it includes the line that would become one of the most iconic lines in cinema. And that is, of course, they're coming to get you, Barbara. But what about this do you think makes such an iconic bit of cinema history?

SPEAKER_02 40:48

I think for me, a lot of times with these iconic lines, and this could be an off-base take, this could be an out there take, but this has generally been my take on classic cinema lines for as long as I can remember. I think it comes down to delivery more than the writing itself. Because just the the way he delivers that line is just so it's so creepy, but I think like if if it was delivered differently, like picture that line with a transatlantic accent. Picture that line as if the guy was from Boston. Would it have the same thing? They're coming to get you, Barbara. Yeah, they're coming to get you, Barbara. Um but you know, and it's and it's like other lines like that too. It's like, you know, would would Here's Looking at You Kid have the same weight if Humphrey Bogart didn't deliver it that exact way? Or a more recent amazing line in cinema. I've had a few, a few small peers. Like, I think that's one of cinema's all-time great lines. And it's all because of Benizio del Toro. But like another contemporary option, the character Nux in Fury Roads screaming, Oh, what a day, what a lovely day. Like, people can argue with me and be wrong about that movie not being a masterpiece, but you can't argue that line isn't incredible, and it's because of the actor.

SPEAKER_03 42:08

Yeah, I'm with you that that's a masterpiece. I also think that sometimes the stickiest movie quotes are the ones that you can quote in your everyday life. And oh, what a day, what a lovely day is such a usable quote for like when you're having like a manic or like uh a Trenoline-fueled moment in your everyday life. Like it just fits right in there. They're coming to get you, Barbara could be, you know, another one of those things that you could apply and use to scare your own little sister. I don't know. And it's also for the character of Johnny, where he was so himself before, like you see him break into this character and it's a direct tone shift from the whiny but generally, you know, upbeat Johnny into this more sinister the coming to get you version of Johnny. And that's right at the point where the movie changes from this tranquil scene, though it, you know, it is at a cemetery, but like more or less it's a pretty tranquil, you know, family moment. It could turn into a different movie at any time, but then the zombie comes and it turns into that kind of movie, and that happens right as Johnny's tone shift happens. And I think, you know, it does a good job of making that pivot for the film as a whole, you know, more recognizable and more notable.

SPEAKER_00 43:35

Russell's uh Streiner, who was a producer on the film as well, because everybody on this movie did everything, he chose not to go credited for this performance. And I think a lot of that was, you know, just out of a sense of humility, where it's like, I'm already the producer. Why do I need an acting credit on top of that? But think about like he's only in it if you count him being showing up at the end as a zombie, and again, a another terrific shot of like, you know, using His driving gloves is, you know, the thing that gives it away.

SPEAKER_01 44:03

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_03 44:03

Yep. They they really set that up that he's always sort of fiddling with those gloves the first scene, and then that's his recognizable trait when he reappears.

SPEAKER_00 44:12

He gives look, Dwayne Jones, I think, is the best performance of the film. This is close, and it's only like a one-scene performance.

SPEAKER_03 44:20

Yeah. Honestly, Harry, pretty great performance, although I'm not sure that they didn't just find a coked up little man.

SPEAKER_00 44:27

He's another producer on the film, too. And also Is it really? He was also the chief makeup artist.

SPEAKER_03 44:33

That's so funny. Because I can't picture the character of Harry doing anybody's makeup.

SPEAKER_00 44:40

It was Marilyn Eastman who played Helen his wife, and the guy who played Harry. Also, they were the two people doing the makeup.

SPEAKER_03 44:49

Alright, well, why don't we transition into the scenic view? Because we're analyzing this as not just the opening, but one of Adam's picks here. As you may know, for the scenic view, we like to pick out scenes from anywhere in the movie. We don't have to go in order necessarily, just scenes that stood out to us, our favorite ones, things that prove our thesis from our opening takes. John, what do you got for me? You got another scene to uh dig into?

SPEAKER_02 45:17

Yeah, so scenic view for this film, besides the opening and the ending, I think to pinpoint any one scene in particular, I think is a bit, I wouldn't say disingenuoine. Um, but it's certainly harder because once they get to the cabin and then we're introduced to the rest of the people in the basement, it just kind of goes and it doesn't really stop. Like it has ebbs and flows, but that whole middle section sort of feels like one big extended scene. But I think what I found really interesting about that, I guess, is like from the ebb and flow of that, there's so much that is going on there because, you know, from from the moment we have Harry and the rest of those characters introduced, it's like, okay, we have people in the basement, which means they were withholding information. And it's like, oh, well, we didn't know who you were. We didn't know if you were them. We already start off with these characters not trusting each other. And in an interesting way, it progresses to these characters all learning to trust each other, and they start to find a leader in Ben, but the moment the plan with the truck goes awry, that's when everything falls apart. It's like, oh, we tried this one thing, it went disastrously bad, and Harry just immediately resorts back to all right, it's every man for himself. And you know, and then having it culminate with Ben understandably attacking him when he gets back in. I think so much of this, and as we subsequently learn with their daughter having been bit by a zombie, and granted, we don't know the rules, so to speak, these characters continued to withhold pertinent information from our hero Ben, and I just couldn't stop seeing parallels again between what was going on during COVID, and especially as time would go on. Like, I'm sure we all knew a story at some point. Like, I remember doing a job, and I learned right in the middle of another job in 2021 that the person I was with had been exposed to like five people who all tested positive for COVID. And I wasn't told this until like three days later. And I was like, dude, your boss should have told you this. Because it like basically it shut down the other job that I was on because I decided to do the right thing and be forthcoming and say, hey, I'm literally learning this in real time that I was exposed. And it's just to me, that whole section kind of serves as a mirror in a way.

SPEAKER_00 47:54

It's easier in in terms of this film to talk characters more than I think, because this is a film that the second they get to the farmhouse, the second that Barbara sets foot in that farmhouse, we talk about with One Battle and with Silence of the Lambs, like movies that are like immaculately paced. While I wouldn't call this movie immaculately paced, it's the stor the economy of storytelling is so propulsive. It doesn't waste a frame. It's like every frame is literally we're conveying a new piece of information to the point with, you know, the the opening image. We're gradually letting not just the characters in, but the audience in along with the characters. We're feeding them a new piece of information with every single frame that this movie hits. Barbara shows up, she, you know, walks around the house for a minute, she goes upstairs, and what does she see? A body of a dead woman, and that freaks her out initially. And she runs out, and what happens as she runs out? That's when Ben pulls up, and you know, now we're introduced to essentially the protagonist of the film.

SPEAKER_03 48:51

I would actually have to disagree just a little bit with that of like the idea that this is a movie with no wasted frames, because I do think that, like, as much as I love it, there are a couple like seriously inefficient parts of the film. And that actually leads me into one of the scenes that I had selected, which is the scene where Ben is breaking apart the house to build fortifications, and he is breaking up a table where the legs would eventually be what he makes a torch out of. And him and Barbara sort of both give their side of the story of what just happened to them. And Barbara does sit there and essentially reiterate the entire first scene of the movie back straight to Ben, but to us, the audience, right? And so it's a few minutes where it's just like we just watched all this, you know, and like it's only natural that in a real situation that's exactly how things would go. But as far as movie writing goes, like that's not really a typical thing. You know, you try to show, not tell. But what it is about this scene that made me select it is that most of their dialogue in this scene is ad-lift. Dwayne Jones improvised most of that scene. And the reason is because he did a lot of rewriting on the Ben character throughout. Dwayne Jones was a very educated man, and the character of Ben was originally written as a very simple, sort of unintelligent truck driver. But when Dwayne Jones came on, he wanted to make this character more of a reflection of himself and rewrote a lot of it.

SPEAKER_00 50:40

I'm glad you brought that up because that's a whole section that I wanted to get into. To your point, Romero had another actor in mind. And the reason we're with Dwayne Jones is because Dwayne Jones was the best actor that they knew personally. So it makes sense to put your best foot forward. Now, Romero and Jones did clash on the film, shooting it a lot because, Anthony, to your point, Dwayne Jones wanted to have the character reflect more of himself and the black experience. Romero thought it'd be more progressive if no, let's just leave the character as is. Because, you know, nobody's different to anybody. And I know how that sounds. And at the time, I'm sure, again, Romero's like, I'm being super progressive. It's you're no different. But yet Dwayne Jones would say, Yeah, but when I hit this white lady, people are gonna read into that. And there are gonna be people who, when I walk down the street, they're gonna give me a lot of shit for that. And Romero later on in life, reflecting upon the film, was like, you know what, Dwayne was right. Because where all the racial tensions are certainly subtext, they're not quite text because even with Harry, and the way he kind of looks at Ben and even Barbara at times, it's there, is very much there, but it's very much unspoken. And I think going back to what Romero said, like Dwayne was right, we should have, I think that mentality did carry Romero further into his career, especially with the other dead films, where there's more to this than just being spooky.

SPEAKER_02 52:04

I found that really interesting on this rewatch for the podcast. I picked up on it when I watched it in college, but I remember, you know, it's been 13 years. And what I found really interesting is it's if I were to make the comparison between the social network of all films, when you have these two opposing ideologies between the writer and the director, in that you have this story written in a way that anybody could have played the character of Banner. The thing that was most shocking to me the first time I watched it was thinking, huh, wow, this is crazy that the frumpy, balding old white guy didn't say the N-word once in this movie, considering the lead was a black man in 1968. I was shocked that that didn't come through. Learning that it was not originally written for Dwayne Jones now makes me say, okay, yeah, they just went with a whoever's the best process. However, all of that comes through in the performance. It is all over Dwayne Jones' performance. And I think, like you said as well, Adam, that stuff comes through in the performances with the characters of Barbara and Harry as well. Or the scene when Ben gets back into the house after Harry tries to lock him in and Ben just starts wailing on him. It's like, buddy, you may not have written this part with this subtext, but like, read the room. You had a white guy lock a black guy out and leave him for dead. There's a whole different level of theory in that performance.

SPEAKER_03 53:38

Yeah, like with Romero, you know, he thought he was doing the progressive thing, and Dwayne Jones was like, no, no, no, you've got it all wrong. This is why, when someone of a different background, a different race, a different religion tells you what their experience is in the world, believe them. Just believe them, listen to them. Why do you think that you're gonna know better? And this movie is possibly all the more iconic and has more longevity for Romero having listened to Dwayne Jones. You like you're right that like it feels like it could have been played by anybody in a sense, but the fact that they made the, at the time, ballsy move to cast a black man as their lead actor in 1968, like as far as commercial viability goes, like that is the kind of thing that could have had a real effect on that film at the time. Like they did that and they made something immortal for doing it that a lot of people could attribute their own meaning. And like when I think of Knight of the Living Dead, in my mind, it is an allegory for late 60s racism. Watching it again, I'm like, you know, it's really not that obvious. Like, you really have to lay your own meaning on it because, like, you're right, racist terms were never used for it, like in the context of the film. But like, I have a review here from 1969, Kevin Thomas describing Dwayne Jones' character as quote, a comparatively calm and resourceful Negro. Fuck. Yeah, the audience was like, how crazy to see a smart, intelligent, calm black man on screen like that. Like it was completely groundbreaking for the average person out there going to movies.

SPEAKER_02 55:27

Have they not seen a single film starring Sidney Portier?

SPEAKER_00 55:31

Apparently not.

SPEAKER_02 55:32

Dems were the times. God. It's also interesting, too, because I feel like those decisions that were made, given the way the studio system would operate, and as we saw, or heard rather from that review that Anthony had recited to us, something like this completely outside of the studio system might have been the only way that something like Night of the Living Dead with Dwayne Jones as the lead could have gotten made.

SPEAKER_03 55:56

Maybe. You know, consider that we're only 15 years removed from famous stories of Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. touring together, and Sammy Davis Jr. like not allowed to eat at the restaurant that he was hired to perform at. We're really not far from that era with this film. But, you know, kudos to the team, kudos to Dwayne Jones, legends. As far as I'm concerned, those decisions are some that make this enduring in the way that it is.

SPEAKER_00 56:29

And you feel bad because he's another guy that they they mentioned this too. He died, unfortunately, very young. And they said like he should have gotten more of a career. If anybody, if any like actor out of us that should have gotten more of a bump from this film, it was Dwayne Jones. You do wish that this wasn't just like the one thing he was known for because I there's a lot of gravitas that he has in this part. Rule of thumb, just in general, for anybody who wants to direct, your actors aren't your enemies, they're your collaborators. Listen to them, let them bring their own shit to the role. Don't think that they're trying to change your words or change your intent. They're not. You listen to your actors, your actors make your movie better.

SPEAKER_03 57:09

For real. That's why I believe in the diverse writers' room. If you want to create a world with a bunch of different types of characters, you need to bring in the real deal to write those characters more believably. So listening to the people around you as you're making anything is so crucial to making something that people can really feel and see themselves in across the spectrum. This is why I think the Autora theory isn't real. Or like if you let the autor theory go, you end up with Maestro.

SPEAKER_00 57:42

I guess we're not covering Maestro anytime soon.

SPEAKER_02 57:44

Yeah, I guess but I guess Bradley Cooper is not going to be a guest on this thing anytime soon either.

SPEAKER_03 57:49

No, we're we're gonna put that thing behind a paywall. That episode. I mean, there's another scene I wanted to bring up here, and it's the scene where after the entire cast is put together for the most part, with the exception of Marilyn Eastman and um young girl, not sure her name. Judith. Judith.

SPEAKER_00 58:10

It was no Karen is the little girl. The other couple yeah, Karen is the little zombie girl, and then you have Tom and Judy, who's the younger couple that are hiding with Harry and Helen.

SPEAKER_03 58:21

Right, yes. So Tom, Judy, and Harry all come upstairs, leaving Karen and Helen down in the basement. The scene I'm referring to is once Harry goes back down into the basement to be with his wife and daughter, and he won't leave it alone, that there's this guy upstairs who thinks that the cellar isn't the safest place to be, and he's wrong, and they'll all see that I'm gonna be right. And Helen says to him, that's very important to you, isn't it? That you're right and everyone else is wrong. What do you guys make of that scene?

SPEAKER_00 58:55

You get the sense that Harry feels like the kind of guy who's in middle management. A kind of guy that has a bunch of big ideas and may actually have people under his employee, but there's always those two or three guys above him that actually run shit and he's gotta contend with them. So he comes home every night to his wife before all this, and he just ransomerates about how the these idiots, this company, they're making all these decisions, and only if I were in charge, I would by God, you know, show them, you know, what for. So you get the sense that Harry looks at the situation not rationally, not as like, all right, there's clearly a guy upstairs that knows, you know, more than I do. I'm just gonna yield to him. No, this is his opportunity. Mr. Mill, Major, Mr. have been pushed around my entire life. Now I'm in charge. And here's where the racial component of the film comes in. Because he automatically assumes that because I'm a white man of a certain age, you should all be deferential to me in this situation. Because clearly, even though I'm not equipped to deal with this at all, you should still be reverential to me because clearly it is manifest destiny that I should be in charge here. Even if he in actuality doesn't, I feel have the requisite skills to do so. Because I think that the cellar, to Ben's point, is a death trap. There's nowhere to go.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:14

Well, I mean, he's already making mistakes off the rip. Like he knows that there's food upstairs, but he didn't bring it down to the cellar in the first place. From the introduction, we can, you know, make some assumptions. He's not exactly making the best decisions in the situation, but you're right. Like he fully assumes that by default has rank over everybody else. But yeah, the new person coming in who people immediately sort of gravitate towards, like a charismatic leader, now threatens your hold over the group because you don't have the charisma that's gonna make those people fall in line behind you. So you try to like flex your authority. Again, like I'm not sure if it's necessarily overtly racial in the context of the film. We definitely, as a whole, attribute that to it. But like I feel like it almost proves John's sentiment of like you'd rather be right than think about the goodwill of those around you.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:14

Yeah, and I think that's like I said before, I don't think in the script there was anything involving like Harry's attitudes towards Ben. Like, none of it comes off as, you know, racially driven from a script standpoint, just based on solely on the words coming out of his mouth. But if the guy playing Harry is any actor worth his salt, he's picking up what Dwayne Jones was putting into his performance and playing it accordingly. And I think he's a bit more subtle in it, but I think the performance has definitely added a little bit of that layer subtextually.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:49

Because you have to remember too, of all the characters in the film, Harry and Helen have the one thing to lose, basically, which is their daughter. And Harry, who is inept but thinks he should be in charge, who's tr making all these decisions, but they're the wrong ones, he's doing it in a way because he's got something to protect. Even like Helen makes a remark earlier on where she acknowledges that they're not happy in their marriage, literally staying together for the kid to, you know, paraphrase Blink 22 for a second. But that's the case where it's like he's making this decision knowing, like, alright, my wife hates me. I'm I'm getting yelled at by this guy upstairs who thinks he knows better than me. It feels like this is just a guy who's been just dealt one shit hand after another, and yet everything he's doing right now is just for the ban of his child that was injured and is possibly dying. So maybe he's not thinking in terms of sheer rationale because again, it's just pure emotionality. I've never been in a position where I'm not a father, but I've had, you know, loved ones being put in some sort of perilous position, and you can't think straight. So my question then to you guys is do you think Harry is just acting on sheer emotion because his daughter is in jeopardy?

SPEAKER_03 1:03:00

I don't think so. I mean, honestly, I think that for a decent amount of his screen time, he's truly not thinking about anybody else. Like he doesn't spend a ton of time with his daughter, but like when he's dying, when he's shot, like that's who he heads for. And that, you know, is like really his moment of consideration that he realizes what he's fighting for and who he should have been, you know, thinking of like in their best interest. In his final moments, it was about his daughter. But up until all of that, I think it was mostly primal self-preservation and filtered through his lens of needing to be in control. You've touched on his marital issues. Wonder why they have marital issues. You know, like he's probably a very dominating father and husband in their home. And, you know, now that they're outside in the world, he's like trying to be dominating for them, he's trying to dominate the people around him too.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:06

I took a lot of him trying to lead based on ego. And when social order breaks down, I mean, you know, 1968 we're getting a little more progressive, but that's still certainly a period where, you know, the men controlled the house. So a guy like Harry is probably used to people listening to him and doing what he says because he said so, because he's the man of the house. So when society breaks down, a guy like Harry starts to learn he has no real power. You know, people listened to the husband and they listened to the dad because he was the man of the house. And he's now suddenly put into a room full of other people, and it's like, bro, you ain't nothing.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:53

There's one small scene I want to touch on because we do kind of talk about like how, you know, this movie, 50% of the acting is great, 50% the acting isn't. And there's one monologue that Barbara gives right after she's met Ben, and right as she's kind of going catatonic, that when I was younger, I thought, oh my god, she doesn't remember the continuity of the scene. She's her brain's all over the place, like, what the hell is it? And then upon this last rewatch, I finally understood the scene where she's talking to Ben about how she got to the house. So the one that I covered sort of before. Yeah. But from Barbara's perspective. Okay, yeah, great. Let's do it. So after Ben kind of tells the story about the diner and the the the truck on fire, Barbara, who's again, mind you, just been attacked by a man who just watched her brother get killed, who's just had this horrible thing happen to her. That affects her throughout the rest of the film because she's in shock basically. She starts going off on a scene about like what she was doing and you know, her brother Johnny and him asking for candy and you know, her teeth. And like remembering it differently. And I'm sitting there going, oh my God, she's literally trying to access a memory that's already kind of been suppressed. Even if it just happened, she's conflating a bunch of different events. And this is literally you're watching somebody having a nervous breakdown in real time. And while again, we're so used to, and I actually have a Pauline Kale quote here that I kind of want to address because I think it relates very well to the film itself of Nitherland that she said, one of the most gruesomely terrifying movies ever made. And when you leave the theater, you may wish that you could forget the horrible experience. The film's grainy, but in all seriousness, works for it, gives it a crude realism. And for me, Barbara's nervous breakdown encapsulates that. There is a crude realism in that you're used to movie logic where this would be a very serious monologue in which you would nail every little instinct and everything, and everything would be so emoted. In this case, you're literally watching a woman break down, and it is awkward and weird, and you feel uncomfortable watching it. But that's the point.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:10

I think that even though, you know, I sort of called that out as an inefficient scene, like functionally, what you're describing does make a lot of sense. Consider that this is a woman who just watched her brother be killed and is now like, you know, hearing on the radio about these murders and finding a bobby in the house. Like to go through that, you sort of assume, like in a zombie movie, that in that world, zombie movies don't exist, right? Like they don't know what this is. And witnessing that in those first few moments would be like a complete shift in your mental paradigm of like how you believe the world to work. This was almost an alien movie. Like, that's like I'm deep in the UFO rabbit hole, and like that's a thing of like, you know, understanding like the idea of UFOs is like you can't just think about it as like flying saucers. You can't just think about it as, you know, little gray men. The stories are so widely varied that like you would have to have a completely different perspective on how the universe and time and physics works to like fully grasp the extent of what it means. And it would disprove a lot of things that we believe to be true. Like if aliens turned out to be real, wouldn't that have an effect on like the way we perceive religion? Right? If the dead started rising tomorrow, would that not have the same effect?

SPEAKER_00 1:08:35

Yeah, pretty much. Or it would definitely give credence to a lot of zealots. Again, but it's the one bit of pushback I'll give on the, you know, that scene not serving much function. It does serve plenty of function, in my opinion, because it gives you insight into the characters and what they're thinking. And look, I I think about film differently than most, whereas I feel like a lot of people, especially in our vocation, think story first, character second. I flip that. For me, the story is an excuse to hang out with the characters. If your characters are terrible, then why should you care about anything that happens to them? The narrative is the engine that drives the characters, not the other way around. And for me, when the movie can slow down like that and kind of give you the insight, because all of a sudden these people go from just, you know, actors on screen which you're watching to, oh, they have interiority, which is a thing that this movie, you know, will slow down and give you a sense of from time to time. Is it propulsive? Absolutely. Does it let up that middle section? No, but yeah, it's still it's smart enough, not just with Ben and with Barbara, but the Cooper family in general. That the scene that we were talking about just beforehand with Harry, they have a whole scene, Harry and Helen, where they outline their entire marriage to each other, and you get the sense that it's a lot of shit that Helen's been wanting to tell this man for years, and now that the world is ending. All right, I had to hear you bluster and go on about work for, you know, 10, 15 years. Now I'm just gonna tell you this outright. Our marriage kind of sucks. And if we do one good thing though, it's protecting our child.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:03

Alright, so we've been through some scenes. Let's go through the closing. Because I know, Adam, you're chomping at the bit to talk about this as a scene selection as well as our final images. So please lead us through the last few minutes of Night of the Living Dead.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:19

The next morning, Sheriff McClelland leads his posse through the woods on a hunt for more zombies. Their hunt leads him to the farmhouse where Ben is waking up after surviving the night. Ben staggers upstairs, so clutching onto his rifle. Outside, one of the posse members sees Ben from inside and points him out to McClelland. Alright, Vince, him in the head, right between the eyes. Vince opens fire, shooting Ben in the head, killing him instantly. Good shot. Okay, he's dead. Let's get him. There's another one for the fire. As a posse goes to retrieve Ben's body, the film turns into a montage of still images. The posse pick apart Ben's body with meat hooks as the credits start to roll. Ben's body is placed onto a pyre, along with the Karlov zombie from the beginning of the film, as a posse sets everything on fire, and the film ends with nothing short of a lynching. Yeah. So when I said that the opening scene is what made the film successful, the reason why three individuals such as ourselves get to talk about this film almost 60 years after the fact is this scene because there's a lot to unpack. Now, again, as we've been saying throughout the film, Romero never intended to cast Dwayne Jones as his lead. With that being said, yeah, tell me if I'm wrong that this feels very much like a lynching, guys. Correct me if I'm wrong.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:40

No, you're right. And I'm sure you can see that modernly, you could see that from the perspective of an audience member in 1968. Like the idea that this movie ends with a posse getting together, pooling all their guns and ammo, and you know, walking through all the fields, you know, what kind of person volunteers for that job? And like they're going and they're killing all these shambling zombies, they're shooting first, not asking any questions. When Ben gets shot, he has a rifle to his eye. Not exactly a thing that the zombies do. Do they understand that? You know, the zombies don't raise rifles, or are these people that were just willing to go out and shoot with impunity because they're the kind of people that are like, well, yeah, let's go do that. We're gonna take care of this right quick.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:35

This is leadership when it pertains to when everybody gives their autonomy away and just becomes part of a greater swarm, no different than the zombies, to be honest. Where you're giving up your individual autonomy and giving yourself over to somebody you think does know what's best. In this case, a literal sheriff, a law enforcement official, somebody that we're taught at a young age to, hey, this guy knows what he's doing because he's a law enforcement official. We don't know what other agendas he brings to that role, apart from they're there to solve the issues, and as the sheriff says earlier on the film, you know, they're dead, they're all messed up. A guy who just like is using this cover as all right, we're just gonna go kill these zombies. Now, you know, Anthony, to your point, Ben's not moving like a zombie, even if you can't see him from a good angle. He's got a gun on him, you can see it raised. He's not shambling per se. And you can sit there and say, well, the Pollyanish view of this film is, oh, they made a mistake and they accidentally killed this guy. The sheriff's a little bit too fucking eager in my eyes to be like, oh, there's a guy, shoot him. Not calling out a warning, not hello there. Usual stuff you'd see in horror films by and large. He's just like, nope, shoot him.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:45

Yeah. And you know, you could think of it like that they are just violent people out there for the kicks, in addition to thinking that they're doing the right thing, or like, you know, they are lawmen, so they think that they're an authority, even though they really know nothing. And authority without wisdom has the potential to cause even more chaos. If you're just somebody who thinks you can step into a position of power and do something, but you have no idea what you're doing.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:16

Correct. And there's another point I wanted to make before we kind of go further. It's another kind of law of horror films, by and large, that Romero followed. Because in his mind, at some point, Ben messed up so bad that now the law of dramatics dictates that he must die. And upon this viewing, I'm like, all right, let me see if I can point the location. Because I I could never quite remember. Is it when he shoots Harry? I don't look at from that perspective, because Harry was becoming a danger, and he, in my opinion, acted in a way that, like, alright, I'm gonna finally just put this guy out. And there's a moment that's very brief, but I think this is what Romero was talking about. He very half-heartedly tries to save Barbara from getting eaten by the swarm, basically, at the end of it. And I don't know if that was the intent because I didn't read deeper into it, but like by that point, Barbara has been Cantox most of the film. She's now just starting to kind of snap out of it. And then she sees Johnny. And it's almost like she starts back into the Cantox state to a degree. And I think Ben makes a selfish decision of like, look, I can carry this woman from now till the literal end of the world, or I can make a decision for myself and run into the basement and hide in the basement, taking Harry's advice inadvertently. For me, that's the mistake that Romero was talking about because everything else that, again, I think Ben did a relatively good job, all things considered, is an impossible situation. You put anybody in that situation, I feel like it ends the same way.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:41

There's so many different angles converging in one point here. Like, in a way, yeah, Harry was right, right? Like, if you lock yourself in the basement, make no noise, make no visible movements, they'll sort of just pass over you. Or eventually help will come and wipe them out, as it does in the end of this movie. Ben is hiding in the basement, the posse comes along, shoots all the zombies. If Ben had waited 15 minutes, he probably would have survived. Or, you know, if like they had actually made it into the house, like they say they're gonna go check it out, you know, and he was still in the basement, like hearing them come down, he could go, like, hello, hello, you know. But his first instinct upon hearing that there were people outside was to go upstairs and investigate and put himself back in harm's way. And, you know, possibly maybe in his mind is like he hears these people with guns, I have a gun, maybe I can join them and help clean this up, right? Like, I believe that at that point he's like got his own best intentions there. And that's ultimately his downfall. It's a very cynical perspective of like, you know, maybe Harry was right in like the incredibly selfish people are gonna be the ones to survive this. Because if you get in a hole and don't think about anybody else, don't try to help anybody else, then yeah, maybe the whole thing will blow over for you. But if you're a person who thinks about others, you're inherently gonna put yourself in harm's way more because you're trying to look out for the community, the people around you.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:18

Well, and you'll subsequently at times be open to trusting other individuals as well. And I think that another factor that could come into play here as well is that this film takes place, and correct me if I'm wrong, Adam, it takes place in Pennsylvania. It takes place outside of Pittsburgh.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:34

Correct.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:35

Yeah, because I think that that also plays a factor in Ben's decisions as well, because while I don't know what it was like to be a black man in Pennsylvania in the 1960s, they were still in Pennsylvania, which is part of the north, which has historically been a more progressive part of the country, and they weren't in the deep south. This film ends a completely different way if this takes place in like Georgia or Texas in the 60s, because Ben is going into that basement and he's not getting out. Because like he's not gonna be like, hey, over here to a wandering group of white dudes armed to the teeth in Texas or the deep south. But like Pennsylvania.

SPEAKER_03 1:18:15

Yeah, you're gonna see if the basement has a basement.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:17

But again, in Pennsylvania, it's like there's something almost darker to me about that than it happens in a northern state.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:24

There's a little bit of pushback I'm gonna give because I grew up in very rural New Jersey. And the South isn't just in the south. No, no, not not at all. And you guys are from New Hampshire, and there are definitely some more, let's call them rural for the sake of argument, areas up there that you would be like, Did I cross a Mason Dixon without knowing?

SPEAKER_03 1:18:45

Oh no, there's some racists up here. I I'm there right now. I grew up here. Like, oh, racism is alive and well in the north.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:53

Dude, my rural town in the southern part of the state, not that far from the capital and also most of like the other cities, which subsequently meant like being pretty close to Massachusetts. Some of the shit that my classmates would say, especially as we were getting past 2008, was appalling. Like downright shocking hearing some of the stuff that they would say. And I'm like, bro, we live in New Hampshire. This is not the Deep South.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:21

The thing is that it's almost, I don't want to say it's worse, but it's different because there are so few black people in New Hampshire that the people in New Hampshire really don't have real-world exposure to all that many people of color. Having grown up here, like I know that like the idea of black people that I had in my mind as a kid in all white New Hampshire, it was only provided by the television. Definitively not always the best representation of black people as a whole. Like you can't like they're not monolithic, but they're also like not portrayed well historically in film and television and all sorts of things. So you like the people, you know, they don't I don't think they think that they're racist, but oh man, oh yeah, you can be.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:14

And I I feel like I'm speaking, talk about being Pollyanish for a second, but like I think the difference is in the north, it's definitely a separation of cultures that's kind of self-imposed and there is an unintentional othering. Though I would like to think then a situation such as a zombie apocalypse per se, we're less inclined to discriminate and kind of do what the sheriff did. Again, I'm being completely Pollyanish here.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:40

Yeah, well, I mean, again, like I don't think that the writing of this film inherently has racism baked into it. No. But the casting of Dwayne Jones is what makes this movie hold up a mirror to us as a society, and what we see from it is we see a lynching. Because, oh man, isn't that familiar imagery for this country? Isn't that a story that happens so damn often throughout American history? And I think that, you know, maybe a more broad interpretation of this in like our modern sense is that people given a cause are willing to do terrible things. I don't know, there's a certain meteorological element named institution these days that's offering repayment on your college debt and thousands of dollars of money as a signing bonus for you to bully brown people.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:43

Right. And that happens everywhere, not just regionally, but everywhere.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:48

Yeah, and given the authority, what do those people do? They're told go round those people up, and sometimes those people are toddlers on their way home from more things change, man, the more I stay the same.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:00

But because again, like I I feel like I'm the one trying to be somewhat of an optimist. It's damn near impossible. But it feels like this feels like a dying fucking ideology. Which part? The systemic racism part. Let me explain.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:15

And guess what else is reawakening since 2024, coming back from the dead.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:23

But good old-fashioned racism in America. The point being though, is a and again, we we joke about you know faith and we took joke about a lot of these, you know, things. It feels like it was a tradition more than it was anything else. You know, we're taught, you know, growing up that racism is the thing that's taught it's not inherently born in people. I believe that. Yeah. And I think we're hitting that point where a lot of people have been told that did believe that shit, no, it's bullshit. It's bullshit to the point where we elected a black man to be president, which, of course, had consequence to it, but that had to show at least some scion of like an ending of it. And I think the reason why it's almost been tripled down on from some sectors of this country is they feel, oh, it's slipping away from us. Oh, we are a dying fucking ideology. And we will fucking, you know, fight till the end, not knowing that there are a whole other group of people that are willing to fight. And that's how look, respectfully how you get a civil war going, but it's because again, these old fucking arcaic traditions are starting to fucking die. The resort of a last desperate man is violence.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:34

Yeah, I I believe that. I mean, hard disagree on that this is dying. Like, I have some real concern over the younger generation's politics because hard conservatism is alive and well in a younger generation than ours. Like, we can see that there is the next generation of young politicians, and when I say young, I mean our age, like in their 30s. Like, what was it? It was young conservatives who, you know, we got their text chats that are saying, you know, send the opposition to the gas chambers and like drop an N-bombs, right? Like those people are gonna lead our country. Like right now, I know people, you know, that are younger than me that have some real warped views of other races and women and all like all sorts of things that I'm just like, wow, I thought we were making progress. And then, you know, you come out into certain parts of the country and you see, oh no, no, no, those people are out there and they vote. There's the younger ones too. Even the Ben and Harry thing, this guy who's used to being like the center of attention, is then cucked by a charismatic black man. What does that sound a lot like? It sounds like that correspondence dinner where Obama made a joke about Donald Trump, and you can see it in his eyes that he pledges to make Obama's life a living hell. And a lot of people trace all of these Trump-era politics of him even wanting to run for president back to being insulted by Barack Obama at the White House correspondence dinner. The point of all this being is like this movie, the way that it ends, like all of this is just pure Americana and the dark side of it. This is yet another reason why this movie is immortal. It was made in 1968, and you can take it today and pull all the same shit from it. Let's talk about the legacy of this movie. I don't even know where to begin. This movie alone has two remakes. There's one, two, three, four, five sequels, and one in production right now in Puerto Rico. That's like the last one he wrote, but he didn't really finish it. But I think his son is finishing it. I actually know the producer on it. Shout out Sarah. Bring me out. I want to go.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:01

The legacy of this film, while difficult to quantify, it boils down to in its most simplistic terms. It's one of the films that changed everything. Not just in terms of giving a grimier edge to horror that the studio films couldn't, you know. I brought Psycho up earlier. Psycho was still put up by a major studio, it still has that gloss, that sheen to it. It doesn't have the jagged edges of Night of the Living Dead. You know, without Knight of the Living Dead, we don't get Texas Chainsaw a few years later. Without Texas Chainsaw, we don't get Sound of the Lamb so many years after the fact, though. Sounds lamb is still a studio film, but still feels a little dirty. Night of the Living Dead, also what we now know is the true independent film where a couple buddies get together and, you know, hey, my uncle has a camera. Hey, we have our own little production company, we have all of this gear. Hey, I know this troop of actors. Let's all just make a movie because it'll be a fun thing to do, and maybe we'll make some money doing it. That comes from Knight of the Living Dead. Even if there were films before that that tried and failed, Night of the Living Dead succeeded and therefore has become what we know as the archetype. But ultimately, the legacy of Knight of the Living Dead has to be it added something to the zeitgeist. The zombie as we know it comes from this film and is now a permanent fixture of popular culture in a way that a lot of things don't get to do, even things that are more successful. It's literally added to the lexicon. And I think that is its legacy, even beyond what it did for film. This thing did something for culture, or popular culture, rather.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:40

You're right. Like it defined what we know the zombie to be. Like I wanted to get into a little bit about the origin of like where the zombie comes from, and then compare that to like what it is now after this film. So the primordial inspirations for the zombie come from Central and South African folklore, but the word Zombie comes from the Haitian French zombie. In Haitian rural folklore, zombies are depicted as dead persons physically revived by the act of necromancy of a bokor or like a sorcerer or witch. The Bokor is opposed by the Hungen, which is a priest, and a Mambo, which is a priestess of the voodoo religion. And uh a zombie remains under the control of the necromancer as a personal slave, having no will of their own. The Haitian tradition also includes an incorporal type of zombie, the zombie astral, which is a part of the human soul. So essentially a zombie is two parts. There's a soul without a body and a body without a soul, and the zombie is that part. You know, even in their most original form, the zombie was a symbol of societal critique. Why might a bunch of displaced Africans in Haiti come up with a monster that is essentially a human being stripped of its soul and forced to serve a master? Sort of a head scratcher there, you know? But the two types of zombies sort of also reflect a sort of soul dualism. Like I said before, the idea of a body without uh spirit or flesh without spirit and spirit without flesh.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:13

Oh my god. Now I just went down this rabbit hole in my mind of like, did Romero whitewash the zombie?

SPEAKER_03 1:29:19

Uh I don't know if whitewashing is necessarily the word for it. I think he took the idea of why that would be created and made it applicable to anything. This is why I like the modern idea of what the zombie subgenre is. Because you can sort of take the zombie and plop them into a story to mean whatever you want it to mean. Like George does in every one of his films after that. Like if you talk about Dawn of the Dead, what do the zombies represent in that film? They represent the consumer, like the rampant consumer of product and capitalism. I can read this quote here from George Romero in an interview with the New York Times. He describes his zombie films as quote, being about revolution, one generation consuming the next. All of his films are snapshots of North America at a particular moment. He has an ability within the genre to do that. To quote a uh like an article that I had read, that this isn't a quote from Romero, but it continues piggybacking off of that quote. Romero, one of the greatest innovators in the zombie film genre, uses gory images of zombies consuming human flesh to represent what he sees as a crumbling America. The America that Romero focuses on is one in which consumerism and racism pervade, creating rampant inequalities. Though Romero does not explicitly talk about these inequalities in his films, he uses representations of racism and consumption to depict immoral social hierarchies that perpetuate poverty and lower standards of living for worthy people, most often poor African Americans. So that was through the lens of Knight of the Living Dead, but in general, it's like whatever you think is consuming the brains of the public, you can throw in a horde of zombies as a functional element to like make your story.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:18

Well, and I would also argue, too, that with zombies, a through line that they have is that they consume. And so you're always going to find some kind of critique involving consumption of some sort with zombies in particular. Uh or at least that's what I've generally found. I don't know so much with like the 28 series of films like 28 days later, because they have a very explicit origin and they're not actually zombies. It's more of a like they're functionally identical, but I have found with like the dead coming back to life, consumption always seems to be some kind of theme in some capacity.

SPEAKER_03 1:31:58

There's plenty of different ways that you can attribute the theme. It could be consumption, it could be conformity, right? Like part of the fear of zombies throughout zombie lore and zombie media is that you yourself can become one. And it's not sexy like when you become a vampire. It like it's something that disgusts you. Like South Park had a great parody of it, which was about, I believe, homelessness in the episode where um all of South Park is overwhelmed with homeless people walking around, change, change, and Randy gives change to every single homeless person on the street until he realizes that he no longer has any money, and then now he's asking people for change. And like that's part of the fear of it, like they could be a warning for like something that you don't want to become.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:52

I get it. I just it's the the odd thing of like that we kind of grafted something else that had a very traditional war and of itself onto what now is known as a zombie.

SPEAKER_02 1:33:04

Well, and I think some of that I I wonder if it was a form of synthesis, because like we had covered before, this film wasn't originally Knight of the Living Dead, it was Knight of the Flesh Eaters, and only changed due to the title suggestion. And correct me if I'm wrong, but Dawn of the Dead is the next film in Romero's filmography involving zombies, and that's as that would be a solid 10 years after Knight of the Living Dead, where he was able to think about that, you know, still potentially a co-opting of something. But yeah, I I guess a part of me would also be curious as to like, you know, what did happen? Was it the general population that kind of fell into this association with zombies being more like this? Or is this something more conscious on the filmmaker's part? I ask because I haven't looked into this.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:54

I think it's society taking it for what they saw of it, and the filmmaker later on kind of saying, I should just run with this.

SPEAKER_03 1:34:03

I think that the reason that it is the way it is now, hands down, is because of George Romero, right? Like he made this movie that became iconic. He followed it up with a couple great sequels that stayed consistent in like this thing that he was developing. And like, if you think of zombie movies, like you think of George Romero, right? Like books have been written, other people started to imitate and steal, just like how you're saying Boris Karloff was stolen to make the zombie number one. Other filmmakers then copied Romero. We forget about the white zombies and the I walked with the zombies, you know, over time, like so many, you know, average film goers that aren't us that like study this stuff, you know, are gonna forget those things to time, but the classics endure, right? And that shaped everything as to how we view about it, and everything that we know about it now is built off of that primordial ooze.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:10

And I think ultimately that's the legacy, right? Yeah. And that about does it for this week's episode. As always, thank you to our founding father, Andrew Schwartz, for creating the podcast, as well as for the music that you hear at the beginning and end of every episode. Thank you also to John Anthony for their usual brand of wit and knowledge, and for making my married life a little more chaotic over the next months. Again, that couch is looking very comfortable right now, so thank you, gentlemen. Tune in next time as Zombie Star rolls along with something a little cheekier, something the three of us consider the best comedic homage to zombie films ever made. David Kill the Queen. So for John Beolianta Zaccone, I'm Am Zekofico, and as always, I'm sorry, Jesus.