You know, I've seen people act like that in pictures. What do they call them, zombies or something? Zombie.

What's a zombie?

Just what is a zombie? Well, a zombie is, um, Mr. Bill is...

The living dead. They are the living dead. It's an army of zombies.

Because a zombie has no will of his own.

What is wrong? What is wrong?

Welcome to Zombie Strains, the podcast where we watch all the zombie movies. Though, while producer Brad is away, Andy and I have conspired to do a mini history podcast and dump it in the middle of our regular feed. So this will be a bonus episode for you all. What we're doing today is talking about the culture of the 1950s and revisiting some history of the 1950s, because it's the next decade we're going to watch movies in. And why would we want to do that, Andy?

Well, first of all, producer Brad, if you're listening, this is what happens when you let me and John go unattended for more than a day or two. But the reason we're doing this is if you're a regular Zombie Strains listener, you know that a part of our discussion of each movie we watch is what is the cultural context that is fueling the fears and the ideas and the anxieties that that film might be trying to exploit in the best possible horror movie way.

Right, like for example, you know, in the 1930s, we had a lot of conversations about gangsters, right? Because that was something that was on the mind and scaring people.

Yes, exactly. So we're still going to have that conversation with each of the movies we watch as we venture into the 50s. But the 1950s is just such a rich vein of fears and anxieties that John and I thought it might be worth having sort of a meta discussion here at the outset to talk about, to talk through what was going on in the 1950s, especially what was going on that might interest the creator of a horror film or a zombie film. And how do John and I, how do we think that might be manifested in the movies we watch? So I hope we're going to talk through some themes of the 1950s that John and I have nailed down, but I want us to end kind of talking about, so me and John, what are the questions you and I are going to have for each of these movies in the 50s that we watch?

Yeah, how is everything we're about to talk about, how do we think it's going to influence our next season of movies? And then hopefully, if this goes well, we'll do one for the 1960s and the 1970s as well. But let's not get too far ahead. So, what is, what are, let's, we've sort of got some general themes here, but what, why don't you start, Andy, what's like one big thing that, that America in particular is experiencing in the 1950s?

Sure, so just to give you a sense for how I approach this question. So the 1950s, a lot of stuff is happening that you might call positive. And what you find if you look at these positive big developments and examples of progress that are happening in the 50s is that there is usually some kind of an accompanying dark side to whatever that progress is. So the first big theme that I flagged, John, and I want to hear more about what you think about this, is that, so in the 1950s, Americans are more affluent than they have ever been in the history of America. And by Americans, I mean everyday Americans, particularly what we know, what we would call the middle class. On the flip side of that, Americans are plagued by existential angst.

Yes, and it's interesting because a lot of this, a lot of this sort of advancements in buying power have to do with things like, I mean, we all take this all for granted now, but it's the first time where people have like, everybody has a flush toilet, and everybody has the electrical wiring to buy appliances, and everybody maybe has a job that isn't right near their house. There's less public transit. So now we're doing things like buying houses, cars, appliances in ways that we just haven't ever before. And I think that creates a sense of sameness for different people. Does that make sense?

Yeah, absolutely. This is the era of conformity and the awareness of conformity, right? I suppose that humans have always been nervous that they are conforming or part of conforming, but this is the era where when you looked around you, you might have really been struck with terror. So this is the era of Levittown, which was sort of the model for the very familiar site of sort of the modern suburban housing development, where you have a big plot of land with a bunch of rapidly constructed homes, all built according to this exact same template. They were built with a sort of industrial efficiency that was unheard of prior to the 1950s. So you have sort of mass housing, but it all looks alike. You have everybody with a lot of money to spend, and you have a real sense of keeping up with the Joneses, right? You have this, I've got to get the new model of car this year. Everyone's got a new refrigerator. Everyone's got a TV. So there is this, I'm sure it's not the first time that humans expressed an alarm at sort of a consumer culture that has taken over, but man, it would have been taken to a whole new level in the 50s. Do you have any thoughts about that, John?

I mean, think about it. We have advertising, so we went from advertising at the turn of the century was just on paper, right? We didn't even have really substantial radio. And then in the 20s and 30s and 40s, we have radio, and now TV is starting to explode. So not only do we have a bunch of money, we have for the first time moving visual advertisements. So you can see an advertisement for the new Packard car in a way that you never could before. It wasn't just a fuzzy black and white photo in the newspaper. And I think that, you know, we talk about the internet fueling consumer culture. I think this is the first tip of that, if that makes sense.

Yeah, absolutely. I don't know, John, if you have that same sort of feeling of despair when you hear marketing buzzwords like, you know, target demographic and target audience.

Yes.

But this, the 50s, is when that era of of mass marketing was really coming into its own, and companies were building marketing strategies around reaching out to specific audiences and types of people. And there is a certain dehumanizing experience to that.

Yes.

As, I mean, it would have, I can speak having had a career that's touched on marketing for a lot of my adult life. You know, there is that, there is that achy feeling you have sometimes when you're doing the marketing, and then there is that corresponding achy feeling when you understand yourself to be the recipient of this sort of very targeted mechanical marketing.

Yes, and it's so funny because it's actually more obvious today, I think, but also more accepted. So I think that's why it's so interesting. I was talking to somebody about a product, and I maybe Google searched it or something, and then I just started to get a bazillion ads for it all over my social media and everything. And that really jumps out to me, but I think in the 50s, that's when we really start, for example, advertising to women for expensive items like appliances, who at this time are still, well, it's a sad time because what happened is women left the home. During World War II, there were a bunch of men off at the war, and so women went and got jobs, and they realized, hey, this is kind of great. So when they came back, they sort of got forced into this conformist, pigeon-holed as it were, you have to be this sort of perfect housewife, and here we'll sell you a washing machine. And so everybody is feeling like they have to conform more. You know what I mean?

Yes. Yes, I think that if this doesn't show up in the zombie films of the 50s, I will be shocked. But when you imagine that sort of trapped housewife of the golden age, kind of when you conjure up that stereotype, that is exactly here in the 1950s, because for an awful lot of suburban women, while on paper, you are happier than ever, you're making more money, you have more stuff. You are also stuck in this house that looks the same as every other house within miles. And just that picture of that grinning housewife who's dying inside, I think that is straight from the 50s here. And if that isn't manifested in some of these horror films, I will be stunned.

Yes, but also I don't think it's only women. I think a lot of young people are now coming sort of to realize that by creating a sort of, by having everybody's sort of life and house be the same, there's less things that distinguish you. So you were mentioning marketing earlier. In addition to advertising to women running households and that kind of thing, there is a new class, a new demographic that is being marketed to. Could you explain this? Because I think it's fascinating. Really from this point, prior to this, prior to the 40s really, there was no concept of the teenager, right? Like if you were a child, you were just a child, and in fact, you grew up a lot earlier in a lot of ways. With disposable income, for example, in a more rural environment, you become an adult at like 15, because you've got to know how to plow the fields and stuff. There's no time to be an angsty teenager, but that's no longer the case. So talk to me a little bit about this, because I think it's interesting.

Yeah, this is one of the most remarkable modern cultural developments, I think. It's just stunning to me, because how entrenched the idea of the teenager is and the teenage years. It's hard to imagine a time when people just didn't think of the quote teenage age as something distinct with its own identity and its own features and its own struggles.

And their own money. Like they didn't have any money to spend, but they do now.

And you see this in the art of the time, especially driven by the movies, but also by music. So in the movies, you have people like Marlon Brando, Dean. In the music, you have Elvis. You see the rise of this new kind of main character, I think you might say. And that is the kind of the angst ridden teen, right? Somebody who is maybe good at heart. If you think of Elvis as kind of an archetypal model of this type, you know, Elvis' image is he's young, he's got a good heart, right? But he is filled with angst. He's very self-absorbed in good and bad ways. He's vulnerable in a way that is just simply not present in the, quote, protagonist of earlier decades.

Yes, we saw this in all our previous films, right? Like these square-jawed men who just don't vary their emotional presentation almost at all.

Yes, exactly. They've all been, I think what you would call young professionals, all of the heroes of the movies we watched in the 30s and 40s. They are young, maybe some of them are even on the outer edge of teenage-dom, but they're all wearing suits, they have good jobs, they're usually engaged to be married already.

Yes.

And they read 20-something professionals. So obviously, John, we all know that horror movies, for sure by the time that we get to the 80s, horror movies will have this whole new idea of the teen scream movie, right? Where teenagers are both the heroes and protagonists, and they're the main victims of whatever the evil is. So somewhere between the kind of the brave professional heroes of the 1940s and the 80s, we are going to get this transition in horror movies to teenagers, to idiot teens, right? And with maybe some good smart ones mixed in to be alarmed as their idiot friends are all picked off by the monsters. So I wonder if we're going to get that here in the 50s if we're going to start seeing the first teenagers playing the lead role.

Yeah, I think so too.

Okay, so that is a real quick overview of the sort of concerns and anxieties that floated around that accompanied the new affluence of Americans. So John, what's another big theme of the 1950s that you figured and what is its dark side?

Well, I think values are changing really quickly. And so there is a certain freedom that didn't exist before. So when we talk about the concept of the teenager, a lifestyle that is more, I don't know, maybe exciting. So now you can go listen to this loud rock and roll music and dance and kind of lose yourself and get really energized. There's this huge sexual element to all of the culture that's seeping in, whether it be movies not so much, though that I think will start, but TV starts to push the boundaries. We have developments like the birth control pill, right? That's new now. Kinsey does his famous sex research, which is revealing about how Americans really talk about this stuff and how much we sort of suppress it. And with all of this comes the idea that it comes with this idea that there's a face that we show, right? Which is the nice smiling young man with the tie who comes to pick up your daughter, and then a dark side to that same person who may not be as trustworthy or may be sinister and sort of has these hidden desires that they're not communicating. And I think that there's this, as things get more sexualized, people become more afraid of it, and then we get this sort of push and pull of attention there. Like it didn't really exist, you know, just to take you back a little, right? When we were doing the early 30 movies, there were all these like psychological terms which were kind of scary, because what we're getting is psychology and sociology as disciplines gaining respectability, and now they have some respectability, and now they're shedding light on human behavior that people find very uncomfortable. Am I making any sense?

Oh, you're making total sense. Yeah, this is simultaneous to the stereotype we kind of all understand about the 1950s, but it's really hard for us in this age of our entertainment that just puts everything out there in shocking ways, it feels like. It's difficult to kind of imagine what it would be like to be in a time where all of this stuff happens, right? But you simply don't talk about it or acknowledge it through the media and the entertainment that you enjoy. And that just creates, like, what an incredible fault line for artists and especially horror artists to exploit, right? This incredible, the widening gap between what's going on in your life and everybody else's life and what you're comfortable talking about or exposing to the world. And if you read about the reactions to Elvis Presley's music, I encourage you to go and find a book or a good article about how Elvis was received because it honestly is unhinged how people reacted to Elvis.

Absolutely.

I mean, you imagine Elvis is up there waggling his hips around and he's singing music that was associated with black musicians up until he came along. And people like lost their minds about it.

Yes. Yeah. And I think one thing that's important about that is that again, it's this huge dichotomy around how we present ourselves, and what maybe is going on around or underneath that presentation. So just to give another example, civil rights now becomes, you know, since FDR in the 30s, politicians have been pushing for civil rights, particularly in the south. But it's really come to a head in the 50s, and you can't ignore it anymore. You know, Martin Luther King gets started really in the late 50s. All of these movements get started in the late 50s. And I think that is another example of the south where you have a white population who's going, hey, everything's fine. We like the way the world is. But underneath that, there's a horrible culture of abuse and torment and cruelty that everyone is kind of trying to paper over. You know? And I think that's a huge thing, too.

Yeah, it was so important for people pushing for segregation and racist policy. It was, they had successfully argued for a very long time that everything was fine. Everything that this, that don't listen to the bad stories. Trust us, the system is working just great. Everyone likes it. Every, you know, black and white Americans like it. And by the time the 50s is coming around, there are just too many voices, and there's now too many television cameras on what's really happening, that it just kind of becomes impossible to maintain that image of like, hey, it's fine, except for a few bad apples here and there, it's going great, right?

Yeah, absolutely. But there's one huge thing, and I want to spend a little time on this because I think it's super important. Sort of hiding over all of this and exploiting that idea that everybody sort of has a secret life is Joe McCarthy and the Red Scare. And so let's take a couple of minutes to talk about this, because if you don't know, Joe McCarthy was a United States senator from 1946 until he died in 1957. He's most famous, and it's generally called McCarthyism, and I think that's really appropriate. So he's most famous for holding these very public, very aggressive, bullying Senate hearings where he would force people to confess the sins of their youth and identify other people who had sinned in this way. For history buffs out there, there's also something called the House Un-American Activities Committee, which wasn't run by Joe McCarthy. They were totally in league. They were doing the same thing, but the point I just want to make is McCarthy is a Senator, so he's not running something in the House. There are other people who run the House, but that can all be grouped together under McCarthyism.

Yeah, and it created this... McCarthy is such a fascinating character because he was not taken seriously by a lot of people who knew him and understood what he was doing. But he had this enormous influence on the general populace, and he created this world in which it was perfectly reasonable to look at that suit wearing bright young guy next door that seems like an all-American boy. And suddenly, you were wondering what dark secret he hid behind that exterior. Was he a communist, right? Had he been working all these years, has he been sympathizing with the enemies of freedom and Christianity in America?

Yeah, and I have a couple of quotes here about McCarthy that I pulled out because I did a little research here. These are all from contemporary journalists talking about what he did. So what he would do is he would call you into his subcommittee and as a senator to talk about some nominal topic. But as soon as you got there, all he would talk about is, did you know this person? Did you attend a communist party meeting? Because think about it for a second. In the year 1900, there are two types of governments in the world, right? There's monarchies and there's democracies. And that's pretty much it. By 1950, there are, half the population is now communist. And the way a lot of that communist sort of population came to be was through overthrow of regimes that we liked. Now, was China a really nice open democratic country before Mao? No, it was not. But the idea is that communists can infiltrate and take over anywhere and turn even an ally like China into a scary place where everybody's the same and they believe evil things. You know what I mean?

And John, the way you put it, it brings to mind, I mean, there was a contagion element to the evil ideas that would corrupt you, right? And not to get too on the nose, because we are a zombie podcast, but it wasn't enough to say, I never believed this, I was not a member of the Communist Party.

I just went to a couple of meetings.

Yes, and they don't even have to be sinister Communist Party meetings. They could have been, you went to a festival, or a conference, or a church gathering, where somebody gave a speech supporting, quote, un-American ideas. And suddenly, people imagined that that might have spread to you, right?

Yeah, and yes, exactly. So nominally, if you read, I actually read his book called The Fight for America, which is just bonkers. Yeah, not all of it. I couldn't read the whole thing, but he just felt that exposing communists, and communism was the most valuable thing he could do for his country. But here's, I think, the important thing. Not only is that a contagion, but the way he did it was not to use legal means. What he did is spread fear and paranoia about our neighbors to ourselves. So here, interesting fact, not one indictment came out of any of McCarthy's investigations, not one. It was all about exposing and humiliating people publicly, you know what I mean? And so, and what he was really trying to do, and this is what happens sometimes, it's always an interesting spot in history is, I'm going to quote IF. Stone from his work, The Haunted 50s. He says, the other factor at work is McCarthy's ambition to create a kind of dictatorship for himself within the established government, to make himself a recipient of complaints from assorted crackpots and malcontents, to build up a secret ring of informants within the government, and to make officials more fearful of him than their own superiors, right? So he's doing all this just to create paranoia so he can have control. Does that make sense?

It does. And it's remarkable to me. We're talking about a theme of that contrast between the nice composed outside and the dark twisted inside. Is there a better example than McCarthy himself as an individual, right? He's the loudest voice presenting himself as a champion of democracy and freedom and the American way. But he was a cruel, vicious, just deeply sick person.

Yeah, he was a liar. He gave himself the nickname Tailgunner Joe about his exploits as a tail gunner in the Navy. He was not a tail gunner in the Navy. He was an intelligence operative. Like, you know, he was just, he was awful. And the thing is, that's what got him, right? He actually, so he would, for years, he just bullied and humiliated people on the Senate floor. And what they eventually nailed him for, he went after the Army. And everybody got so mad. What they nailed him for is a lack of decorum and betraying the dignity of the Senate. And that's how he got censured, is the word. So in any case, yeah, it was bizarre.

Yeah, not to get too topical here, but it's it's fascinating to me. Like he seems like the sort of person that American culture was at the time, and maybe still is, just has a very, very hard time defending itself against. Like he is, yeah, like you say, it's kind of like Al Capone, you know, getting taken down on some legal technicalities or something in a way. You know, it wasn't it wasn't enough that there be a voice countering his ideas and convincing people not to go with it. He had to be allowed to go too far until he stepped over some technical line that was just a step too far. Right.

There's a great quote about why this was so hard, because you would say, oh, he's so awful, why don't they just get him? And there's another quick quote from IF. Stone about something early in McCarthy's career. The report made on McCarthy by the Senate subcommittee on privileges and elections is a monument to the ineptitude of gentlemen in dealing with a brawler who pays no attention to the rules, Queensbury or otherwise.

So, John, I feel like it's gotten a little grim here with this McCarthy talk. Can I share my single favorite example of this dichotomy between good All-American outside and dark and sinister inside? Do you know much about the history of game shows, John?

I know a little bit.

Okay. So basically, in the 50s is where you see the very first explosion of popularity of TV game shows, right? These are, we still have them obviously today. And so you had the $64,000 question. This was a new thing at the time, and they were enormously, outrageously popular. And they seem to tap into all of these very American ideas, right? Just that, hey, we're going to just have regular people on this show, and through their own smarts and resilience and intelligence and knowledge, just these regular Joes are going to become incredibly rich. Like, how American is that, right? Like, there's no hierarchy. Like, this is, you know, this is, uh, Jane, Jo and Jane from The Suburbs, and they just got rich because they happened to know a whole lot about a certain topic. Well, they were enormously popular. Uh, charmingly, John, some of the early shows had trouble getting people to, uh, kind of gamble their, their mid-tier earnings in order to get the, like, the top-billed money. So, like, $64,000 question had a problem that, like, they would have these double or nothing, like, gameplay mechanics, and people would get to a certain point, and no one was gambling on the next tier. So, uh, that, that's just so charming. But, of course, then, uh, in the midst of all this super-fun popularity, everyone's tuning in, these quiz show contestants are becoming American, American heroes. You know, people love them. Then we get a wave of scandals, where it turns out that a lot of these shows were just rigged, and that these all-American game show protagonists were, in fact, very carefully crafted and groomed, uh, you know, movie-style protagonists. You know, they would, they would seek out participants to be the bad guy that everyone hates, and they would seek someone out to be the all-American guy that everyone's rooting for, and they would rig the results of the game for maximum drama, and...

It sounds like, um, when you describe it like that, it sounds like, uh, pro-wrestling in the 90s.

Oh, it absolutely does. And, in fact, one of the big scandals finally broke when one of the heels, the guys who had been brought on to be the jerk. I mean, they had him dress in ill-sitting, ill-fitting suits. They had him, they turned on off the air conditioner so he'd sweat a lot when it was his turn to ask questions. I mean, and he just came to resent his role, and he wrote one of the first scandals. But to me, that just symbolizes a lot of the themes that we've been talking about, that it's great, it's all-American, it's squeaky clean, oh, actually, it's a facade, it's a fake, right? Yeah. All right, sorry, obviously, we've just exposed one of the things I love about the 50s. I apologize for the-

No, that's okay. Just two quick things about the game show thing, because it's great. First of all, there's a great movie starring Ray Fiennes, his sort of maybe second big role, which is called Quiz Show.

Yeah.

He is a contestant who has been fed the answers and is winning, and he takes part in one of these scandals. But the other one that's hilarious, I remember this as a kid, I love Lucy. It did an episode where Lucy and Ricky got on a game show, and they were given the answers, but they got mixed up on which answer went with which question. So Ricky gets asked, why was Mary Queen of Scots beheaded? And he answers to scrape the barnacles off her hull. So I just... If you can find that I love Lucy episode, it was hilarious.

You know, I love Lucy slots perfectly into this theme though, too, like of changing values. So like I love Lucy. Lucy, Lucille Ball had to fight hard to be pregnant on her own show. Yes. It was a huge deal that she was shown to be pregnant. They didn't... They had planned to just simply hide her body from the neck down. And there was a whole... There was a panel of religious leaders that had to approve every script, you know, and you couldn't say the word pregnant. You had to say expectant mother. Like it was this... But, I mean, it's silly in retrospect, but you can see this clash of changing values versus kind of the fear of where this all might be leading. You can see that playing out in this really petty friction in like a dumb comedy, right?

Yeah. Well, I think we have another... One more big topic to move on to, but I'll say one last thing about that is, the other thing about Lucy is that she is both, she is a model for somebody who wants to control their own destiny. She became a producer and sort of a really powerful person, which is really cool. But also, she did it not by being overly serious and solemn like Joe McCarthy. The way you puncture people like Joe McCarthy is with humor and to ridicule them like Lucy does. And I think that's why she's so interesting here. But anyway, we have a huge other topic we need to move on to.

Yes. And so, John, why don't you lead us into what has got to be the big horror theme of the 1950s? What do we got?

Yes. So it is technology. Technology is moving very fast right now. So I think as people in this era, we can appreciate it, right? There is so much new technology that people are getting right now. The television becomes popular. Everybody has a car. There are rockets now. There weren't rockets until 1945. Now you can fly across the ocean in an airplane, like all these things you couldn't do before. But it's tied to paranoia and fear of technology at the same time.

So yes. It's hard to imagine today. I mean, we obviously have fast moving technology today, right? Can you remember life before the iPhone or the life before YouTube or social media? But in the 50s, you had people that in the 1930s in America outside of the big cities, there were swaths of America where life was not a whole lot different than it had been in like medieval Europe if you were a peasant farmer. And yeah, that's a little bit of exaggeration, but it's not a huge exaggeration. Yeah, and so if you can just imagine going from that just 15 or 20 years later to owning a home in the cities and having a car and having a TV that's showing you stuff from the other side of the world.

And electric lights and an indoor bathroom and yeah, all this stuff.

Yeah, and yeah, I mean, I mentioned the big stuff like TVs and cars, but you're right. A lot of it is just, you know, we have refrigerators now. You have a bathroom now. You have electricity. You can stay up past 730 at night now. It must have been just extreme whiplash.

Yeah, it's crazy. But with that comes, and we talked a little bit about this with McCarthy. The one thing we didn't say is like, McCarthy wasn't the only person scared of communism. With all this technology, it became a race. So what happens with the Soviet Union at this time in terms of technology? What is the fear that gets awoken there?

Yeah. Well, so this is the age of the nuclear bomb, the A-bomb, and then in the 50s we get the H-bomb, which is just apocalyptically more devastating. If you could imagine a horror scenario where a lot of A-bombs are dropped on American cities, that might be a terrifying scenario where most of our cities are reduced to rubble. When you bring the H-bomb into the picture, suddenly you were talking about the entire swaths of the country being rendered uninhabitable indefinitely, right? The fear that is rising here is that the Soviets have this technology too. The confidence we had, that Americans had right at the end of World War II, that they were going to stay in control of the world's nuclear arsenal, was gone by the 1950s, because the Soviets, way faster than we had expected, had developed their own stuff. And so, I mean, we all know this. This was the arms race of the Cold War, where there was this paralyzing fear that the Soviets might nuke us at any minute, basically. So, how do you stop the Soviets from nuking us? Well, you have a nuclear arsenal that is even more threatening than the Soviets. So, there was a great fear in the 1950s that America was falling behind the Soviets in a fatal way in the development of nuclear weapons, and that we would lose that deterrence, that threat of reprisal that Americans imagined, at least, was the only thing keeping them alive. In retrospect, we know that this was wildly exaggerated.

But in the 50s, it wasn't. In the 50s, the Soviet Union made huge strides in technology, including rocketry, which is the other part of the atom bomb that makes it so terrifying. An atom bomb dropped on you is scary. Somebody shooting an atom bomb at you from across the world is terrifying, because you wouldn't even see it coming. You know what I mean?

Yeah, and the Soviets beat the US to getting a satellite up into orbit. And it was a, honestly, I think it was a life-changing experience for a lot of Americans to realize that they were living in a world where the Soviets were flying stuff right over the American heartland, and we could do nothing about it.

Right. I have one more quote about IF. Stone, about how scary all of this is. He says, and his fear is about our leaders. He says, atomic war means national suicide. The ultimate delusion of the atomic era is the notion that national suicide is a feasible means of defense. How apparently sensible and sane men could drift into such belief will astound future historians if there are any. So like, that's how people felt about this, that it was terrifying. You know what I mean? And I think in the 80s, when you and I grew up, we were also terrified of it, but you sort of have become immune to it now, right? It's not as scary as it was then, but this was all new back then. You know what I mean?

And one of the themes of this Cold War fear was one of the scary things about it was that it was a fear that all of the participants sort of had a vested interest in reinforcing. So it, this is a little, I'm not articulating this well, but there was rarely much political capital to be gained from calling for calmness and coolness and for everyone to chill out and maybe step back from the edge of panic. That was rarely a good move politically. It was almost always safe to say that, to adopt a sort of hawkish tone about what the Soviets were able to do compared to what we were able to do. That was always a politically safer move to make. And so you had politicians, including very beloved politicians like John F. Kennedy, actively participating in this, even if later in life they might adopt more, I guess, more reasonable or laid back ideas about it. So it was everywhere across political parties. And yeah, I don't think that, I mean, yeah, talk about, again, talk about a goldmine for horror movie writers, right?

Right. And we had we had generals, you know, MacArthur, not McCarthy, MacArthur, General MacArthur, who was openly at Senate hearings saying, I would like some atom bombs to go fight in the Korean War with because I think they'll give me a tactical advantage. You know, it was just, that's terrifying. And I, I sort of in reading about this period of history, I have more appreciation for a lot of politicians that because there were so many people like in the military who are leftovers from World War II, who were like this, we need to exploit this technology now. Well, we have the advantage. And I'm so glad that a lot of the politicians at the time didn't listen to that. You know what I mean? So yeah.

I read a lot of stuff about the Cold War with my teenager. And if you ask my teenager who their favorite 20th century American personality would be, I think they would say Curtis LeMay.

Oh, Curtis LeMay is a monster.

He's this completely unhinged nuclear bomb hawk. Do yourself a favor and read up on his final act in American politics was to be, who is the racist candidate for president?

It was not McGovern, it was, was it McGovern? No, it was, shoot, I was just reading about that.

Wallace.

George Wallace. George Wallace.

To be his vice president on his ticket. So just a wild, if you wanna look at, if you wanna look at the sort of extreme personality that was produced by and helped to produce this era of American politics, he is a great one to read about.

Yeah, apparently he is a George C. Scott in the film Doctor Strangelove, how he learned to stop wearing and love the bomb. He's crazy. Buck Turgensen is his name, and apparently he is an impression of Curtis LeMay. So.

Yes. So the last thing I wanted to say about this whole changing technology theme, John, is that Americans are watching this all play out on their TVs. And it means if you are the average, I mean, if you are a typical American, a typical American throughout American history, there's always been crises to be stressed about, right? There's always something bad going on in the world or bad things going on in the US that you're worried about, scary trends that make you uncomfortable. That has not changed. But what has changed is now in a way you never could before, you can follow this, all of these scary topics, not 24-7, but pretty close to 24-7 through your TV. It is being filtered to a much lower extent than it used to be through a professional print media apparatus. Like you are watching Estes Kiefhauer grill the mob in congressional hearings. You are watching McCarthy terrorize young Americans in hearings. You are watching presidents give nerve-racking addresses about the nuclear crisis. It must have felt like you couldn't get away from the stress creating bad news. Like you maybe could have been in the old days by simply not turning on your radio once a week, right?

Yeah, and I think we've all feel that a lot right now, and I think this is the beginning of it, I think is the point you're making, is that it was new in 1950. Yeah.

Yep.

All right, Andy, what does this all mean? Like let's get this back to zombie movies. How do we think this is going to impact zombie movies? So, like what are the big things? Why don't we take turns? Like what's a big theme or trope you expect to see in these 50s movies?

Okay, yeah, thanks for grounding us, John, before we just kept drifting off into that.

It's okay, Brad, we pulled it back.

Yeah. Yes, so to me, what all of these mean are they are adding a new set of questions I am going to be bringing to every zombie movie we watch in the 1950s. And just to start us off here, here is a question I will be asking or a thing I will be watching for. And the big one for me is, is paranoia and conformity, are those two things going to be major themes? They have not been themes pretty much at all in the zombie films of the 30s and 40s. But I think that the zombie genre is really well suited for the themes of paranoia and conformity. And so, obviously, by the time Night of the Living Dead rolls around in the late 1960s, zombie movies are being used to comment on the conformity of American consumer culture. We are not, as of the 1940s, which we just finished, there is no sign of that being the case in the zombie genre. So sometime between the 40s and then, and I think it's gonna start here, we're gonna see zombie films where you're gonna get I think we're gonna see zombie films that are all about this. Like, the zombie is not a sad victim. It's not a scary monster in makeup. It is a reflection of what we fear might be becoming of us Americans, right?

Oh, I love that. That's awesome.

Okay, so John, it's your turn. Toss us the theme you'll be looking for.

Well, I'll be looking for the theme of apocalypse, right? We asked that question a lot in the first 22 episodes, the first 16 historically sequential episodes. Is there an apocalypse? And I think almost every time we said no, but there was a potential for one. So how is the thing? Because now we have the idea of an apocalypse, right? We have Russian rockets dropping H bombs on the US. Now we have a national idea of what an apocalypse could look like and how suddenly it would come. So how is that theme going to work itself into these movies as we move into them? Because I think it's going to play some sort of role. We just don't know how fast it moves, if that makes sense.

Absolutely. All right. I got another one. What I'll be looking for, I don't think I need to belabor it too much because we already discussed it, but I'll be just watching to see if our movie heroes change, right? Are heroes going to get younger? Are they going to get less professional? Are they going to move from the respectable guy engaged to a nice gal to a single attractive, angsty teenager or set of teens? Obviously, by the time the 70s and 80s rolls around, this will be a thing everywhere. Is it going to start here in the 50s? I look forward to finding out. And I want to add that I will be interested to see if we see more diversity in our heroes. And I mean diversity in pretty much every sense of that word. Racial diversity, economic diversity, gender diversity. The 50s is a lot of very important but difficult conversations are still starting in the 50s. So I don't know if that will be evident in the films we watch, but I'll certainly be watching for it.

Yeah, absolutely. One for me is also going to be, how will science and science fiction and technology inform these movies? We haven't seen a lot of technology, and we certainly, I don't think we've seen one science fiction movie yet. I don't think it's an idea yet. I think the 50s is sort of the birth of modern science fiction. You know what I mean? Like there were some, there was a war of the worlds or whatever in the first part of the century. But this 50s, I think, is where sci-fi and using technology to solve problems is really going to take off.

We have seen a little bit, little hints of this in the movies of the 30s and 40s, where we have seen films wrestling with the question of, are zombies a product of technology or they a supernatural horror thing? And I think the direction the genre chooses to take is going to be hugely, hugely important. And I do think that this is probably the era where that's going to get hashed out in a much clearer way than it was in the 40s.

Yeah, I agree, I agree. Anything, any last things you want to look out for before we wrap up here?

I had one more question that I'll be asking and I'll be looking for, and that is, is this the decade when the zombie genre leaves its very, very localized roots in the Caribbean, and it moves, and it becomes a more, I guess a more broadly American idea, or even a global one, right? The zombie movies we know and love from the modern era, they feel very American, right? Think about The Walking Dead, or shows like that. They feel very American, and they feel very divorced from the cultural roots from which the idea of the zombie was taken. And we have already seen a couple of movies just completely dropping the Caribbean background of the zombie, even while most of them have included it. Some have started to drop it. And what is that going to look like? Is that just going to get dropped? Are we going to be able to trace the move that the zombie genre makes out of Haiti and Jamaica into what it becomes in American film? I don't know. I'll be watching for that.

Yeah. I'll be curious about that too. I think that's interesting. In another way, will it just sort of forget its roots and just say, okay, we all know what a zombie movie is. We all know what a zombie is. Now we can set one anywhere. We don't have to fill in this mystical backstory. We can just have a zombie.

Will we be left to rely on brave, bold films like, what was that, like Ritual from 2020, to occasionally remind us about the roots of the zombie genre? That's a little Easter egg for long time listeners.

Yes, absolutely. All right, Andy, well, I think we've beat the 50s to just about death here. We're super excited to be watching the zombie movies in the 50s, and we will see you next week. You've been listening to Zombie Strains. We'll be back next episode to talk about another zombie movie. If you enjoyed our podcast, please take a moment to rate us in your podcast app of choice. Tell a friend, follow us on Instagram at Zombie Strains. All of this helps like-minded people find the show. See you next time.