Angels of Groovy Death #IV: Lynn Lowry Special Edition

With her big cat eyes, button nose, wide toothy smile (innocent yet terrifying), long straight hair, and knack for being cast in future iconic cult gems, Lynn Lowry was a kind of unofficial poster girl for the post-Manson hippy- horror micro-genre of the late-60s/early 70s. She was the quintessential gone-homicidal-flower-child, the girl who Middle American viewers dreaded drawing as a babysitter. She was too sweet to say no to, but.... something about her made you uneasy - like she could charm an elderly neighbor at the front door while letting a coven of knife-wielding satanic bikers in through the back. She glowed with a kind of worldly ephemeral inner luminescence that somehow kept her innocent and free even as she was being gunned down by soldiers or cutting off a housewife's hand with an electric carving knife.

We, the small kids of the early 70s, all knew and loved a girl like her. When she babysat us, anything could happen: fun board games, seduction, arson, smoking-- all kinds of mischief, all with a spontaneous air that let us know any second-guessing or hesitation at one of her dares and she'd leave us behind, forever. You either ran with her giddy madness or got left behind to die in the dull roar of the TV flames. We learned to just say yes, no matter what.

Girls like her carried a bad rep. This was the era of a very popular urban legend of the hippy babysitter who was so high on LSD she microwaved the baby and tucked in the chicken. That may sound farfetched, and one presumes it was, but the legend was so embedded in popular consciousness of the time that it shows up in TV movies like Go Ask Alice (1973), in the scene wherein Alice finds out she's been dosed while on a babysitting job by vindictive ex-drug buddies, so rather than risk the baby's safety by succumbing to the lure of the Radarange, she locks herself in the closet. That the film doesn't even need to explain why she does this testifies to that legend's prevalence.

We kids weren't afraid, though. We wanted to have her over every chance we got. So when mom was making the calls, we prayed for all her first choices to fall through.


This innocent serpent flower child was a new kind of femme fatale. Not the sort to go framing you for murder or shaking you down with blackmail like in the 40s-50s; she wasn't even a new version of the old spoiled nympho drug addict waif like Carmen Sternwood in The Big Sleep. This new homicidal cultist was never spiteful or mischievous --her heart was too full of love; acid had burned out those small minded reptilian fear-desire tail-biting instincts that befell lesser mortals with base fears and wants. And it's this freedom from the usual fears and desires, above all else, that made her so dangerous and unpredictable. Along with everything else, acid dissolved away the morality and impulse control the rest of us took for granted. These tripping waifs belonged more in a comfy psych ward where they couldn't have long fingernails or access to sharp things like pointed scissors... at least until the drugs wore off. But instead of chasing butterflies through leafy fields they were trying to make popcorn --heating lots of oil in a big pot on the roaring stove while we hovered immediately below.

But we were innocent too, and in our love for her, all sense melted away.

Consider this, especially if you're a straight male: Look at that picture below left, for a few seconds, long enough to get a read on all three of their faces. Now... consider if these three girls were to come onto you in, say, the park while you were alone reading the paper on a bench on a sunny 'frisco day. You know that you'd have no problem resisting the ones on the left and right, they're more like sisters or aunts, but the girl in the middle, man, she's cute. If she wanted to go home with you, you'd take her. And you'd be dead by dawn, and she'd wake up snug in your entrails with no knowledge where she was or who you were. Then she'd shower off the blood, eat enough acid to send a rhino to the psych ward, then fingerpaint on the walls with your coagulating blood while softly singing "tralalalala." Does that make her evil? Or are you dumb for letting beauty blind you to danger signs? Were danger signs even there? If evil isn't present, merely a lysergic 'lack' of moral partitioning, then it's just 'temporary insanity' and that's nowhere near the same thing.

"We have no jelly donuts for you today... only death."

The 'Manson Girls,." singing and chanting as one, had become national figures around this time trials (1971) and though I was too young to remember the courtroom hooplah I do remember the fear associated with the words 'Helter Skelter', the baby/microwave thing, and the fear some crazy swinger devil worshippers down the block would put razors in your apples on Halloween. (So we all had to 'check' any fruit, not that we ever got any - if you gave out apples, you were automatically suspect).

This fear of hippies, and the serpent under the hippie flower, so to speak, goosed the 70s along and gave seemingly helpless little barefoot waifs selling peace buttons on the corner a kind mobster street gang clout. No one dared mess with them. And as a kid nosing through mom's record albums, the ones with similarly clad babes (like Peter Paul and Mary and the Mamas and the Papas) all had a queasy bone-chilling dread about them that wasn't there before, and didn't last very long (by the time I became a hippie myself in the late 1980s, I'd forgotten all about it).

Then again, my aunt on my dad's side in Chicago ran off and joined a commune, and we went to visit when I was five, and man that was a hairy place - I tried cat food for the first time, and ran through lots of beaded doorways, and still remember the groovy art, and so forth. My aunt was dating her fourth guy named Randy... four Randys.... in a row... the mind boggled. My grandmother had disowned her.

My parents were just a few years too old for that scene, Ours was like in Mad Men, that bridge club wife swap 70s middle-class golf game / kids walk to school of our own accord / freedom to roam just stay within "Dinner!" earshot type.

We ran amok. We molested the babysitters, not the other way around.

And if you grew up kind of crushing on Susan Dey even if you rarely watched The Partridge Family (Danny was gross; the music horrific), then she might be who comes to mind the first time you see Lynn Lowry; with that downturned lip and sultry eyes and wavy straight hair, Lowry strikes me first as if she's Dey crossed with a cute alien hybrid drawn by a Disney animator unwittingly dosed by a CIA operative. Someone sure should have dosed the Partridge Family. God I hated that redheaded kid Danny, that plagiarizing ginger with his unheimlich neediness.... and wasn't too crazy about Shirley Jones and her sister-wife collars and androgynous hair. She was like that mom who eavesdrops as you try to pick up her daughter than snidely puts you in your place, loud enough for everyone to hear, so that you blush and stammer and run home to sulk with your comic books, and then you never come over again. People, c'mon get happy, yeah right --quit tellin' us what to do. You could tell Mrs. P was one of those hovering mothers that never questions why she's always grabbing things out of her daughters' hands and lavishing them on Keith, whether Keith wants them or not. Feeling badly, Keith waits til mom goes off to pray or something, then gives sis back her shit.

Nice, sweet doomed Keith. He'd make a good sacrifice for the solstice.

On the other hand, Marcia Marcia Marcia was also pretty hot, and had similar straight blonde hair. And that whole family was way cooler, way less locked in their Mormon incestuous death grip. Much healthier sexually. If Mrs. Brady saw you clumsily putting some moves on fair Marcia, she wouldn't shame you, she'd probably just call you into the den, give you some hands-on sexual advice and then kick you back downstairs with a strip of condoms in your hand and lipstick on your forehead like a governmental seal of approval.

Why? Because unlike Mrs. Partridge, Mrs. Brady got laid, really laid. Even us kids could tell that, and her sexually satisfied glow kept the decade alight with a special baseline magic. Mrs. Partridge, if she ever saw how happy they were, would probably call Child Protective Services and make up some lurid lie.

David Lynch would make great use of this terrifying yet sweetly innocuous smile.  Lowry alone knows how to make her untrampled flower child joy indistinguishable from a flesh-rending maenad frenzy

I mention all this only to illustrate how the Partridge Family vs. Brady Bunch dichotomy provided parameters for our collective 70s pre-sexual psyche, and maybe that's partially the idea a Susan Dey archetype untethered from her prim bitch overprotective mom and ginger brother, running away with a Satan-worshipping boyfriend and winding up rabid (ala 1970's I Drink Your Blood --her first movie role) or foaming at the mouth thanks to some new STD (Shivers), chem warfare agent (The Crazies)--or just really speedy acid--rang so many popular unconscious gongs. The times demanded a girl who could slice off a woman's hand with an electric carving knife and still be an innocent, a free spirit cranked to eleven, a girl so pure the needle spins all the way around to the other extreme- batshit homicidal. If you've ever known and partied with the type then you know how rare and intoxicating they are, the sweet sudden shock of dread when what was once a feeling of smitten love and devotion to her sweet beauty becomes sickening blood-chilled dread, the realization you were so far on cloud 9 you made the mistake of letting her get between you and the exit.

give the lady a hand

A sweet, sweet Scorpio (born Oct. 15), she's the kind of friendly animal a Pisces like me would let ride on our back as we swim the channel, but I'm too savvy to ask why she'd sting me to death halfway across - it's not even cuz a man or a sexually transmitted parasite or water-spread virus told her too, or because of acid, it's just her nature. Her long straight hair like wind-stirred gossamer over a denim jacket picturesquely dabbed in a cop's blood, when she starts slowly laughing at the carnage going on down the hill in The Crazies there's a weird schism that marks a great unexplored middle ground between the sane heroes and the 'changed.'  Rather than turn zombie or something, where the line is clearly drawn between normal and 'possessed' or us vs. them, Lowry extends the 'in between' with her contracting and expanding organic circular breathing. She's already scans a "little" crazy, so going all the way crazy is no great stretch, nor is it quite clear the extent to which her incestuous dad's behavior is a result of Trixie (the virus) or just habit. Eventually she's too crazy to know to hide when the military comes. They end up surrounding her, guns drawn, like she's a dangerous maniac, even though all she's doing is offering them flowers and singing, just another flower child protester with no concern for her own life as she marches towards the bayonets with a flower in her hand.

Like some Innsmouth elder royal Neptune princess

With that air elemental aura (she'd make a great Ariel in Shakespeare's Tempest), Lowry is both uncanny and inviting, innocent and corrupting, the babysitter from the 70s my little brother and I prayed for as my mom made her round of early evening phone calls. We only got her around 1/3 of the time but when we did our stomachs sank with queasy dread. Whether she'd be in the mood to play her dangerous Go Ask Alice-style games with us rather than staying on the phone all night or hanging out on the porch with some sketchy boyfriend was another story. But if Jupiter aligned with Mars and she was ready to focus her loving laser beam attention upon us, then it was like some magic new dimension was opened in the Kuersten house, like she alone had a key to a secret door in the hallway wall that led to where all the cool stuff was.

Lowry has that same vibe, an open book of forbidden but benign ambivalence that puts her past our reach even while making her as accessible as all outdoors; she can dive merrily into the depths of depravity and horror and escape unscathed, like Daniel in the lion's den. As long as we don't try to pull her out of it, no harm will come to either of us. If we step in, we'll get hurt.

Shivers - during the transformation from sexually available but professional nurse to uninhibited maenad orgiast.

Toots, my darling, I was only eight years-old and didn't understand but I still hated the implied ascension to older man leering implied in the your acceptance of a quasi-derogatory nickname (I was always trying to come up with a different one) clearly given by a much older man, like a pissed off patron of a table she's waiting on at a roadside diner. Toots, I hated having to say that name to address you, my froggy voice stringy anchored by sublime pre-sexual adoration.

Mom stopped volunteering at that runaway shelter when we moved to NJ in 1980, a fitting analogy. I was 13, so bye-bye cool wild flower power kiss you-on-the-mouth babysitters and hello slasher craze sober virgin final girls making sure we did all our homework and went to bed on time and then we lay  awake, terrified anyway. The early 80s: devil worship wasn't 'fun' with denim babysitters anymore, but the province of icky child molesters at day care centers. The slasher craze had even formerly-louche grade school swingers afraid to go upstairs at night unless mom was already up there, her sewing machine humming the "all clear". Only WW2 saved me from that fear. I stopped thinking about slashers with knives and started thinking about Sgt. Rock, Sherman tanks vs. Panzers, Messerschmidts, Spitfires, B-17s. I was invulnerable when being shot at over Berlin. Figures.

Was it some kind of EC/DC House of Secrets/Tales from the Crypt, post-code/pre-code comic book comeuppance, all this terror and tub-thumping? It didn't matter which side of the censorship barrier, what was once shag carpet and wood panelling vivid--once Thulsa Doom snake cult decadent--was now just postage stamp size color pictures in the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide and John Buscemi Conan the Barbarian reprints. And that was how I wanted it. Whether the one led to the other, in grand macabre twist payback paperback style I don't know. But if both sides want a thing, at least on some level, and if no one else is involved or hurt, can it still be evil, even if it kills them?

It might depend who you ask, but frankly I'd trust Baudelaire as a babysitter over Cardinal Richelieu any day, for he who writes of evil needn't express it, physically. Either way, whether we felt it was evil or not, the fall-out was the same. We may wonder what happened in that Tenderloin peep both in THE HOWLING that caused Dee Wallace to repress her memories. Did that Fiona Apple "Criminal" MTV video cause me to revert back to savagery in the early 90s? Maybe, but by then I was an adult, strung out on a melancholy from never being able to get that delirious first MDMA peak high moment back again. Apple had that certain Lynn Lowry mix of childlike glee and physical corruption. Calvin Klein ran ads that looked intentionally like they were taken in some pervert's basement to send into Flesh World.  The important thing to understand is that dirty old man perversion of today was the gold chain hedonist swinger of yesterday, and if the girl is over eighteen and broke and hot and really into doing your drugs, is it a crime to get involved? Some people sure think so, irregardless. Lynn Lowry--or at least her archetypal hippie Mansonite--doesn't. She forgives you in advance.

We, who were just in elementary school at the time, can't remember if those days were really that deranged, but there's magic and power in the wicked but sweet, terrifying but absolving cat sister mile of Lowry on film which will never fade. Whether succumbing to the mad slavering ecstasy-overdose insane group orgy hysteria of Shivers or giggling in progressive waves of insanity in The Crazies or playing with an electric carving knife in I Drink Your Blood, this strange wondrous actress evokes that 70s post-Manson 'girl next door' anxiety with a flair unrivaled. Some girls are just never far enough away from the fire to know they're burning. Bless them for that, and even if following them drowns you in cop bullets, hitting you like scorpion knife flicker stinging flames of razor wire cat o'nine tails water, how can you keep from singing? Tra-la-la-la....tra-la-la-la....tra-la-la-la....tra-la-la-la....tra-la-la-la....tra-la-la-la....tra-la-la-la....

FURTHER LOWRY READINGS:
"That's how you play 'Get the Guests'" SCORE!
SHIVERS! (capsule review)

Dubious Comforts: PET SEMATARY, SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD and the RNC

"The person you put there isn't the person who comes back" 

- Jud Crandall (Pet Sematary)

Aunt Cecily: "Do you believe...the dead can come back to life?
Bob Hope: "You mean like the Republicans?"
- The Cat and the Canary (1939)

Like a bad dream of Republican 'small government,' Pet Sematary (1989) depicts the return to a simpler, more 'Christian' lifestyle, marred by slight problems like the non-regulation of big business, i.e. Paul Ryan's ideas of 'limited government' is behind, no doubt, the unregulated road in front of the family house, whereon trucks go speeding past sidewalkless residential streets without speed limit signs, cops, or punishment. The heavy toll in run-over pets and children is a small price to pay when the alternative is welfare socialism! Limits mean sacrifice: once you're run over, mutilated in war, deformed from disease, or otherwise unassimilable into the Norman Rockwell ideal it's only natural that you become abject and ostracized, shoveled under the loamy carpet or kept hidden in a back room and spoon-fed oatmeal by the terrified child who will grow up to be the mom in Pet Sematary. This is the deal of small government, warts and all means, inevitably, all warts.

Boys do love trucks...

Like the bankrupting of Medicare and Social Security via ever-longer life spans, Pet Sematary shows how the idealization of a 'real' America is continually undone through denial of death. King's motifs come tumbling out of America's chock full-o-skeletons closet in this film way more so than in most all other adaptations of his novels: population control (here in the form of animal spaying issues --the run-over cat is unable to get to heaven as he's 'incomplete'); child mortality (the run-over infant comes back to gleefully kill off the cast, all because dad can't handle the pain of losing him again); assisted suicide (that old invalid aunt twisted up on spinal meningitis, praying for a death which the doctors prevent); lynchings (neighbors once torched the house of a zombie and its dad); Native Americans (burial site desecration), and so on. The graveyard bringing whatever you bury there back to life, but with a demonic streak of voracious homicidal ill will, makes a nice right wing nutjob analogy to sending your good Christian-raised kid off to college and having him come back an angry vegetarian pothead feminist.

All this deep red state subtext doesn't mean (the film) Pet Sematary is somehow not bad. It is truly bad. But its badness is perhaps why it's able to deal with these skeletons straight on. If the film were any better it would have to deep-six the abject subtexts, simply because too many guys in suits would be watching, ensuring nothing controversial came back to bite them. Instead it seems like even the director wasn't paying much attention, so all the gooey truth stays intact, a bit like one of my favorite awful films Godsend, which is also about the horrid deals grieving parents might be willing to make in order to allay their grief. When there's nothing you can possibly to do to bring your dead son back, you can relax and know that--funeral expenses aside--no one's going to drain your bank account in for monkey's paw resurrection service. Since it's impossible to raise the dead, we can surrender to grief's kiln-like heat and be suddenly made pliable. If we have any other alternative we have to take it, and thus the medical community and its ancient burial ground kin make wheel-of-life spoke-jammers of us all.

As in Godsend, Sematary's small cast, low budget, bad acting, poor spelling, flat lighting, unimaginative camera movements, and clunky dialogue swirl combine to help the movie achieve "the sort of shallowness that brings depth" (1). And while in Godsend it was the shrill over-and-underacting of Robert De Niro and Greg Kinnear that made it all so unintentionally Ed Woodsian, in Pet it's the culminating glory of seeing a zombie demon kid attacking an old man like a rabid Baby New Year at the stroke of midnight (above). Any horror is leavened as the kid is clearly just having fun making mean faces. Grrr. 

"President Obama's promise is to begin to slow the rise of the oceans (pause for laughter) and to heal the planet (more laughter). My promise is to help you and your family."  --Mitt Romney (RNC 2012 acceptance speech)

The bodies must be burned immediately. People will have to forego the dubious comforts a funeral service will give." - Newscaster, Night of the Living Dead (1968)

When I heard the above unabashedly anti-environmental attitude from presidential candidate Mitt Romney, I instantly thought of it as the inverse of the announcer in the original Night of the Living Dead, telling viewers to "forego the dubious comforts a funeral will give." Romney would be announcing the reverse: "The health office insists we forego the comforts of funerals in order to halt the spread of this epidemic, but I say your deceased family comes first!" It matters not if Mother Earth dies while we're eating her, as long as we get a big enough piece before its all gone, because we have to share that piece with our family. Unwashed hordes of illegal Mexican zombies are already gnawing upwards from Mother's toes! Arabs are pulling out her entrails! The Asian markets are scooping up her brains. If we don't drag the carcass away from them fast we'll end up not just hungry but looking weak to our enemies, which is far worse. Don't they know we're tough? Grrrr!

For all our strength we're still a very, very young country

Not to say that's what the Republican ticket and Paul Ryan's Ayn Randiness necessarily represent. One must make allowances for bloc baiting, but it's interesting because we have to go back to the Monkey's Paw's 'careful what you say' word choice of our wishes, and avoid 'getting everything we want' which would mean either (for them) a return to a Handmaid's Tale kind of fundamentalist American patriarchal religious oppression or (for us), an overly permissive socialist Welfare State. Neither side really wants either of those options and so we must preserve our state of conflict at all costs. The trick is to realize this and move into a state of conscious awareness, like the Buddha of professional wrestling - it's just a fight. We need to remember that the fight is just for show, that we need the fight, need the show, for balance. A total victory would mean the end of the match, and riots in the crowded streets, so drag on, lads, drag on...

Both sides have forgotten that the real enemy is the media, whose obsession with repetition and bottom lines and computer game tie-ins has led to the idea that zombie movies are just heads blowing up and armies shambling through stairwells ala RESIDENT EVIL. Romero's films, and King's, on the other hand, understand that without the issue of family and the 'right to undie' or the 'right to unlife' there's no 'meat' to the story, which is why RES EVIL is--for all its mega budget and gloss and nonstop action--so uninvolving, and PET SEM is--for all its low budget badness--so trenchant. We have the mom letting her daughter gut her with a trowel in Romero's first film; the girl in the ghetto protecting her zombie husband from 'the man' and getting bit for her trouble in DAWN; and in Romero's most recent installment SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD, an old patriarch fighting for the idea that life is sacred even in death, that every dead baby has the right to crawl out of the earth and hunt its parents. These aspects are what matter, what lingers after the endless shots of exploding heads have faded from our minds, and which is why 99% of non-Romero zombie films suck so bad. 

Shot in 2009, SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD is less a sequel than a 'concurrent' story to the first two films: it takes place several weeks into the original zombie epidemic, and society is still in the midst of its collapse. Two crotchety Irish-American landowners occupy a small farm-based island off the New England coast, wrestling over the abortion-encoded issue of whether to shoot the undead or to just chain and train them to deliver mail or rake leaves. The poster girl for it all (above) is Kathleen Munroe, a hot Irish brogue-sporting lass in sexy black riding coat with sexy black riding gloves, long flowing hair and blazing blue eyes staggering around a lush green corral with a beautiful black steed she's supposed to eat instead of peoples --and both sides of the argument watching her, hoping she'll take a bite out of this gorgeous black creature. It's a great, twisted National Velvet of the Living Dead moment. The zombie movie has evolved here into something a bit more aesthetically pleasing than we expected, at least in this one image, until the bites start.

Another key in SURVIVAL and PET SEMATARY is the use of intertextual imagery - namely portraits and paintings which 'come to 'life' like the once-buried loved ones now unburied. Portraits are, as we learn from John Berger's "Way of Seeing," the proprietary gaze writ large, the establishment of a permanent record of one's existence and property, meant to last beyond death and age, the way stars in films of the 1930s still look vibrant and young even after their corporeal forms have long since turned to ash or moldering bones. There's a fine line between wanting to return to past glory and mere fear of death, and zombie movies are that fine line's ultimate erasure, the frozen preservation of impermanent flux. Cinematic mortality's dawning self-awareness is the ultimate compromise between the 'undead' photograph of a loved one coming to get you (Barbara) across the graveyard of memory and the real of our cursed plane with its spatial existence ever-threatened both from interior growth-decay and exterior dangers. To live you need to kill and eat smaller creatures and avoid being killed and eaten by bigger ones. But, in the movies, all death goes up onscreen, and so we, floating in the cheap seats, can live, even if for just this 90 minutes, in perfect freedom from bodily concern, bathroom breaks aside.

A key scene marking Romero's film as a critique of the conservative mindset involves the 'mixed race lesbian' from the National Guard who winds up abducted and forced to have dinner (prepared by a zombie wife [below left] literally chained barefoot to the kitchen stove) with the pro-(undead) life patriarch, who poses next to his John Wayne-ish portrait and end table filled with old photos of dead relatives (the old school tradition of 'post-mortem photography') and tries to woo her and her niche demographic over to his side, so maybe she'll extend an ankle for a shackle all her own one day. The dead people in the photos are great metaphors for the conservative slavishness to past cultural mores, the PET SEMATARY-ish longing to return to the land of rose-tinted exhumation. The patriarch here has almost no room in his heart for any living person at all. In death they are infinitely more receptive to the message of reverse-progress. Necrophilia is, in the end, all about control. An alive girl is nice and all that but...

"Sometimes death is better."

And yet, if once it all goes black you can go back, what returns? Babies, zombies, remakes, sequels --is that all there is? "Corporations are people, my friend," and corporations ruthlessly pursue self-interest, therefore successful films must be remade, and man must kill again and again just to eat the same meal he enjoyed last week. That's understandable. What's not is the assumption that grabbing it all for yourself is somehow a good thing for America. Demanding to be adored by the masses for your greedy self interest only seems ironic if you're not a rich insecure scion who's mad because he still lacks the nerve to tell the ghost of his dead father how much he hated him. That may be the ultimate irony of bipartisanship, that both sides are really angry at someone else, who's gone, and only their damned vampire photograph remains, and it can't bite back.

NOTES:
1. a compliment Godard once paid to 40s poverty row films from Monogram and PRC, which this film resembles -- See my piece on Monogram's Voodoo Man (1944)

The Public Domain Undead : George Romero and the Halperin Brothers vs. ze World

With the apocalypse year 2012 only a handful of days away I thought I'd prepare you with this post about zombies and creative copyright - you'll need to know about both to survive what congress and cosmic radioactivity have in store!  

The post-apocalyptic undead 'shoot 'em in the head' cannibal zombie film/TV show is now so ubiquitous that anyone with a camera feels entitled to make one --yet the way the bandwagon jumpers carry on you'd think these walking dead 'zombies' were as old and license-free as medieval folklore. Do the makers of stuff like AMC's sanctimonious glumfest THE WALKING DEAD and/or zom-coms like ZOMBIELAND and SHAUN OF THE DEAD even remember what life was like before 1968? Do they understand their huge debt to one man, the Bram Stoker of zombie-hood? Seeing WALKING DEAD try to be so soapy and self-serious, like "stop smiling, man, my son is out there, dead! And no one cares!" is for me just painful. Lighten up, guys, it's a fucking horror TV show on basic cable!

In the 1930s, 'every desire' was extra dirty.

Before NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD in 1968 all zombies were in Haiti. They were tools of sugar plantation owners and voodoo chiefs, via films like 1932's WHITE ZOMBIE and REVOLT OF THE ZOMBIES (both by the Halperin Brothers). When the Halperin Brothers tried to release REVOLT as a WHITE sequel they wound up in trouble with their old distributor, according to Wikipedia:

In May 1936, however, the Halperins encountered legal troubles in the form of a suit from Amusement Securities Corporation, a company that had helped finance White Zombie. Amusement Securities alleged that its contract for the earlier film gave it the exclusive right to use the world "zombie" in motion picture titles. Amusement Securities sent letters to theaters who planned to showcase Revolt of the Zombies, warning them not to show the film. As the film's premiere approached, Judge Waservogel of the New York State Supreme court ruled that screenings of the film could take place until a judgment in the suit was reached, and appointed attorney Henry Hoffman to referee the case. On June 27, 1936, Hoffman issued an opinion in favor of the plaintiffs, awarding Amusement Securities $11,500 in damages and legal fees and prohibiting the Halperins from promoting Revolt of the Zombies as a sequel to White Zombie.^[3]

Wow! All that over that one word --it's bound to make you mad when you consider what's going on now, how everyone and anyone makes zombie films as they like while the one man who invented zombies as we know them today collects not a farthing and rarely any public recognition. He brought us all the modern zombie features and there's not even a plaque (cough) or a statue of him... in that town, and meanwhile everyone with a camera is out making zombie movies, rewriting classic literature to include zombies, making faux History channel documentaries on zombies and using the ideas he invented as a 'given' of folklore. Michael, he could have been bigger than US Steel, which instead all but owns his hometown of Pittsburgh.


His name? George Romero.


 The Romero brand zombie has become 'the' zombie. Your zombie is a Romero-inspired zombie if:

1. It can only be stopped by a bullet to or strong blow to the head
2. It eats the flesh of living humans
3. Those who are killed rise up as zombies anywhere from a few seconds to a few days after death.
4.  It can somehow smell out who is dead vs. who is alive (or hear the heartbeat)
5. They're not really cannibals since they don't eat other zombies.

That's what I never understood. At what point does a dead person being eaten alive wake up a zombie and say, excuse me brother, get your damn teeth out my arm or I shall start eating thee? And why is it, even with tons of meat at their disposal, they'd rather waste an evening bashing at a front door than chow down on the corpses available and/or wrap something up for later?

Of course there's a long history of borrowing and co-opting in horror, stemming from legal issues over the use of DRACULA as a narrative in the 1920s, filed by Dracula author Bram Stoker's widow against Murnau's film, NOSFERATU in '22. That's just an example of the muddy battle by which the name DRACULA eventually became public domain. Now anyone can reprint that book or make a movie with a Dracula character. Free publicity - a bankable name. Ditto for FRANKENSTEIN, but the Universal monster make-up IS copyright, so your Frankenstein can't have a square head, bolts-in-neck, and so forth.

The original properties for those two are too old for renewal anyway, but NOTLD shouldn't be. (One of my pet peeves over books like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is how lazy and bottom-line it is, the zombies are royalty-free, the source book is royalty-free, just Cuisnart them together and make some lazy fucker rich).

The big disaster for Romero was that the licensing rights to NIGHT fell into the public domain due to someone letting the copyright lapse, probably through the usual tangle of crooked distributors.  Then again, would the film have become so ubiquitous otherwise? Since anyone could show it, the film played endlessly at the end of drive-in triple features up until the end of drive-ins in the 80s, as well as college campuses, local TV, and cheap VHS.  Now anyone can make a movie or TV show or book with Romero-brand zombies, and adhere to the rules, or change them --it's a true myth for the ages. Maybe that's the definition of myth - public domain - once it's public domain, anyone can tell the story in their own way. And of course that's why the story gets told over and over... so letting your title lapse may lose you cash, but in insures your myth endures.

Disputes over the rights and directions, led to a branching of minds between Romero and his effects man / screenwriter John Russo who did RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD in 1985, which references NIGHT directly, wile Romero did DAY OF THE DEAD the same year. I remember seeing both in different NJ cinemas the same week! Adding to the confusion, Tom Savini remade the original film with Romero producing (?) and there was also a colorized version.

Interestingly, I'm pretty sure the word zombie never even appears in the original 1968 film. The newscasters do refer to them as 'ghouls' and 'individuals rising up and committing mass murder and cannibalism' but never as straight up 'zombies.' Unless I'm mistaken that name came from Italy. They loooooved NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD over there. And the called DAWN OF THE DEAD (imported by Dario Argento who funded it with profits from SUSPIRIA being a huge fan of Romero's original) ZOMBI, so ZOMBI 2 was their own sequel to that film, called ZOMBIE here, and a big hit, with the unforgettable tag line "They are coming to eat you."

Even if you were too young to ever go see ZOMBIE, you saw the TV ad, and you remembered that tag line and that terrifying, rotting face.

At least the imagery of hungry hordes ripping the living to shred finds a perfect meta analogy for the feeding frenzy of zombie cannibal bandwagon jumpers.

Well, that's how we got where we are. So fuck THE WALKING DEAD, that's the name of an old Karloff programmer from the 1940s anyway.


So...if you're going to make a movie about zombies, heed these words: unless you're doing it in a voodoo context, you're using Romero's ideas, his and original co-screenwriter John Russo. Give some props.

 Or better yet, go back to 1932 and respect the brothers Halperin, who brought us the amazing WHITE ZOMBIE!! This film is also in the public domain, but that's okay, fuck the Amusement Securities Corporation. Plus -- the Roan disc is pretty good quality-wise so again so go for the reliable brand! Bela Lugosi won't get a cent but.... Bela Lugosi's dead! Long live...'choke - gasp!'.. Bella Swan.