Hey everyone, John here. Just a quick note. We decided to release our 1970s episode this week. So I drink your blood and I eat your skin - our double feature will happen next week. Please enjoy this conversation and we'll see you next time.

Welcome to Zombie Stranger's The Podcasts that watches all the zombie movies. Today, producer Brad is a way. So Andy and I are going to do our 1970s episode.

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

Zombie.

Zombie?

What's a zombie?

Well a zombie…there’s um... ...Mr. Bill there’s... ...the living dead.

They are the living dead.

Get me the zombies!

Against an army of zombies, no armies could stand!

The unburied dead are coming back to life and seeking human victims.

I’ve seen the dead rise.

Kill the brain, and you kill the ghoul.

Welcome to zombie strains. I'm John.

And I'm Andy

Andy, producer Brad ,the fool, has left us alone again and we're going to talk about history. That's right, but specifically what we have a purpose as fun as a much fun as you and I would have just talking history our goal is to find out not what happened in the 70s, but what were we scared of in the 70s that might show up in the zombie movies of the 70s. Yes, absolutely. So, Andy and I have done some research here. Each of us read a few books about the 1970s. I read one about Mexican cinema and horror in the 1970s. Andy, of course, the responsible run, one read history in the 1970s. But we'll put the links to our sources in the show notes and we'll probably mention them as we go along here. Yeah. But, John, you know what's exciting about the 1970s? we were alive. So not only did we do a little bit of homework here, but, you know, we are remembering the 70s a little bit, right? And I have to say, I have a memory. I have several memories of the 1970s that are very distinct. But one of them was, like I don't know that I actually remember this. I just remember as a kid hearing about the Vietnam War on the radio and I was only like six, but isn't that crazy? Yeah. Cause it's so far in the past now. I was born in 1975, so most of my memories with the 70s are kind of mushed into that blur of very early childhood quasi memories, but as we've pointed out, you know, breaking things down by decade is is a pretty artificial way to look at a time period. Yeah. Because unless you were on the cut, unless your family was on the cutting edge of like technology and consumer goods and fashion, you know, in the mid 80s, your house still had 70s carpet and you had all your 70s furniture and your car was probably from the 70s. So yeah, So, these things have a way of lingering past their actual expiration date. Can I tell you, in 1970s, memory, I just have one distinct one that I always think of when I think of being a little boy in the 70s. 1976, the bicentennial Christmas, I had the chickenpox. And my favorite uncle came, but I couldn't go near him because he had never had them. I was devastated. It ruined my Christmas. So, that's the 70s memory that I always, always cling to. I, that is a, a wistful, nostalgic memory is a wistful and nostalgic memory. So Andy being the diligent member of this team has come up with the five things that scare you in the 1970s. So we're going to go through those. It'll be a conversation. It's not like we're going to go through a list. And I'm going to, you know, offer in some of the things I've learned in my research and will hopefully come to some interesting conclusions. Yeah, that sounds great. I have these, yeah, I've broken these down into five things we were scared of, and for each of these five things, I have a question that I propose we ask of each movie that we watched during the 70s. I do have kind of a disclaimer, a couple of disclaimers that I want to get out of the way. First, everything I am going to say and probably a lot of things you're going to say, John, should come with the asterisk with a little footnote that says it was actually quite a bit more complicated than this because I feel like especially in the second, I mean, history is always complex but things start getting real hard to track in the 60s and 70s, I think. Secondly, because I'm looking at the things that scared us in the 1970s and maybe bled into our horror films, I am going to be making the 70s sound like an absolute dystopian hellscape. So that is only one part of the 70s experience and what percentage of the 70s was dystopian hellscape is maybe up for debate. Yeah, and that certainly my childhood wasn't a dystopian health scheme. No, I lived in the suburbs. My neither. So we aren't planning on doing like a what we really enjoyed about the 70s. What was delightful about the 70s podcast episode. But listener, you can imagine that there's sort of a phantom mirror of this episode. That is a little more positive about the decade. We're here to talk about horror movies and zombie movies. Yes, exactly. All those wistful memories are swept aside as we get into it. All right. Well, I'm going to jump right in the first thing that I think people were scared of in the 70s is going to sound like a cop out here because it's something we were also scared about in the 60s, but we were really scared about it in the 70s in the 70s we were scared of the rise of perceived chaos and lawlessness. Yes. So let me give you a little background here. This is stuff we've touched on throughout our sixties episode. In the seventies, we see a backlash to the counter culture movement. The Manson murders and the late sixties have sort of spoiled the hippie dream. The actual Manson murders were, again, everything is more complicated and nuanced than that. But that is what and markedly in the late sixties going through like the mid seventies. The tone of public discourse is taking a scary turn. Yes. One way this is happening is that protest movements and counter-culture movements in general are turning violent, or at least are starting to be edged with violence or the threat of violence, if you remember the big civil rights and other related movements of the 60s were generally characterized by very intentional non-violence. But by the 70s, newer and angry or leaders are taking charge. And, absolutely. From their logic, Their message was, hey, non-violence didn't work. So maybe violence is needed to bring about change, whether that's change in racial, the racial situation in America, or the change in poverty situation in America, or the change in social, more is, So on the, you know what I would say Andy about this is we constantly, you know, you made the point earlier about decades in the sixties versus the seventies. I think for the purposes of this discussion like the definition I'd like to make if this makes sense is the seventies really starting 1968. Yes, they do. Yep, you know what I mean? I have seen I have seen the 60s defined as like 1964 to 1968 or something and that's probably a good way to think of it. Yes, yeah So a lot of way is saying how's it's a roots in the like very last year or two of the 60s, but then flowers for better for worse in the 70s Yeah. So this is on the violent edge of these movements. You have groups news kind of scary and maybe sometimes exciting groups like the weather underground, you have the black liberation army, you have the Symbini's liberation army are getting a lot of headlines. It is also You know, just this isn't one of those groups that you're talking about, but like this is also when the Rolling Stones had a concert and had Hell's Angels as security. You ended up killing people. Yes. Right. So, you know, that's part of it too. It's hard to believe this, this shocks me whenever I think of it. But in just the first couple of years of the 70s, what was like the signature violent action of these 70s groups, John? I mean, they would do bombing. Yes, it was bombings. Yeah. And this seems bonkers in our post 9 11 world. But there were literally thousands of bombings of government buildings, corporate buildings, and other kind of institutional structures in just the first few years of the 70s. Like, now, the death toll was not very high because these bombings were not generally meant to kill people. They were trying to deliver a message. So, they were playing a bomb and then they would phone it in and then the building would be evacuated and they would find a bomb in a bathroom the tile in the bathroom or something but that's just an America like the IRA was like this as well you know they would call I mean they killed more people but they would they would threaten the bomb London and they would call it in Yes, the sheer volume makes that very terrifying and yes, it's hard to imagine, I mean, these were like your local police station or your local the bank where you just deposited your paycheck might be suddenly evacuated and a bomb goes off, you know, That's crazy, and not all the violence is on is coming from that side of the culture, though There is state violence pointing in the other direction in you have the camp state in the Jackson state killings by police in 1970 and Where this all brings us to some extent is kind of a generational divide where you have One group of people saying look mom and dad. We tried it your way and your way didn't work. Yeah the old rules have got to go. We need to do something else to solve society's problems. And on the other hand, other side you have people saying, hey, you're breaking down important norms and conventions that you don't understand. The question I think we should ask about the zombie movies that we watch in the 70s is, do they evoke the terror of crime, blalisness, and anarchy? And do they evoke that divide between new and old generations, both like generations of people by age and generations of these social movements and counter movements? You know, a sort of seminal moment in violence in 1970s horror movies is the last house on the left by Westcray, yes. This is the movie that pushes violence. Over the edge, a woman gets raped. The entire scene is shot and shown in the film. And then the killers flee and they end up in that girl's parents' house. And the parents kill all of them in revenge. So it is a dark movie filled with violence. It's also really not a very good movie, like it's super sloppy. And it's really just there for the extreme violence. You know what I mean? And that's how this gets personified in horror movies. In action movies and regular movies, like every movie cop runs into a guy on drugs who's trying to rob a bank and he ends up having to shoot him. All of that violence is sort of expressing itself in movies in ways like that. I also think of a very famous horror movie, The Exorcist, as reflecting it a little bit. I think the fundamental core of the exorcist is that you have this innocent little girl who is screaming these profane blasts and just the discombobulation you feel when you see that. everything has just gone to chaos, everything is flipped from the way it should be fear that you might have felt them. So absolutely and I still say it's one of the scariest movies ever made. It also has some other things that reflects but I think you might get to those. So yes, so that was my first point. The second thing and this is also kind of an easy one. I'm going to get into some more interesting ones later but the 70s I don't think anyone will disagree that in the 70s we were afraid because of a loss of trust in authorities and institutions. Correct. So in the 70s, we all, if you hadn't learned it in the 60s, you learned in the 70s that authorities can't be trusted to tell the truth, and they can't be trusted to help you do help you in any way. Yeah, this is when the who's saying, I hope I die before I get old. Right, you know, the phrase was, don't trust anybody over 30. I want to go back for a second because you would think that the parents of the 1970s, given everything you just said would sort of be like, and they were not like they were I mean I don't know what your experience was my parents both smoked you know they kept cartons of cigarettes on top of the fridge that you know they had drinks when they got home and then I would just leave that I was like feral I would just leave the house on my bike try to find some kids and then like the rule was when the when the lights come on like when the night lights come on like go home yeah you know that was the rule and and sometimes a parent would come on call for you but normally they were just like Yeah, be home before dark. It's cool. Yeah, at some point, hunger will bull-john back. Exactly. No, yeah, I didn't have quite the same experience, but certainly I did have that experience of like, I'm just going to go out and bike around and I'll be back at some point in a few hours. Yes. Anyway, as far as, you know, loss of trust in institutions and authorities, We all know this, but like the one-two punchier is Vietnam and Watergate. Obviously Vietnam, I don't think I really need to say anything about Watergate. You and I have read a lot about Watergate, so I'm trying real hard not to go down into Watergate a whole, but you know, Watergate wasn't just a crime where people one time broke into a hotel. Watergate was like and what's interesting about that to me and we don't I don't know that we've had this conversation before is it happened to Nixon, but I think if more information would come out in a different way like it could have happened to Johnson. Oh totally. It's more sort of like right guy right time than this was the first time this ever happened. You know, yes. I mean, not I'm not not to excuse or defend Nixon's many corruptions and many. However, it is certainly true that he was kind of just doing the same stuff President's had been doing for a little while. Yes, right. Exactly. I think we just trusted them. Can I give you my fat Nixon factoid that I always like to share? Yeah, please. He played football. It was a college in California and their mascot or their nickname was The Poets. Oh, there you go. Hey, all right. Well, now I know. But there's a third thing after that one to punch. There's a third thing that I think kind of quietly destabilized a lot of people's trust and government. John, if I said the year of intelligence does that mean anything to you? It's just that. So in 1975, sometimes called The Year of Intelligence, was a year-long period of intense media and congressional scrutiny into how the CIA, FBI and NSA had been behaving for the last few decades. So this is when like who the reality of how Hoover operated the FBI became public. Do you want to talk about that a little bit? Jay Edgar Hoover was, I believe he was the first. director of the FBI, right? He founded the FBI. I think he was the FBI director for four decades? Yes. Is that right? Maybe three and a half, four decades? After he passed away, Congress hastened to put term limits on FBI directors, by the way. Yes. Because what he did, I don't want to say he created the modern surveillance state. Because I think like expertise in surveillance stateism is really, you know, the gift that the Soviet Union gave us. But in America, he started the rigorous intelligence gathering operation. So there used to be a thing, like hippies used to say to each other, yeah, the FBI has a file on me, you know what I mean? Because they would collect all this damning information, but everyone they could and Hoover would wield this, not only to disrupt American middle class lives or poverty lives, but he would wield it against politicians. Yes, absolutely. And he died right before this all came to light. His image up until this point had been like the the super awesome like man, you know, the America's law man squeaky close dedicated American and this was this is one of the biggest falls from grace of any politician, you know, outside maybe Nixon and a few others. But anyway, that year, a couple of congressional committees, a church and the pipe committees, started exposing basically illegal activities and intelligence abuses that have been going on for a long time. The most famous operation that Hoover was running was called co-intel pro. And this is where we learned that remember how I said we were afraid of all those lawless violence. groups. Well, this is where we learned that the U.S. government had been actively participating in, in some cases, uh, egging on this violence, uh, that it had basically been waging a war against people it didn't like, and that war was not waged in accordance with legal responsibilities. One famous incident from Coantill Pro is that the FBI knew about Martin Luther King Jr.'s mistress and threatened to smear his name and held that over him. They encouraged him to kill himself, like overtly told him you might as well kill yourself. My favorite thing, I don't think this happened until like 1980, but my favorite thing that kind of sums both of these first two points up, do you know who Bernadette Dorn was or is? Bernadette Dorn, I think she's so alive. She was the public face of the weather underground. Oh, she lives in Chicago. No, doesn't she? I think so. Yes. I have a story about this. But carry on. Okay. Yes. So she is she is like the beating revolutionary heart of the weather underground in the inspiration for a lot of these edgy semi violent groups at the time. She's very smart. She's extremely charismatic. And she, you know, participated. She led the weather underground throughout all of their like bombing days. Right. So she goes underground for most of the 70s. I think And at some point I think at the late seven years or maybe 1980, she turns herself in, she comes back in from being off the grid, she comes back in from the cold, so she's guilty as sin, right? Like she's guilty as sin. Why did she get off with like basically a slap on the wrist? Yeah, why did she end up hosting a fundraising party for Barack Obama when he hosted his, when he announced his first run for president? Yes, right. Like, like, she got off Scott free and in fact became a celebrity. And do you know why she got off Scott free? I don't. Because the government's case against her was hopelessly, hopelessly polluted by all the illegal actions the government had taken to fill this case against her. I did not know that. So I thought she just got off because she was a white girl. No. She, the government basically said, we don't want to do discovery here. Right. Exactly. Yeah. So she got a slap on the wrist and that to me just kind of sums this up. You have, you have an obviously guilty, you know, terrorist person, but you have a government that like bungled it so badly that they can't be trusted to bring. Yeah. Anyway. I'm not going to be that worse any longer. This isn't just a matter of like not trusting like the police or not trusting politicians or something. There were a lot of like major environmental and toxic waste accidents in the 70s that really shook the the I confidence that like government can keep us and like the physical land we live on safe. I yeah we know about Chernobyl but three mile island was in the city. Three mile island in the late 70s in New York we learned that like a generation of New Yorkers had been basically soaking in toxic waste that had been buried by a chemical company there. Like a lot of the stuff happened, the environmental movement really spraying into life in this decade as well. And if we don't start getting some toxic waste zombies in the 70s, I'm going to be shocked. So this is all leading to my question. I think we should ask does this movie show a lack of trust and institutions and authority figures? And I want to, I want to also talk about a different way that manifests. So if you think of movies like Dirty Harry, starring Clint Eastwood, there were a series of four films where he is a cop who bucks the system. And that is all those stories are about people who cannot get justice or satisfaction from the system. Yeah. So that even the police, have to go outside the system to get real justice. Yeah. So it's not just civies versus the police. It's the system is so bad individual actors inside of it need to take extraordinary measures to make the world a safe place. What is that? There is one movie that I think is often playing as like the Er text of the vigilante. We've talked about it before. Death wish? Yeah. Death wish. That's seven days, right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Charles Bronson. That's right. Okay. I'm going to move on because we got to keep this train rolling. Number the number three thing that we were scared of in the 70s is we were scared of a massive shift in public morals growing up. Maybe a more measured way to describe it is that there is a huge reevaluation of the way that your gender plays out in public life. This decade, we see the rise of second wave feminism. Second wave feminism focuses on like workplace equality and a new discrimination against women and equal rights women. Yes. And what is the big women's issue that crops up in the 70s, John? a abortion abortion reproductive rights. We should say. I want to get back to that in just a second, but so women are entering the workforce and mass in the 70s. What got significantly easier to do in the 70s, John? Divorce. So in 1968, I believe, right? The government essentially made divorce no fault. Yes, I don't know if it was 68, but yeah, no, I'm talking about the shift Yeah, no fault divorce. I was sitting around with a bunch of friends, the other day where all Gen Xers, we were sort of talking about the difficulty of raising our kids because none of us had a model of a father after I think the oldest was 12. Right, so all our, at some point, all our kids hit an age where we just didn't have any reference material. Wow, you know, and, and I, I refer to it as sort of the great experiments like, like some people, like today people today will say, you know, like divorce is never a bad idea and I generally agree with that. Like if people are miserable, but we're better at doing it now than I think the big part about no fault divorce is not that it occurred. But like, you know, I know a family who the kids live in the same house and mom and dad just takes shifts. You know, the kids never have to move, right? Yeah. In the 60s and 70s, if your parents got divorced, dad was gone and you saw him once every two weeks. Yeah. And if the family is the place where you train each new generation, how to be a good citizen and how to grow up to be a good spouse and a good parent, what do you do when that family is suddenly not stable? Or be wealthier power or be well, yes, that's what can I actually can we tell us story about that When Nelson Rockefeller was gonna run for president. I can't remember who was 64 or 68 What was the big mark against him? I'm gonna guess he was divorced he was divorced and had a new wife a new child and he could not overcome that oh wow to get the nomination time you imagine that being an issue today I know it's like if that was your worst problem then you were probably doing all right but yeah a couple of last things I want to hit on here yeah who was asking for these divorces of the wives. The wives. So women filed something like 70% of divorces in the years immediately following this change. This is over simplifying it, but you can kind of imagine a lot of people, a lot of women who felt trapped in a previous generations like social system that they were stifled in, right? Right. Like if you think of Rosemary's baby, Rosemary's baby is kind of the story Men saying hey, we miss we miss when women were like quiet and submissive and docile, right? That movie to me feels like a extremely 1970s film And it's not a coincidence that the mother and the exorcist is that there's no dad around. Yes. So I want to talk about abortion as well because just as abortion is uncomfortable to talk about today, it was yeah uncomfortable to talk about in the 70s. But abortion was a very hot topic in the 70s, but the debate looked very different than it does today. very different. So Rovy Wade landed in the early 70s and it hit a country where abortion laws were all over the place. And opinion on abortion in the 70s didn't map to a political party or to a conservative liberal divide and quite the same way it does today. No, and in fact, many Catholics were pro abortion with the attitude of, like, look, everybody makes a mistake. And the families should, we should, you know, people should be able to have good families. People, people, kids shouldn't be born into difficult situations. Yeah, it was sort of a charitable thing and they would run these clinics. Yeah, there was all sorts of, uh, you could, you couldn't tell what someone's like politics were by their opinion on abortion or vice versa. So no, because instead of like having one political party be pro abortion and one anti-abortion, so later in the decade, the GOP does adopt an anti-abortion thing, but that's part of a broader change in political parties that we won't get into because that's an answer. No, but I do want to mention it for people who aren't familiar, don't study political history, not that we study it, but we read books about it. You can have conservative Democrats and liberal Democrats. You can have conservative Republicans and liberal Republicans, you know, Dwight E. Eisner is kind of a more liberal Republican, yet all the Democrats holding down African Americans We're Democratic senators, right? So so that's hard to imagine now because the parties were split in a way that they're not they're still split certainly the Democratic party is still split But not in the way they were back then. Yes, I'm I'm making my saving throw versus continuing down that because sorry I tend to do that's that's bait Andy Instead of political parties being mapped to abortion opinion, said you had a bunch of different sort of cultural groups that had different takes on. So you had Roman Catholics, many of whom were, I mean, the core religious anti-abortion group would be was found in the Roman Catholic. American roaming Catholic community. You had a medical establishment that kind of abortion is like a public health measure, not as like a moral question. You had Protestant and Jewish groups, which this was a surprise to me as someone who grew up conservative Protestant. Protestant and Jewish groups tended to be pro-choice in the 70s. What this means for horror movies, and here's what I'm going to try to land this plane, is that everyone is anxious about a topic that has been essentially taboo until now. And this is like women's sexuality, and women's bodily autonomy. Yeah. And consider that in the 70s, you can't like in place society, you can't say the names or the activities that you're talking about in in blunt form. But nevertheless, it's on everyone's mind a lot. So yeah, this manifests in a strange way, I think, in slasher movies, which get invented in this decade. Yeah. because all of the the sort of leads in those movies are women who have made bad choices. They're very more elastic conservative movies in a way and they're sort of about this topic single women who can't make bad choices and it's morphed into it can be a more powerful empowering thing for women in slasher movies and certainly even the first one Had a little bit of this, but it quickly became, you know, you made a bad choice here. Here's your slasher. And I think it was possible, kind of no matter where you fell, I think it was possible to be scared that we were simultaneously going too far in some ways and not going far enough in others. And exactly where you fell in that spectrum, like probably very heavily from person to person. You definitely see this a lot in mainstream horror movies, which is why I'm hoping it'll show up and zombie. I already mentioned Rosemary's baby. I mean, my favorite movie Alien is all about is all about this. And this kind of comes to a head in 1980 with the film Dress to Kill, which features a divorced woman who is killed by a random stranger because she chooses to try to seduce him. That's sort of the by Brian DeFama, this is sort of the, the prototypical like single woman who's chosen to get divorced, and realizing the consequences of what she's done. I haven't seen that. I'll add it to the list. Unless you're, unless you're cautioning us away from watching it. You know, this better Brian de Palma films to watch, but okay. Well, all this said, uh, the question I want us to ask of the zombie movies we watch in the 70s is does this movie evoke anxiety about sexuality, reproduction, or bodily autonomy, and maybe secondarily does it evoke anxieties over women's bodies? Yes, I'm very curious to see if that filters into zombie movies, because in the past, our zombie movies have lagged behind. Yes, they have. We just watched one that was, we just watched one that was not lagging behind at all. Yeah, so I'm curious to see what happens. Andy, this is going pretty well. How many more do you have left? We have only two more. We are over halfway, John. Excellent. All right. So, hold on to your hats and glasses because we're going to keep pushing ahead. The next thing we are scared of in the 1970s that I think is going to show up in zombie movies is we were scared of consumer capitalism. Yes, consumerism became a concept in this deck. Yes, so we've talked at length in the past about the economic revolution of the post-war world, kind of going through the 60s. When the 70s, this trend has reached sort of its apex. This is the decade of shopping malls, suburban sprawl, and just a general culture of material acquisition. Does you know what movie I'm going to bring up? I know it, save it, save it till we get to the end of the topic, because it's where it's we're all heading towards. These things I just mentioned, I'll felt really progressive and exciting and liberating in the 50s and 60s, but by the 70s, I would say the shine is off. Yeah, it felt very shallow right because you just been through a period where you're trying to raise your consciousness and save the world and now you're worried about your son burst of and with matching vent hood and it all seems very shallow and pointless. I'm not an economics nerd, but I'm going to dip my toes into it for a second. Until the 70s, conventional wisdom generally held that inflation and high unemployment were mutually exclusive. They could not happen at the same time. So guess what we learned in the 1970s, John? Yeah, we invented a new kind of inflation. Stagflation. That's right. Yeah, so there's a number of big... economic shocks to the system that have tangible effects on your average American's life. We start getting into this mess. There's a couple big things happen. I'll just breeze through them. So we had this big thing called the Vietnam War. How do you pay for a war if you don't want Uh, you, I don't know. How do you pay for it? You start printing money. You start printing money creating inflation. I, that's a no-for simplification, but so, well, then it was obvious. I, I'm embarrassed that I did. No, no, I'm asking these ludicrously open-ended questions and trying to fish for a specific answer. So, uh, we also have various crises in the Middle East that cause oil prices to skyrocket. And in the 1970s, there's no part of American life that doesn't rely on energy. no segment of the economy is spared. So what you, what you have gotten, where we've landed in the 1970s is we're in a vicious cycle. Yes. Sometimes this is called the wage price spiral and my understanding is that this sort of spiral does not like solve itself naturally. It takes no. It takes smart government and bank intervention. And for Americans, you remember this, just think we could have been in England at this time, which was very worse, right? Yes, exactly. England was on the cusp, I did they actually request for help from the International Monetary Fund. They were on the cusp of doing it if they did not. I don't know, but that sounds about right. Yeah, and that's a good reminder that I'm talking, obviously I'm talking about America here. It's not because I only think America was important in the 70s, but it's because that's sad. Yeah, and a little bit later, I do want we're going to take a few minutes to talk about Mexican cinema because we have a lot of Mexican movies coming up, we also have a lot of Italian movies coming up and we'll probably discuss those when we get to them. But so, John, where, what movie am I heading towards that is both a horror movie and a zombie movie that came out at the end of the 70s that perfectly encapsulates anxiety, consumer anxiety? John of the dead by one, Mr. George Romero, a little, you, you probably haven't heard of this guy, but. Yeah, so the heroes of that film that we're going to get to, they're stuck in a shopping mall, they're surrounded by material goods that are now worthless. And zombies are swarming the shopping mall out of muscle memory, right? Yeah. It's just delightful. So my question is, we may find that Dawn of the Dead came up with that out of whole cloth. Right. But I want to know if zombie movies specifically started making this connection between zombies and consumerism before 1978. So for that reason I propose we ask of each movie we watch does this movie evoke economic anxiety and consumerism gone and muck nice. Okay, we have one of my points left, then we're going to get a little maybe hopefully a more uplifting set of info about Mexican cinema. I'm not sure if it's going to be uplifting or dispiriting. I got bad news for it. Okay. All right. Well, the last thing I think we were afraid of in the 70s that I think is going to crop up in zombie films in the 70s, or that I hope does is we were afraid of the rural versus urban divide. This one I'm going a little bit more out on a limb on this one. The previous ones I mentioned, I think are if you just Google like what were the problems of the 70s, you would probably get the previous ones I mentioned. This one, though, I am a little more curious about, so this is the era of urban decay. Major American cities that used to be the heart of the whole American economy start to nose-dive for various reasons. So jobs are moving overseas. White flight is an effect you mentioned this earlier, John, where white people are moving out of the cities. Black and minority people are moving into those cities only to find that there's no economic security in those cities anymore. Right. I sort of like a trap. And so cities as people leave cities they lose big chunks of their tax base cities have less money. What happens to the experience of living in a city when the city has less money? public services deteriorate. This is the time we have stories about people calling the police and them not showing up for two hours. Yes. You know, or the trains just not running at all, or sewer backs, sewage backups in your basement. Yes. This might have been the first time the idea of a city going bankrupt became a prominent possibility, even for really big cities like New York. So, yeah, with less money cities become worse places to live. It kind of feeds the The urban north seems to be declining, and the country's center of gravity is shifting south. One of the books I read, posited that the southward shift of culture, of industry, of everything, is the single most defining element of the 1970s, for by the way. interesting. But so life's not peachy though in rural America either. This is the decade where industrialized farming really starts to kick into overdrive. So if you're on your family plot of land, this is the era of that stereotypical big company that purchases all of the farmland in your state. So big global enterprise is starting to encroach on what you might call And making it hard for for smaller businesses this is sort of the death of the American small business Yes, it's not just farming. It's it's your it's your small hardware store and now it's got to be part of a franchise You know, and this is this really kicks in in the severies too. Yeah, so all of this shifting around which is enormously complex enormously more complex then what I just summed up But all of this is creating I think a city versus country polarization in the popular mind I think so too, I mean, you know, rural people have always been more conservative than city folk as a rule, like if you all the way back to the French Revolution, right, like like the people in the cities were into revolution and none of the people in the countryside were so that's a sort of consistent thing, but I think what is really different here is awareness, it becomes so stark in the 70s. Can you think of, so sometimes, so this definitely manifests in pop culture in film and TV, can you think of like a fun manifestation of this? Yeah, the Duke's a has exactly, Duke's a hazard, Smokey and the Bandit, yep, so there's a very fun, a lot of fun can be had with this theme. If I were to name an early 70s horror movie that I think that evokes the not fun part of this, what do you think I'm getting at? Oh, I don't know, surprised me. Deliverance? So liver and yes. Yes. So excellent choice. It definitely shows up in horror movies and so the question I want to ask is our zombie movie is going to reflect this too. So I propose that we ask does this zombie movie evoke tensions between urban and rural life? I love it. That's a great question. All right. And that is my fifth and final thing that we were afraid of. We weren't afraid of anything else in the 70s. No. It was all good outside of those topics. Everything was going great. Yes. So, may I do what we did last time. So, last time I named six movies from the 50s and compared them with six movies from the 60s. So, I've taken the same list we had from the 60s and now I want to read you a comparison list for the 70s, right? So, here's the ones I picked out for the 60s. Some of them I picked because we had watched them. But, yeah. Psycho, the first one, over Carnival of souls I picked out just because we loved it, but it also is indicative of I think 60s or that was that was a really good movie, John. Yeah, what was whatever happened to baby Jane night of the living dead. And eyes without a face, which was a French horror film. That's right. All right, so let me read you six 70s films. Speaking of Italy, superior. Oh, yeah. Yeah, Dawn of the Dead, 1978. Last house on the left, Halloween, and last, and certainly not least, the Texas chainsaw mess. Yes. Now, first of all, a lot of these, a lot of discussion about those movies come from this wonderful book I read called Shock Values, so if you want a dig deeper, you should look into that. But my favorite line from that book is, the thing about the Texas chainsaw massacre is all three words are required. Nobody's going to the Iowa chainsaw massacre, you know? That's amazing, yes. Yeah, speaking to your rural divide question. Yeah, it takes place in rural Texas. It features a bunch of hippies from the city. Like, like, there it is right there. Yeah, you know what I mean? So yeah, absolutely. Is that, that's not going to wind up on our zombie list, right? There's no zombies. No, it just crazed Hillbillies. No, that's for our next podcast when we talk about cannibalism. You're you're you're soloing that one, John, I don't think I have the I don't think I have the the guts no pun intended for that one. Yeah, okay, but yeah, so we've talked about this so here is one thing I didn't mention a question I think we should ask it's not really tied I do want us to be asking Is this oh, you know, it movie I forgot. I'm sorry any alien. Yes, that is a huge 1970s horror movie. So I apologize for not including it. I was trying to keep my list of six and I'd choose. Oh, it's fine. I mentioned alien. Uh, during the gender. Uh, a people stuff. I was going to say there's one question I didn't list here but that I do expect we're going to be asking I because I am more with the curious I do want us to be asking is this movie grosser than movies that came before it because yeah I think it's like a given with the horror genre and that's why I didn't call it out like as a 70 specific thing it's a given with the horror genre that the horror genre is always going to be pushing the envelope. Yes, but it happens, it happens in the 70s more and actually I just want to take a minute to talk about what that means for the 70s. Yeah, I think it's an important question. Yeah, and I don't mean to say that that pushing the envelope always means getting grosser or, you know, or getting scarier. It just means doing something that some doing something uncomfortable. Right, like having a protracted rapeseen for over many minutes seems like an hour in the middle of last house on the left Yes, you know, I've never seen that movie and you have convinced me to put it on Don't don't do it. It is it is a cultural artifact you do not need to see it. It's just told you everything you needed to know about it Yeah So what I'll say though is the big difference, so one of the reasons, and it is again, more complex than this. Part of the reason the 70s are sort of off the hook for a lot of this gore is the invention of the rating system. It used to kind of be a studio honor system. in terms of violating sort of the moral code of the film industry. But once you invented a rating, a winch against which filmmakers could measure, they could then make choices to go against that rating. And there was a very conservative person in charge of it. So he would say, OK, your movie's got an X or it's unrated, and the filmmaker would be like, yes. now I can sell this is the most and now I can really push because in a strange way because by having that limitation of ratings, you you took away the barriers to going all the way. And you you push forward the ratings the rating directly below it because the sensor would say this scene is too graphic, you're going to get an X rating. And so the filmmaker would say, what is the absolute minimum I can cut to squeak by with an R rating instead of X? And so you get a scene that like was perceived by the filmmaker as about as far that you could push that R rating as positive. Yeah, and you get people, and so then imagine doing that a thousand times over and your movies are just going to get more and more and more, uh, uh, reskay and gross. But I think the other point I want to make about that is you, we talked about, uh, the exorcist and alien and Rosemary's baby, Dawn of the Dead, and certainly superior. The one, the thing that is different about these movies, then most of the movies we've watched, like the Santo Films, or, you know, the zombies of the stratosphere. These are movies for adults. New filmmakers who are important who become the sort of mavericks of the 70s make horror movies. So you sort of have this new crew, right? It's Steven Spielberg, it's George Lucas, it's Francis Ford Coppola. They're all inspired by French movies, Francois Truffle, and they're sort of the young kids who are pushing the boundaries in making the cool new movies. Even Steven Spielberg's second movie, and his first movie were horror movies. you know what I mean yeah and and it gets and and horror and so when Roman Planski makes Rosemary's baby like he's a he is a artistic filmmaker he's in a tour he's not somebody who wants to make a movie for kids and it gets to the point where Stanley Kubrick the director of of 1968's 2001 of space out of the candidate for the greatest film ever is adapting a Stephen King book in 1980 called The Shining. So it's when adults become interested and start going to horror movies. So the other thing, other reason these movies are going to get a lot harder is they are not for kids anymore. Yeah. You know, they don't have to worry about that. It's all for grownups who want to see this stuff. Yeah. So Alright, well, hey, John. I have been waiting with some excitement and impatience to hear what you have learned. John went down his own, I don't want to say rabbit trail because it's it's an important path that we are going to be taking and that is we're going to be experiencing a lot of Mexican horror films this decade. So tell us what you have learned, John. Well, Mexican film in general, and horror film may deviate from this so I'll be curious to see what happens. But in general, Mexico had a golden age of film making from after the war, 1945 to the mid-50s. They made a lot's film. They copied the Hollywood studio model. and they got a lot of advice and support from Hollywood, because America was busy doing other stuff. I remember Mexico was not involved in the war at all. They were neutral. So they jumped into the sort of the void, filled, or the void left by a sort of slow down, a little bit of a slowdown, and Hollywood, and Hollywood encouraged it to a certain extent. However, as the time progressed, what happened is that the system sort of calcified, So when the Hollywood money sort of evaporated in the mid-50s, you had a bunch of people making films for a long time on the Hollywood model and they couldn't afford to do it anymore. And furthermore, you'll see this, I think this is the biggest thing leading up to this new Renaissance is we commented a lot on how the first Santo movie we watched was really good. And the second one, for sure, but definitely the third one too, we're shockingly bad. And then we realized these are made by the same people. So what it happened is all the people who sort of sat on the money. and the production facilities of cinema became Graspi. They're like, we need to keep our jobs. It was almost impossible for young filmmakers to break in. And what that led to is less money with the same people, with less creative ideas, and then you get Santa versus, you know, you get Santa in the world of the dead or in the underworld. Yeah. That's how that happened. That's why it's the same people making a worse movie. Does that make sense? Yes, it makes total sense. So after, now we talked in last episode, but maybe you could just give us a reminder, there was a big event in Mexico in 1968. Yes. In sort of like Kent State, but go ahead and give the briefest details. Yeah, well, yeah, I forget the name of it. Sorry, so the T, but the Mexican government basically massacred a bunch of university students. Yes, it was a cattle, it was a, I mean, obviously that's horrible, but it was the catalyst in a lot of ways for a sort of youth counter culture movement called lot on the wave. Yes, and. And what happened here is that the president or the leader that immediately followed after that massacre actually had a very liberal attitude. And what he did is he started making easier for people to get into film and get into film arts. So he created a new film school and encouraged a bunch of new filmmakers to make films. And this last through the 70s. will be really good in the 70s, even the D zombie movies we're going to watch. Yeah. And it also represents a change of values, not dissimilar from the US values. You shouldn't be shocked to learn that Mexican values. are different than American values. There's a couple things that are really important. First of all, family is number one, right? In the golden age, many of these sort of melodramas would feature someone in a family making a mistake. So a young woman who marries a man out of her class and then is shamed and has to come back and live with the family and she realizes she made a mistake and connects with the family again and then everything is set right. So, films in the 70s are sort of going to be a response against that a little bit. Oh. The other big thing that I think that we don't wrestle with that I assume is going to be all over 70s Mexican cinema. Well, there's two things. One is Catholicism. Yeah. Catholicism is a dominant religion in Mexico in a way that no religion is here in the United States. even evangelicals, which are a large percentage, like there's all kinds of different denominations. Yeah. There are very few Protestants in Mexico. Now religion may have been maybe less important now, but it's still a huge factor. The great thing about Mexico that I think is very different, From United States cinema that I'm looking forward to, this is a great line here. This is from the book, by the way, cinema of solitude by Charles Ramirez Bird. It is a great book about Mexican cinema. It's very readable. I don't really like academic text that much. This one is great. The only downside is I can't watch all the movie see references in it. But, So, if you think of Mexican cinema, they were new Spain, they went through, they got independence, they went through a revolution, the massacre in 1968, and the, and the idea is that Mexico has sort of been trying to figure out its identity, what it is to be Mexican. in a way that, like, I think some Americans have a more sure hand, like we just look like, what does it mean to be American? Well, it's John Wayne. Yeah. Even if that's not your cup of tea, I think we could easily define it, right? Right. Right. And there's a great line about trying to establish this national identity, and it says, the main obstacle to achieving self identity, according to the psychologist Samuel Ramos, is Mexicans tremendous inferiority complex. And this is where that copying of the Hollywood system comes in, because what they try to do is copy our system. And when they can no longer keep up, they just keep trying to do it in the same model. And the fact that their films were not as good, they were like, well, we're doing our best. So I think in the new wave of cinema, we're going to see more confidence in Mexican filmmakers, which I'm really looking forward to. And the last idea here and I'm not going to get too into it and it's not really related to zombie movies, but I'm curious to see if this is here. Mexican, you know, this is called the cinema of solitude, you know, a thousand years of solitude. Solitude is a strong concept in Mexican culture. Though well the family is important, the other side of that is not having a family and living in solitude. So that is a huge part of Mexican culture in this time period as well. So those are sort of the things I have my eye on for Mexican cinema in the 1970s. Yeah, well, you know what, my favorite part of doing this podcast is that we don't know what we're going to find. This is not something where John and I watched a deck that all of the zombie moves in the 1970s and are now something about what we learned and telling you what the themes were. This is us wondering if this is the direction that these films are going to go. So we're going to learn this at the same time. You know, hopefully you're learning along with us. So I love that about this podcast. And that's why I love this. Yeah, I know. So we have one. So that's my favorite thing. And we're not going to do a special dedicated episode on Italian cinema, but when we start to get to Italian movies, we'll, we'll do a, we'll do a, we'll do a cultural segment on it. We'll certainly do some of the sides about what's going on. So for sure. Well, I'm looking forward to the 1970s. However, There are a lot of cheap greenhouse films in our future as well, and I'm curious to see those are the ones I'm most curious about in a way because, you know, we say that the cinema of an age tattles on the culture in a way and so and grind house does that in the most obviously subtle way so I'm curious to see if your items just are right on top of the there's no subtext to a grind house maybe they're just in the text right on top in the way that you're describing them. Well, as we've discussed before, what surprised us in past decades was often that the themes we thought would define the entire decade. In fact, it didn't really become apparent in zombie films, at least until the end of that decade. Whereas in the 70s, I think, by the time this episode airs, we will have had episodes on some movies that very much, I think, embody a lot of it, and I think we have a little in in being a zombie movies podcast because one of the defining films that made movies for adults that made them grosser is our national hero night of the living dead that that was like that like usher in this new area of era of horror cinema in a lot of ways so i'm curious to see if zombie films sort of carry the torch All right, well, John, do you have any closing statements? No, I love doing this research and I love doing these episodes. So we'll do a little bit more of it. And I actually, can I say this? Can I think a season ahead? I can't wait till we do this for the 80s. Yeah. Not only we were alive, we were conscious and seeing these films in the theater or on VHS. Or sneaking to our neighbor's house to watch it because the neighbor could parents let him watch it and your parents didn't. Yes, or your friend had show time and his parents had no clue that you could watch the Friday of the 13th movies at 10 o'clock at night on show time. So, right, just I think typical hypothetical, yeah, so this will be something we discussed in our 80s films. But that was great, Andy. I love your questions. I'm really looking forward to this season, there will be some rough spots, but I think with this context, it'll make it a lot more interesting. I think the 70s are going to be a roller coaster ride in every sense of the word. Absolutely. Okay. Well, if you haven't yet, and you want to hear all of our info on the 70s, or movies, the greatest era of horror cinema, you should subscribe to our podcast. So we will see you next week for a double feature, speaking of the Grindhouse. I drink your blood, and I eat your skin. We will be jumping into the deep end. You've been listening to zombie strains. We'll be back next episode to talk about another zombie movie. 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