Welcome to Zombie Strains, the podcast where we talk about all of the zombie films in order. This episode, we're not talking about a specific movie. We're talking about what is scary about the 1960s.

No, I've seen people act like that in pictures. What do they call them? Zombies or something?

Zombies.

What's a zombie?

Just what is a zombie?

Well, a zombie, there's Mr. Bill, there's...

The living dead.

There's a living dead.

There's the zombies.

It's an army of zombies. Because a zombie has no will of his own.

What is wrong?

What is wrong?

I'm John.

And I'm Andy.

Hey Andy, no producer, Brad.

No, does Brad know we've snuck into the Zombie Strains lab and are using his equipment?

I think when we tell him we're gonna do like a history-based episode, he flees.

Yeah, he couldn't get farther away fast enough.

Yeah, I think he stops returning my calls and text messages at that point. So yes, that's what we're doing. So like we did with the 1950s, we had so much fun talking about what our expectations were for horror films in the 1950s. We thought we'd do it again for the 1960s. It's an exciting decade for horror cinema and zombie movies in particular. But we're going to sort of take a step back and look at the 60s more broadly and culturally. The caveat I'll give is that we are zombie movie podcasters. We are not professional historians. So we're really just using the lens of what do horror movies and zombie movies tell us about the culture of the 60s. We're going to go through some legitimate history, and we'll draw some conclusions. But we are not trying to create a master socioeconomic theory of the 60s. We're really just talking about scary movies.

Absolutely. And you and I, John, had a really good time. When we did our episode about the 1950s, we formulated a set of questions that we then asked ourselves about each 1950s film that we watched. And we were looking for ways that that film was either part of, or responding to, or rejecting the context of the 1950s, in which that film was released. And we hope to do the same with the 60s. So we're going to talk about a lot of stuff here. But John, what I hope we come out of this with is just a simple set of questions that we're going to be able to direct at every 1960s movie we watch.

Yeah, so we'll, I think in the future, we're going to keep my questions about the zombie pillars. I don't think those are going anywhere. They're starting to feel a little tired, but I think that's just as they're becoming relevant.

We have to just, we have to stay true because they're going to become very relevant very soon.

Yeah, so we're sticking with those. But the 1950s questions we've been asking, the questions about science and paranoia, and those questions are going to be evolved into a new set of questions about movies in the 1960s. Having said that, what do we mean by the 1960s, Andy? I mean, surely we mean 1960 to 1969, right?

Well, not exactly. One of the books I read in preparing for this episode, opened with about 40 pages discussing the feasibility of even talking about a decade as a coherent thing, and whether that was even a valid historical approach.

Yeah, because the numbers often don't match up. So just to give another example, not that this one is super modern, but the 2000s would be the age of 911, right? That decade is defined by that. But that's not the whole 10 years, right? Or a lot of people call the 80s the decade of Reagan, but it really ended in 88, so it didn't go all the way to 90. So in the same way, the 60s is not coherent or cohesive. And let me just start with some basics what we mean. So in 1960, John F. Kennedy is elected president, and in 1963, he is assassinated. The Vietnam War has just begun for America, and generally speaking, 1963 is considered the year where the hope and optimism and the belief in the American project from the 1950s morphs into this sort of disillusionment and then darker aspects of the 1960s. Would you agree with that statement, Andy?

Yes, absolutely. Was there a more impactful year than 1963 and then 1968? Like just two years kind of framing this period that must have been wild to live through?

So the 1950s, a lot of what we talked about is on the upside, optimism about the future. I mean, literally, it's the baby boomers, because in the late 40s, everybody was having children, because they were optimistic about the future. And we get the teenager, which didn't really exist. We get people with free time and disposable income and optimism about the American future and the American project. And that changes in 1963 and then devolves faster and faster as we're hurdled towards 1970, which is just, when we talk about the 70s, which I think in many ways is an extension of the 60s, but also is the ultimate sort of disintegration of any idealism that remained from the 1960s, if that makes sense.

That's a great way of putting it, John, yes. So I can sense, by the way, I can sense your negative attitude about the baby boomer generation, and I'm bristling at it.

Yes. So you have a lot of sympathy for the boomers. I have some. I'm actually curious what we're talking about. Are your parents boomers?

My parents are boomers, yes. My mom had beetles and monkeys posters up in her teenage girl bedroom. And so I got a big dose of that when she had kids, and that was the music we listened to in the car on the way to piano lessons and all that stuff.

That's amazing. So my mom was a silent. So just to do the, so was my dad, they're only a year apart, but just to do the generations really quick, so that what we're saying makes sense. If we go from the 1940s forward, what we've got is the greatest generation, right? That's the generation that fought in World War II. And put together this American project in the 40s and early 50s. Following the greatest generation are the silence. And they were followed by the boomers, who were followed by Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z. So, I just want to put that in context. And so the person that I read extensively, I didn't read extensively, I read a book, by Joan Didion is a silent. She's somebody a little older who is sort of judging the 60s from a cooler place of maturity, I guess I would say. A less romantic view. So, all right. So, let's talk about the 1960s. I wanna go through some of the milestones that are important. And I don't wanna, again, we're not historians. If there are historians listening, please be kind. But I did wanna do super high levels so people understand what we're talking about. So, let's start with 1960, right? The big thing here in the American landscape, TV has become something. Mostly in the 50s, it became a big deal because of Joe McCarthy and the trials that he put on TV. People are now glued to their TVs watching the news. And in 1960, we get what a lot of people refer to as the first TV election, right? It's Richard Nixon versus John F. Kennedy. There's a famous televised debate, and John F. Kennedy gets it. And Richard Nixon does not. Kennedy wins, and there's, you know, they call it Camelot, right? The last book my mother ever gave me, She's a Silent Who Loved John F. Kennedy, was a book called Havanahs in Camelot, about somebody who used to just hang out with John F. Kennedy and smoke cigars. So the Havanahs in that sense references cigars. But that's how people thought of it. 1963, Kennedy is killed, okay? What's happening is, there's been some real international tension right before his death, right? We have Bay of Pigs, we have the Cuban Missile Crisis, and then we've just started Vietnam. And at the height of all of that, John F. Kennedy is assassinated. And that is the boomers, 9-11, right? This is the formative event in the same way that 9-11 is a formative event for millennials. Would you, am I on the mark here, Andy?

Let me know if I'm wandering. Sounds exactly right.

So things start to unravel a little bit, because all of this TV, now we have the Vietnam War on TV. We have repression of black Americans in the south on TV. And a lot of great things happened from like 1963 to 68. So I just want to make that point really quick. So like Lyndon Johnson, this quote unquote uncouth Texan, who nobody really liked, becomes president. And what he does is execute all of the things that he and John F. Kennedy and all the Democrats have been wanting to do forever, right? The Voting Rights Act, right? The Civil Rights Act, the Great Society, Men on the Moon. All of this is executed by Lyndon Johnson, part of Kennedy's vision, but also part of his own. So these amazing things are happening in the American project. We have some things we didn't have before in the 50s, so just to jump back a little bit. In the late 50s, the freeway system is invented by Eisenhower. So now we travel, we see each other, we've got TV, all these things are happening. But what all of this exposure, connection and travel does is it starts to create disillusionment, right? John F. Kennedy's died, the TV is showing the horrors of war and civil rights protests, and Bull Connor turning hoses on peaceful protestors in the south. And as we go, people realize we need to change this, we need to make the world better. And so the boomers become these sort of idealistic, optimistic people who are trying to change the world, the hippies, the flower children, and it keeps unraveling, and it keeps getting worse. Vietnam gets worse, and then we come to, and there's a lot of things that happen, but I'm going to jump right to 1968. Do you want to interrupt me on any of that before I do this?

No, keep going, John, you're doing great.

So in 1968, the following things all happened in one year, okay? Robert Kennedy is assassinated. Martin Luther King is assassinated. Lyndon Johnson, the sitting president who's eligible to run for another term, has so much heat over the Vietnam War, he chooses not to run. That is bananas by modern states.

Can you even imagine that? It's crazy.

Yeah. Additionally, so people who do run are an outright white supremacist racist, George Wallace. There's also division in the Democratic Party over who should run. And sort of the man who invented, politics have always been dirty, but the man who's generally credited as inventing the sort of modern milieu of dirty politics, Richard M. Nixon, becomes president in 1968. And there are protests at the White House. Like this is like a disaster for the boomers. And they, he eventually, you know, his corruption is eventually revealed and he resigns. But I think that whole experience was so disillusioning that then we get the 70s, which is about people just going crazy and trying to, you know, live for themselves and just get a, have a good time and all this kind of stuff. So this sort of idealism and optimism turns into a very, and this is my first criticism of boomers, like people complain about younger generations being self-absorbed. You know, this is the first me generation. This is, you know, 1960s, I'm on my trip, you're on your trip, don't mess with my trip. Communitarianism, all those kind of things, they start to change how they look. And in many ways, a lot of those institutions like church and all those other kind of things tend to start to dissolve. So, and now we're in 1968, I'm going to stop there.

Yeah, so it strikes me while thinking about the 60s and the Boomers is that the Boomers are judged harshly by just about everyone, I think.

Yes, I'm sorry, Boomers.

I grew up in a conservative household and the tale that was told about the Boomers was one of, you know, decadent rebellion by a bunch of vapid dilettantes, right?

Yes, because what we're talking about is these kids from the 1950s who were consuming all of these science fiction and all the horror movies and stuff that we watched in that decade become the creatives for the 70s and 80s, but they go through the 60s first, which is their youth and college years.

Yes. And like me, you grew up in a conservative part of America. The 60s are where it all started to go wrong, right? Where everything broke, all the good stuff broke down, and it's just been a decline, a defensive battle since then to sort of cling to what made to goodness and morality. But the left is also unkind to boomers and their legacy. Yes, it is. I think John-

How many times do you hear like they got what they could out of the system, and now they're pulling up the ladder behind them, et cetera, et cetera? Like, nobody seems to like them. It's a bit unfair. Let's be honest.

Yeah, so kind of the progressive take on the boomers is that they were these idealists who had good ideas, but then they basically all sold out by the end of the decade, and nothing came of their dreams. And both of those, I think, are unfairly harsh. Unfairly harsh. There's a...

Here's the thing. Here's one thing I want to say about that. So the other thing that happens, right? So in the 1930s and 40s, we sort of build a liberal consensus headed into the 50s and 60s, by which I mean everybody kind of agrees, except for a few fringe people, that government and society is there to sort of help each other out, right? This is the time of the New Deal, the beginning of all that stuff. In the 60s, those conservative reactionary elements who don't like that start to win. And think like a lot of this liberal consensus, this New Deal idealism is being eroded throughout as well. So a lot of ways the boomers are reacting, they're saying, well, we had this great stuff. Everybody should have this great stuff. Let's bring it back, in a sense.

Yeah. One of the things I gleaned from my readings about the 60s was something that was a new idea to me, and that was that the 60s was a pretty conservative and reactionary decade.

Yes.

Like when you think the 60s, you think free love, you think hippies and drugs and birth control and weird sitar music and stuff like that, and anti-war protesters. But the reality was more like a fundamentally reactionary American populace got briefly fascinated by a bunch of progressive people and ideals. And a couple of those ideals stuck. Like the anti-war movement kind of worked. The civil rights movement worked. For sure. But in general, that was sort of a, we were sort of American. John and I are talking Americans here. We realize that the 60s encompasses more than just Americans. But as Americans, in people watching mostly American zombie films, Right. that's our bias. So the 60s was a time where we toyed with a lot of ideas, a lot of new and interesting possibilities, but only a couple of them really stuck. And an awful lot of them ended just sort of being discarded or fading away.

Yeah. And it really, you know, Eisenhower, Ike, who was a Republican, was generally a conservative. We don't need to get into the details of the conservative and progressive parts of the different parties or anything like that. But we can say he was the last president that presided over the liberal consensus, right? Like he built the freeway system. He was willing to spend government funds to do things for the benefit of the whole country and help and make sure all Americans had an opportunity to be successful. Did it work out? It did not. But after that, conservative reactionary, conservative reactionism becomes the story from then until today. We're still going through that.

I have a quote from, so John, in this conversation, what I'd like to do next is talk a little bit about who the boomers were, like how they understood themselves. And then I want to move on to, and I want to invite our listeners to kind of imagine with us, based on the profile that we talk through about the boomers, what would scare these people? And so what are we going to be looking for in our zombie movies that's going to just scare the pants off of these baby boomers? But I wanted to just close this discussion of the kind of history of the 60s with, I'm a fan of the writer Hunter S. Thompson. Are you, John?

I have read his books. I'm not as much of a fan as you are, but I'm familiar.

Okay, so he has a famous quote from the wonderful novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, that I think is often taken to sort of represent a progressive retrospective on the 60s. And here's what he says. He says, that I think was the handle, the sense of inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil, not in any mean or military sense. We didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. We had all the momentum. We were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west. And with the right kind of eyes, you can almost see the high watermark, that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

Nice.

Yeah.

I have a quote I'll read later from Joan Didion. And I think, cause I think one of the other things about the 60s is it is boomers we're talking about, but we're also talking about silence. As boomers are going to hate Nashville, there's a whole older generation who is like, what is happening here? And I think that's part of our fear conversation, the 60s, but we'll come back to that.

For sure. So, hey, John, let's take just a couple minutes. Let us define, let us talk about who are the people with their butts in movie theater seats in the 1960s. Yes. And what kind of defines these people? And then we're going to move from that into what scares these people, right? So let me start out here, John. So I'm going to say baby boomers. I kind of am encompassing some of the silence as well, but I'm just going to say boomers for now. By the way, John, are you the right age where your kids hit you up with the okay boomer meme?

They have not.

Okay.

I am not a boomer. I know they feel that way.

I'm not a boomer, but I have been fed a sassy okay boomer response by my teenager on more than one occasion.

Nice.

It's infuriating, but yes.

My kids aren't that online, which is weird, but I'll take it.

I add to you. Okay. So the boomers, so just who are these people? As John said, these are people, this is a generation of young people who are living in a time of incredible changing technology. Like when we talked about the 1950s episode, we talked about this just bonkers revolutions in science and medicine and everything. And this is a generation that is born into that world of limitless technology.

And wealth, and wealth on, like I think we take it for granted today because we could just go online and order an iPad and it'll be at our house tomorrow. But that kind of wealth wasn't even a concept for most people until the 50s.

Agreed, and I think critical to who the boomers are, and one of the reasons they are often sneered at as like ungrateful or shallow is that they weren't born, they were born into this new American world of prosperity, and without having lived through the years of privation and difficulty and depression and war that created this era of American dominance and everything.

Right, my mom was born in 1935 in the middle of the Depression. A couple of her uncles were killed in the Second World War. So I think a lot of that judgment from the silence in particular and the Greatest Generation starts there.

Yeah, so my mom is like a perfect boomer. She was born in 1950. She didn't live through the war. She has no memory of it. And so to an older generation, these kids might seem like little snotts that don't appreciate the world that they live in. But can you blame them? So I think there is, I mean, there's a cliche that every new generation is not understood by the one that birthed it. But this feels especially true because America has changed so much in the space of 10 years. It feels just especially true of this generation that their parents on some fundamental level don't really get them. And so because unlike their parents and grandparents, I mean, they didn't live through the tough times, and they aren't beholden to this like need to survive, like this grind to just stay, keep your finances in the black, just bare and eke out an acceptable survival level. Instead, the baby boomers, they have options. They have opportunities. They've got money to invest in those options and opportunities, and they have time on their hands, because they don't have to be working every spare minute to put food on the table. They have time to think about life beyond the necessities of just getting through the month or the year. And they've got a lot of money, and they've got a capitalist world that for the last 10 or 15 years has been gearing up to sell them anything that they want.

Right. And this is why, just to say, so the Boomers we're talking about were kids in the 50s, and this is why all of them write and told stories about how great the 50s were. Stephen King, Steven Spielberg, Rob Reiner, name a Boomer creator, and the 50s is like a golden time.

Yes, absolutely. And it's, you know, John, you and I did not grow up in the 50s, but this sense of nostalgia for the wonder years of the 50s is so strong. We feel it today, right?

It still resonates. Right, I remember watching Happy Days.

Yes.

And like that is an, that takes place in the early 60s, but it's an attempt to capture that world, right?

So John, I want to move on to what scares these children of prosperity. But first, I want to, I jotted down four things that I think define them. And I want to invite you, John, and our listeners, as I walk through these, I want you to just ask yourself, given these properties, and let's just assume I'm correct here for the sake of argument.

I always assume you're correct, Andy.

Given these characteristics, what do you think would scare these people the most? And so what would you put in a zombie movie if you were trying to scare these people? So the first thing I marked down that defines the children, the baby boomer generation, is that they are defined by a drive to question authority and tradition. So they have seen the world their parents created through the depression, through the war, through all that bitter slog. And you know what? They have noticed that the world is still full of problems. Their parents, the greatest generation revered by Americans ever since, didn't, I mean, they won the war, they got through the depression, they managed to afford a house and an automobile and a microwave and a fridge. But when their kids looked around, they saw racism, they saw injustice, they saw the constant threat of war in all sorts of new places around the world, that you were just learning about a new every week, right?

Yeah, and they saw the unglamorous life. They saw that it's somehow unglamorous, in a way.

Yeah, so their parents, it was possible to have a certain contempt for your parents in this generation. And that sounds pretty unkind, and maybe it is. But what, if you were a kid of this era, you would look at your parents, and your parents seemed to be pretty content with a life of material success, right? Because victory for their parents' generation was a stable job, a house, and just enough money to support my family, and maybe buy a new car. And that was the win condition for their parents' generation. But if you were a kid in the 50s and 60s, that isn't enough. It's not enough.

That's what your square parents did. And you want, this is, I think, where this focus on spirituality that goes crazy in the 60s comes from.

Yes. Yeah, so my last point on this is that, you know, when you're, there is a human tendency that we, if I was just a little harsh on the boomers for judging their parents, I want to be a little harsh on their parents right now. Their parents' generation, like all humans, has this psychological tendency to make a virtue out of suffering. Yes. So that means that their parents' generation have a lot of rules that frankly don't make sense to their kids. Why do I have to go to church every Sunday? Why do I have to salute the flag? Why do I have to respect authority just because they're in charge? All these things. It doesn't make sense. And maybe it made sense to their parents' generation because that was the way you needed to organize your life and society to succeed in those earlier decades. But it seemed a little lacking now in the 60s.

It was no longer satisfying.

Yeah. So I'm going to move on to my next point. But do you have any thoughts, any final thoughts on like that questioning authority?

No, I think you nailed it. Like the line from the 60s, right, is what are you rebelling against in the responses? I don't know. What do you got? Right. So yeah.

And so the next thing I jotted down as defining the Boomers is a drive towards individuality and personal responsibility. This is a generation that resists what they see as mindless conformity. They have the time and the luxury to consider their existence and like their purpose in life, in a way their parents simply did not. And they've got a ton of technology that makes this, that really pushes them in this direction. One thing I hadn't considered is that one of the most societally impactful inventions of this era was the personal radio. Yeah. Because before you could buy a radio and listen to your own music, the way you would listen to music or consume culture was like, you would gather as a family in front of like the family's giant record player and radio console. Did you have one of these growing up, John?

I did. And I think what's interesting is that this is the first sort of like, that kid is in their room glued to their technology.

Yes, so we have this technology that's really pushing people to be like, hey, you have your own tastes. You're your own person. You're not like anyone else. You're not like your parents. And part of that being an individual like that was this sense of personal responsibility. That was like, if we can use the Spider-Man cliché was like kind of a blessing and a curse at the same time. This is a generation that believes it's not enough to just passively participate in society by voting every four years for an election. As a unique individual with dreams and a vision, it's your job as an American to actively participate in democracy and make your world a better place. That's going to drive. And remember, they're looking back at a parents' generation that, like, some of these things, like for civil rights exactly, like whatever your parents might have felt about civil rights, their generation was not in, like, a huge rush to make civil rights happen, right?

No.

We have a lot of fondness for, like, Eisenhower and stuff, and he took some important steps in a civil rights direction, but it wasn't because he really wanted to.

Yeah. FDR in the 30s was talking about civil rights, right? Like, that's when, like, we had not passed civil rights legislation in this country since 1890. Black people were not equal in the South, and no president or leader seemed to be able to do a thing about it.

Yeah. So you have, this will drive people, I mean, so this will drive this generation to its great successes, like, in the civil rights movement and in the anti-war movement, but I do think kind of the flip side of this is that a lot of the problems, it turns out that a lot of the problems that your parents' generation couldn't solve, the reason they couldn't solve it is because they're really complicated nebulous problems with no easy fix.

And when you solve one problem, other problems crop up.

Exactly. And that tension between needing to do something to fix a problem but not seeing a clear obvious solution for the problem, is setting you up for some real psychological friction, I'll say. Yeah.

Like just to give an example, civil rights, voting is achieved, school integration is achieved, right? However, what happens? A lot of private school systems and other school systems like that crop up and you're like, oh, we wanted to integrate the schools, but it didn't really happen. Because a certain segment of the population refuses to participate.

The problem adapts to your attempted solution.

The problem adapts to your attempted solution. Perfect.

All right. So two more points, John, and then we'll move into what is scaring these people. The third point here I have here, we've already touched on it. These are consumers. They have money. Every industry in the world is catering to their needs. These are kids. They're driving trends in music, in film, in clothing, in language, in everything. They are, from a business perspective, they're like the most important people in America, and some of this is going to rub off on you. You know, when your entire society seems like it's bent on satisfying your every need and responding to your every whim, that's going to create a certain sense of self-importance, I think.

Yes, and I think, yes, for sure.

So, and then my last point is that this was a driving feature of this generation is their hope that there might be a better way to live. After all of these decades and centuries of doing it one way, what if we just organized things and lived life in a different way and tried something new? Maybe there's even a better way to be an actual better human being. Right.

Some spiritual pursuit, something. And I got to say, I feel this, I feel the influence of the Boomers in this way, because I always think about this. Like, how can we be better people to each other? And I think if you were to ask a silent or a greatest generation, they would just say, like, do the best you can where you are. Kids are starving and trying to finish your dinner, right? Which is not what the Boomers believe.

Yes, exactly. Yeah. So that hope is a defining characteristic of the early 60s, but it's going to collide hard with disillusionment later in the decade.

Right.

When this stuff, when life just proves significantly more complicated and problems much more resilient than you would, than you wish, right?

Yeah.

So that's my very, very quick rundown of what I think defines the Boomers. Did you have anything you wanted to add before we move on?

Well, I did want to have a briefer bottle because I read this wonderful book and I want to talk about it a little bit. Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem because it is a silent view, an older person's view of the 60s, particularly 60s California culture. And I wanted to bring it up and I wanted to read a quote from it because I think that the rebellion of these people, that we're talking about Boomers mostly, they're the most populous generation. But there is also a feeling from older people, fear is generated by how these Boomers are behaving and resolving this. Does that make sense? So I just wanted to give that perspective briefly. So Joan Didion is one of our great writers and one of our, I mean, Americans claim her. Her more famous recent book, it's not that recent anymore, but was called The Year of Magical Thinking, which I think many, many people read. It's about the death of her husband and daughter when she was older and how she adapted to that. It's phenomenal. But she first came on the scene in the late 60s with a book called Slouching Towards Bethlehem, in which she, with a very sort of cool journalistic eye and a very perceptive eye, breaks down the counterculture of the 60s. And it's filled with essays where she goes to Joan Baez's Center for Peace in California, and she talks to the owner of a communist bookstore. And she has all these things. But the best essay is the title essay, Sludging Towards Bethlehem, where she just goes to Hate and Ashbury, and hangs out to see what she can see there. Could you give me 30 seconds on what I mean when I say Hate and Ashbury beside a place in San Francisco?

You go, you're on a roll, so you carry on.

So Hate Ashbury would be where hippie-dom happened, right? Like everyone's coming together, people are descending on it. It's like the scene, man. There's drugs, there's, when you think of these hippies with long hair saying, man, and that's your trip, man, that's cool. Like you're thinking of Hate Ashbury and the genesis of hippie culture and where it starts to evolve into the later culture of the 70s, if that makes sense. But I just wanted to mention two things from her book. So first of all, the phrase slouching towards Bethlehem. This is actually from a very famous poem that we quote all the time now, and I just wanted to make that note. It's by WB. Yates, and it is, well, not everybody, but many people will know this line. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned. And then the last line of it is, and what rough beast in this hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born. All right, so that is the epigraph of her book. All right, she starts, and then in the essay, here's what she says, and she's talking about hate at Heshberry. She says, the center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices, public auction announcements, and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children, abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off the past and the future as snakes shed their skins. Children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that held society together. People were missing, children were missing, parents were missing. Those left behind filed desultory missing persons reports and then moved on themselves. So there's more to it than that, but I just want...

What a quote. Holy cow.

That's how she starts the essay, right? And what she's saying is there's another side, like checking out, going to Hate Ashbury, taking these drugs to find your trip or your experience, to find your spiritual self had a consequence on society. And that is her perspective. And I just wanted to say that because I think there's fear of that too, in all the movies we're about to talk about, if that makes sense.

Yeah, absolutely.

The dissolution of normalcy in a way is also a fear that appears in the 60s a little bit.

So yeah, absolutely. Actually, that ties into. So I propose that I also jotted down four because I'm weird like this.

You're consistent.

Four things that I think scared the baby boomer generation. And can I walk through those? Because the first one is very relevant to what you said. I think that the baby boomers were terrified of anarchy and chaos. There was an extreme rise in crime throughout the 60s. The 40s and the 50s had relatively low crime rates, but things really spiked in the 60s. And a lot of that crime was really shocking in nature. So, you had this really upsetting political violence. We had assassinations of JFK, MLK, Malcolm X, and RFK. And beyond just these kind of high-profile crimes, this is the age of the serial killer. We have the Manson murders, the Zodiac killer. This is the age where the extent of organized crime in America is becoming common knowledge for the first time. In the 60s, there's this series of Senate hearings in which a mafia member named Joe Villacci basically testifies to a shocked Congress and American public about how extensive the mafia is and how integrated it is into American society. This is all scary stuff.

This is as to Kefauver and Robert F. Kennedy unearthing this through Senate hearings.

That was in the 50s. Kefauver hearings were in the 50s. This is a second set that absolutely is a mirror of that. Yeah. And I mean, my point here is that these were scary times if you valued law and order, which most of us do. And the scary part is that there's not... Oh, I want to say, there's also... There's just not an easy solution to this. No one really understands why this is all happening.

We still struggle with this today.

Exactly. I mean, you might have your pet causes, but I think on some level, we understand that a problem like crime kind of defies easy, simple fixes, right?

And I think part of the rebellion is that the conservative reaction is like, well, there's an easy fix, throw them in jail. And we're saying, well, no, that's not... That's not a solution. And this may be getting too political for us, Andy, but we're saying that's not a solution, but that's all to say, it's just complicated. I think it's interesting you bring this up. The first essay in Joan Didion's book is about a woman who kills her husband because she's having an affair and doesn't really want to go through a divorce. And so it was a super high-profile crime, and it's the exact same kind of thing. Does that make sense?

Yeah, it's a messy crime, right? That's a messy, messy crime that feels just right for this area. So, I mean, why is crime going crazy? Well, there's a lot of young people who have time on their hands. I mean, that's probably a huge chunk of it, right?

Yeah, the glorious freedom of the 50s turns into the degeneracy and truancy of the 60s. Does that make sense?

Yeah. And a lot of this crime has like really uncomfortable racial or civil unrest elements to it that no one really knows what to do with.

Yeah.

And there's, you mentioned, you know, a sort of reactionary response to this sort of thing is always like, well, make the laws harsher, throw them in jail. But this is an era where there's this kind of national evolution of thinking about crime and rehabilitation and what does good policing actually look like. Yes. And so you have kind of experiments going on with different ways to tackle crime and it's not clear that they're working or they're making it better or maybe they're making it worse, right? No one knows.

Can I give an example of how this all sort of comes together in 1968, the end of this anarchic period? So in 67, 68, and I'm not going to go into the details, a group of people had decided the best way to achieve justice was to kill police officers. So something like 30 police officers were assassinated in this time period. And when the chaos erupted at the Democratic National Convention in 68, people often refer to this as the police riot. The police had had enough, and they went nuts and started going after protesters in an extra-legal way. And that's sort of a summation of this tension. There's lawlessness. Police officers are getting killed. They respond with uber-violence and just sort of uncapped anger. And so that's the kind of violence we're talking about.

Yeah, in a way. So this is an era where you have a real and genuine fear that you will be the victim of a crime. Right. And it might be a violent crime, and it might be a crime visited on you by a stranger, because this danger isn't just happening in some distant big city. It's happening in your town, and it could absolutely reach you. And you have this fear that law and order is breaking down, but you're a boomer and you also are suspicious of authorities that in the name of law and order are trying to enforce order at gunpoint.

And this is the 1968 police raid, like it's authority going out of control.

Yeah. So that doesn't look much more fun than the crime, right, that triggered it, right? So, all right, I want to move on to my next thing. Did you have any other comments on the, I think boomers were scared of anarchy and chaos?

Yes.

All right. My next thing is I think boomers were scared by a lack of meaning and purpose. This is a generation that looked back at their parents' values and beliefs and judged that those had not fixed the world's problems or even had satisfactory answers about the meaning of life and existence. And so, if those old systems that have been around forever have no good answers for you, well, where are you going to find those answers? If the rules in your family structures of yesterday don't really give you any confidence or security or safety, like what would provide those things? So you have this existential crisis that gets pretty bad, I think, when the counterculture starts to disintegrate later in the decade.

And there's so much experimentation with this, right? There's communes and this is when meditation like Zen meditation and that sort of thing becomes popular in the United States. This is a new search. You know, somebody said the, I heard somebody say the other day, there's always a meaning crisis. It's just a matter of who's trying to, you know, make politics out of it. You know what I mean?

Oh, totally.

And I think the boomers felt this particularly acutely because so many long held traditions were, that they had thrown out the window, they didn't know what else to do to an extent.

Yeah, so you mentioned this already. There's this like surge of cults. There's this like rise of self help and self improvement movements. There's spiritual revivals. This is all happening while like there's development in fields like psychology that are kind of changing the way we think about our brains and our human behavior. So, and this is just a existential crisis that I think is never really fulfilled. So, I think lack of meaning and purpose is something that scared them.

Yes.

All right, my third point here. Thanks for letting me just barrel through these, John.

No, this is good.

Continue to step in. I think baby boomers were scared of problems that are too big to be solved.

Yes.

I don't think I need to belabor this because we've already kind of talked about it. But like, so what are the problems that the world faces? I mean, this is the era of communism in this existential conflict against the free world, an era of wars that no one knows how they started or what purpose they're being fought for or what might cause them to end.

It's the first time when you would see American teenagers and young people, like there had been people like this for a long time, but like in a almost social way, start to talk about communism or capitalism as an evil to be combated by communism. Like workers and stuff had said that in the early parts of the century, but this is where it sort of enters the middle class.

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, the problems of the world are so evident that you just can't avoid them. Like you look at the news and you see racism. We haven't mentioned it, but like South African apartheid, it gets on the national, the global radar at this time. There's communism, there's social injustice, there's this spiking crime, and there's this kind of ongoing threat of nuclear Armageddon.

Hanging over all of it.

Yeah, so what are you gonna do? Like, how are you gonna fix these problems? Every single one of those is complicated, multifaceted, and you as an individual, whatever your hopes or ideals, have little ability to affect those things. But you feel the sense that you ought to be working against those problems. So what do you do with that? So I wanna pause it. I think we have already, by the time we get to Night of the Living Dead, I personally think this fear is gonna be front and center in our movies. Problems, there's no zombie master you can kill to just solve this problem.

And I'd like to say that this is what we're headed towards in the late 60s. Night of the Living Dead in many ways is the ultimate counterculture movie.

Yes. And my last point is this, I think I already touched on it, but I mean, we shouldn't forget that this is the era where there was this real genuine sense that like whatever, whatever hopeful ideas you're having right now, it could all come to nothing because the world could end tomorrow.

Right.

So this, I mean, especially in like the early 60s, there are some like genuinely scary moments where it feels like the world is on the brink of just being destroyed.

The Cuban Missile Crisis may be the scariest moment in modern US history. I mean, I have to think about it besides 9-11, but it was the closest we ever came. And I think it's burned into a lot of boomers' brains.

And I think that fear is just too big for the human mind to encompass. And so, I mean, I think you can imagine all kinds of kind of psychological reactions to that level of existential dread. You could sink into really reactionary thinking. You could just go full on... Nihilism, exactly.

This is where we get punk rock, right? Like hippies dissolve in, they quote unquote fail, and punk rockers are like, what's the point of anything? And all of these ideas are stemming from this.

And making it all worse is that you now have a healthy skepticism about how authority figures are using these massive problems in cynical ways and exploiting them. I mean, I think that would just be, just do a real number on your ability to get through the week. Yes, I agree. So having talked about what scares people in the baby-booner generation, John, here's, I propose that we ask these five questions of the movies and the zombie movies that we watched in the 1960s.

And after you pose the questions, what I'm going to do is list a bunch of movies for you to see how those questions stand up from the 50s and 60s.

I can't wait. And I don't think we need to belabor these because these are all pulled out of the themes we've just discussed.

Okay.

Question number one, we're going to ask, does this movie question authority? Does it include a suspicion or a revelation that trusted authorities are flawed, broken, or maybe even villainous? Do we see skepticism or cynicism about established traditions and practices? So that's actually, I squeezed a bunch of related questions into number one.

Yeah, but I like to.

Number two, does this movie have a focus on the hero's inner life? Are they faced by highly personalized or even internal horrors? Are the protagonists forced to face horrors on their own without the help of communities, churches, or traditions that maybe past generations could have relied on? Question number three, does the film have a fear of crime, societal chaos, and anarchy? Question number four, does the film have a sense of looming apocalypse, and does it exploit the psychological stress that this creates? And lastly, does this film have horrors or problems without an obvious solution? Is there a lack of a clear villain who can just be simply defeated in order to fix the problems? Those are the five questions I propose we ask. And you've got a list of movies, and I'm curious how they're going to hold up to the questions I just asked.

Let me start by listing you six movies from the 1950s, okay? So, Them, with an exclamation point. This is the movie about giant ants that the military has to fight.

I was very fond of this movie as a kid. Yes.

The Thing From Another World by Howard Hawks. Great movie that does have some concepts of paranoia and stuff, but the real principle is about an external alien invader, right? On that note, invasion of the body snatchers. Again, paranoia, lack of certainty about who's who. But again, it's got an external threat, right? Is the fundamental thing. Just for fun, let me throw in the horror of Dracula, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing. That's not maybe the most... I think it is kind of important, and it can kind of be a stand-in for like The Hammer and the sort of romantic Vincent Price movies, you know. That is a strain of horror that is in the 50s, for sure. War of the Worlds, also a 1950s horror movie. And I'll throw in one of our own, just because I think it's appropriate, the creature with the atom brain, right? All of these, I think, embody the ideas of paranoia and uncertainty, and all the things we talked about in the 50s. Technology, external threats, I think all of those are in those movies. What do you think of that list to start with?

It's a quintessentially 1950s list of films.

All right, so would you like to hear my list of 1960s films? I could have done 20 of each of these, but I think in both cases, these are, we could quibble about what are the most important films. I'm just trying to say all of these are certainly relevant. So let me start with my 1960s. 1960s, Psycho, all right? There is no external threat in Psycho. This is about someone who is crazy going crazy in the most terrifying way possible by pretending to be their mother and acting out and killing women, like what? There's your serial killer right there, right? Rosemary's Baby, okay? What is real? What is not real? Are my neighbors against me? Is this really happening? Am I going crazy? Again, this movie, completely internal. Whatever happened to Baby Jane, a movie about a woman who traps her sister inside their crumbling house and torments her with psychological terror? Yes. I'll throw in our own Carnival of Souls, right? About a woman detached from reality. What is real? What is not real? Eyes Without a Face is a French film about a woman whose face is disfigured in a car accident. She wears this flat mask where her father conducts these insane experiments to try to get her a face transplant. And finally, 1968, Night of the Living Dead, okay? So what is different about these two lists?

They could not. They feel like they are from different planets.

Yes, yes. So I think, I mean, the big thing that jumps out at me is, you know, we have left, if we look at Psycho, Rosemary's Baby, whatever happened to Baby Jane, Night of the Living Dead, though you and I have been tracking zombie movies towards Night of the Living Dead, like none of these are the kind of film you would see before 1960.

Right, yep.

None of them. They're all focused on, I don't wanna say internal, but they're focused on like self-doubt, what is reality, the questioning of reality. And none of them are about external threats to you or society until we get to Night of the Living Dead. Yes. So that's my list. I think that backs up your pillars pretty well, Andy. What do you think about that?

I think so too. It is, I will confess that Night of the Living Dead just looms very large in my thinking as I thought through this topic. Because I do think it is a very special film in just exactly how many buttons it manages to press.

Yeah, but like a Rosemary's Baby, for example. Questioning authority, for sure. Focus on the hero's inner life, highly personalized horrors, absolutely. Fear of crime, societal chaos and anarchy. Like, she's worried there's a devil cult in her building, right? And it turns out there probably is. And then she's giving birth to the Antichrist. So the looming, a sense of looming apocalypse and psychological stress this creates. And then horrors without an obvious solution, right? At the end, she just sort of in a bizarre way accepts it. So yeah, I think these work really well with the movies we listed. And I think and I don't know if it's going to list, you know, I think one thing we've discovered is our zombie movies maybe are a little behind or a little different.

Yes.

So we'll see how that works out. But in terms of what was really scary to people in the 60s, I think you've nailed it.

All right. Well, hey, John, that's all I've got on the 60s and the boomers and the zombie movies that I expect to be watching in the 60s. And part of this, I should say, that you're John and I aren't certain if these are the right questions to be asking. We don't know what the answers to these questions are going to be. Because we don't even know what movies producer Brad is going to spring on us throughout the 60s. So this is going to be a learning experience. And I hope you are willing to join us in, as we, me, John and Brad, kind of learn, not only about the zombie movies about this era, but a little bit about the era as reflected through its zombie movies.

Yeah. And I just, like, as a reminder, everybody, you just said it so perfectly, Andy. We're not film experts. We're trying to learn about these films. This is a journey for us that we're having fun. Don't think of us as, like, lecturers who are presenting. Okay. And here's a list of films to back up the thesis we just proposed. Like, we don't know. And we're excited to find out.

Yes, absolutely.

All right. Thanks, everybody. And remember to join us next episode for 1963's Monstrosity, which was featured on MST3K. 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.