Welcome to Zombie Strains, the podcast where we watch every zombie movie ever produced. Yes, all of them. How many is that? The current total is more than 600, and we will try to watch them in order of release date, with a few flash forwards for fun. We look forward to watching zombie cinema evolve and become what it is today. I'm John, and I'm joined by my co-host Andy and our producer Brad. Join us for this journey to see which of us makes it to the end alive. Hello, I'm John.

I'm Andy.

I'm Brad.

Your producer, Brad. Come on, get it right.

I know, I know. But were you able to pull all those audio clips I sent you?

Here, I'll play them all in a row right now. Did you catch them?

I was wondering. I knew there was a gag in here about audio clips. I was wondering how we would fit it in. So thank you for getting it in right off the top there, John.

Why are we making a gag about audio clips? Andy, is it because this film is full of them?

Yes, it's because hot off of 19, well, wherever we were last episode, we have gone back in time to watch a three-hour French silent film from the 19 teens.

Yes.

So no audio clips.

It's a silent film called J'accuse from France from 1919. It is listed as possibly the earliest zombie movies. The word zombie does not occur in it, but there is some interesting zombie action. So we will be discussing that. And we'll discuss the film generally, but I don't know. I think we just get started. What trigger warnings do you have for us?

Yeah, well, this is a movie about war. It's an anti-war film that portrays the realities of war pretty starkly, I think, for the time. So there will be having general discussion of violence and destruction of war. More specifically, there is a heavy dose of misogyny directed at the main female character in this film, including spousal abuse and sexual assault and the threat of harm to a child. So those topics may come up in our discussion, although of course we will not go into too much detail. But anything to add, Brad or John?

No, I think we're going to do it a little differently this time, and we'll talk about it more once Brad gives us the details. We're not going to go through the plot beat by beat, because this is a very long movie and most of it has nothing to do with zombies. But we do want to talk about it because I'm fascinated by this movie. So I'll hand it back to Brad.

All right. Well, J'accuse was released in France on April 25th, 1919, and in the US on October 9th, 1921. Some big movies from 1919 are Male and Female starring Gloria Swanson, Daddy Long Legs starring Mary Pickford, and The Miracle Man with Lon Chaney, which is the film that helped make Chaney a star.

And this is not the Lon Chaney we saw in Ebony Castle and Mead Frankenstein. This is his father, correct?

Correct.

Mary Pickford, I know that name. Have we watched Mary Pickford in a movie or do I just know it because she's famous over time?

She's just one of the original silent stars. She married Douglas Fairbanks. They had a famous house in Beverly Hills called Pick Fair. She and her husband, with some other notable people in the film industry, created United Artists, which were artists having their own studio to release their own products, which also happened the same year in 1918. She's a big name. Got it. There were quite a few movies classified as Horror Films from 1919. Many are from Germany. The titles are The Beetle, The Dance of Death, Madness, The Plagues of Florence, written by Fritz Lang, and Eerie Tales are just a few. The plots are kind of different than we think of, and I'll read some of the INDB summaries so you can get the idea. The Dance of Death. A beautiful dancer's sexual allure is used by an evil cripple to entice men to their deaths.

Whoa.

And for Eerie Tales, a demon, a reaper, and the ghost of a prostitute read gothic short stories and act them out.

Okay.

And then last one, Plagues of Florence. An evil seductress causes the city's ruler and his son to both fall madly in love with her, the son killing his father before an order to torture the woman can be carried out, then turns the city churches into dens of sexual debauchery. Acts of evil and corruption continue unabated until the arrival of Death, who brings with her a horrible plague, which she's about to loose upon the city.

Wow.

I feel like the earlier we go, the more salacious we get with these films.

Yeah. Sometimes, yeah.

My stereotype of how controversial content evolved in film is different than that. I always imagine it was squeaky clean and then it got worse and worse as the decades, or more gratuitous as the decades went on. But that has not been my experience with this podcast.

Well, think of it kind of like technology now. Things come out and it spreads rapidly and it takes the sensors and morality a while to catch up and put its lid on and slow it down.

And also post, I think, post-First World War, there's a move towards sort of morality. But anyway, Brad is doing notes and we're not discussing the historical context, so please.

I'll carry on. J'accuse is a silent film written and directed by Abel Gans. Prior to J'accuse, Gans wrote or directed dozens of films and I'll cherry pick a few for our audience. He wrote the 1911 film The Electrocuted Man about an electrician who brings a dead man back to life. He wrote and directed the 1912 film The Mask of Horror. And the IMDB summary is, A mad sculptor searching for the perfect realization of the mask of horror places himself in front of a mirror after smearing blood over himself with the glass of an oil lamp. He then swallows a poison to observe the effects of pain.

Whoa.

Wow. Does that one about the guy being brought back to life, that sounds zombie adjacent. Is that on our list?

It is not. If you'd like to keep going backwards, we can.

I don't know if I can survive another three hour silent French film, but.

But to me, it sounded similar to Frankenstein, electricity bringing the dead back.

Okay, yeah.

It's listed as a short. So if we ever get to the point where we do.

I smell bonus content.

Bonus content is where I was going.

Yeah. I also smell our next podcast, which is about silent films, which we'll do after we finish this podcast.

All right. Gosse was drafted into the French Army for World War I, but he was discharged due to bad health, and he wrote J'accuse as a direct response to the war. J'accuse is an epic film and it costs more than 500,000 francs in 1918.

Yeah, there's some huge set pieces here. Places with hundreds of extras all in real military uniforms and.

And the reason for that is he re-enlisted while filming this, so he could go to the front, to the war front, and he used many real soldiers who were on leave.

Oh, wow.

So the scene at the end when all the dead rise, those are real soldiers.

Oh, wow.

And he also, in the film, there are all those inner titles, the cards in between, and some of them were letters from the front home from soldiers.

Yeah, there's a good sequence there for that.

Those are real letters, and they were friends of his who wrote those, and they're two friends and both died in the war. So those are pretty meaningful to him. Wow. The version we watched was restored in 2007 from six different prints, including one with Gauss' original tinting and toning. And do you know what that means for silent films?

I do, and it was fascinating. I want to talk about that in detail, but different... So when we say black and white silent film, what occurs in this movie frequently is the frames are tinted. So during the war, there's a sort of red tint to a lot of the frames, and there's green and blue. Yeah, am I on the mark there?

Yeah, blue seemed to be used in this film for night. And then the orange was kind of indoor for candlelight, and the red seemed to be battle. And it was a common thing from the very beginning of silent films to tint, which means they would color the white parts of the film, to give it a tone. And then toning would be they would color the black parts to give that a different color.

Interesting. I thought that was one of the things that jumped out to me while watching this. I have a lot to say about this kind of technique, but we'll get there when we get there.

J'accuse was a financial and critical success in France and Britain. The London Times Review said, the miracle has been achieved. A film has caused an audience to think.

That's pretty cool.

But J'accuse had trouble finding distribution in the US. It was too grim, and the pacifist message was at odds with American sentiment at the time. So in 1921, Gantz came to the US to promote it. He showed the film in New York to a large audience, including DW. Griffith and actors Lillian and Dorothy Gish. Griffith considered one of, if not the greatest director at the time, admired the film and arranged for United Artists to release it. But the American version was altered for the American audience. It was given a new title, Iacuse, a happy ending, and the anti-war message was changed to a patriotic message. The film didn't find success in the US, and the New York Times said, Gans's terrific J'accuse was so emasculated before it reached the public screen under the title Iacuse that it must be counted as lost.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, I'm not sure what you would have to do to this film to make it toward a happy ending that isn't anti-war.

Yeah.

I guess there's a few hints. I guess we can get to it. I mean, this movie does contain a couple of different competing ideas, I think. But anyway, all right, save it for later. Sorry, Brad.

That's right. Probably Gons's most famous film is Napoleon, which was released in 1927. And if you thought J'accuse was long, at two hours and 45 minutes, be warned. One version of Napoleon was over nine hours long.

Oh my God. Can I give you my factoid about the length of this film? So the cut we watched, the premiere watch was two hours and 45 minutes on the nose. And I looked this up just for fun. That is exactly 16 minutes longer than Avengers Infinity War and 16 minutes shorter than Avengers Endgame. So make of that what you will, but that's my factoid.

If you watch all three in order like that, how does it play?

I feel like J'accuse is a counterpoint to the positive aggressive messages of the Avengers films. We'll be discussing that in detail during the cultural context.

So I don't know when to bring this up, so I'll just do it now. Throughout watching this film, I was bombarded with ads for like quack medicines to combat attention deficit and stuff. And I don't know, it felt a little bit too close to the mark.

Going back to Napoleon, Napoleon was a film he worked on repeatedly throughout the rest of his life. He kept doing different versions, and the Wikipedia lists all the versions he did, all the different versions other people contributed to. And he worked on it all the way through 1971, when he released a new version. And it included new footage, and it was a sound film. So it had original footage from 1927, with footage she shot in 1965, and footage she shot after that, that was in sound.

Wow.

So it's a pretty impressive film. I think Coppola did an edit too at one point.

Well, I've never heard of a film being reworked, starting in the silent era, and making it into the sound era like that. That's remarkable, actually.

But we do have examples of films that directors keep going back to. We have the Star Wars films that Lucas kept monkeying with, and we have Blade Runner.

How many cuts of there are Blade Runner now? I've lost count.

I don't know. So it's not uncommon if someone has the power to keep doing it.

Yeah, it's more just the bridging two eras of film. I mean, back in the early days, it would have been filmed under an entirely different set of constraints and contexts than later.

One of the things he did was he was a really unique filmmaker, and many of his techniques, they start in J'accuse. There's a lot of fast editing that's in this, and later directors picked up on this. For Napoleon, he did a triptych technique where he had three cameras shoot something, and he projected them at the same time, which was before Cinerama.

Interesting.

So it was an extra Y, but he didn't like it because there were seams, and he couldn't get rid of the seams, so he couldn't figure out how to make it pleasing. So he was kind of visionary in the things he did with the camera.

Interesting. I would agree with that. This movie was kind of a revelation.

Well, he also re-did this movie in the 30s, as World War II approached, Gantz re-made J'accuse in 1938, and he used the same lead actor that he used in the 1919 version.

Interesting.

And in the 1938 version, the actor played a veteran of World War I, who is now trying to prevent war from happening.

Oh, interesting.

Interesting, because there's a veteran character from a previous war in this movie who is not trying to prevent war from happening. We might not even get into that. We'll talk about it, but yeah.

Well, real quick, the actors, there's only a handful and there's not much to look up on them. And their names are French, so I will struggle with them. Rumeau Job played Jean Diaz. He was in the 1919 and the 1938 version. Severin Mars plays Francois, and he died in 1921, two years after the release of J'accuse. Marisa D'Avray plays Edith, and Maxime Desjardins plays Edith's father.

You've got Angèle Guise, who plays possibly the most adorable child ever committed to film, but.

Well, it was her only film, so.

Fair enough.

There's not any history on her other than this film.

All right.

All right, carry on, guys.

Well, okay, cultural context. I think this will be a little longer. We're finally doing it, Andy. Here's our history podcast happening right now. I wanted to talk about the historical context, because the name of the film is important and in the period it covers is important because it is an anti-World War I movie. So let's can we start with the name J'accuse and where that comes from?

Please.

So before the First World War in France, there was a huge scandal in the French military, and there was a man by the last name of Dreyfus who was accused of treason and thrown in prison. He was Jewish and it was discovered that he in fact was not the traitor. Somebody else was, but the army was reeling from a bad image problem already, so they tried to sweep it under the rug. In 1898, Emile Zola, who's a famous French writer, wrote an essay, the first essay titled J'accuse, where he takes down the French military for engaging in fraud basically to avoid a scandal. This scandal went on from 1898 to 1906, when Dreyfus was finally released from prison. Forget OJ, forget Dept V heard. This was all over the French newspapers for years. What's important about it is that, A, it became a staple of French writing. So, when a French author wants to really ruffle feathers, he will title, or they will title an essay J'accuse to say, I mean it, a lot of investigative pieces. But the other thing is, I think, lack of faith in the French military that was generated by this whole affair is a big part of this movie. So, I don't know, did you have any thoughts about that, Andy?

No, I wanted to ask you, John, because I don't know, do you know what was the state of the French military and sort of patriotic spirit after the Franco-Prussian War? That would have been the last major conflict before this, right?

Yeah, so we have a character, Edith's father and Francois' father-in-law, is a veteran of the Franco-Prussian War. In the movie, they just say the 1870 War. But, so up until that war, France was sort of the big strutting rooster of the continental Europe, and Germany basically kicked its butt, and took over some French territory, and France was really, I mean, I don't know that the French military had ever recovered in terms of honor or prestige, and then the Dreyfus Affair happened. And so, at the beginning of the First World War, which this movie is about, it was really sort of anti-patriotic towards the military. That's how France had re-oriented itself, which was very different than Germany, which was very proud of its military and its military tradition.

Well, I find this interesting, not just because of the history of what was going on here, but we talk about the films that we cover in this podcast as being often reflective of societal fears and concerns and worries that are just in the zeitgeist, and the films in sort of an indirect way leverage that anxiety to produce their effect. But this is, I think this is the first movie we've watched that is a direct, explicit commentary on something that was very fresh on everyone's mind, right? That gives it just a, that gives it an energy, I think, that some of these other films that have to be a little bit more hands-off with the fears they're trying to trigger. I find that to be an interesting experience.

Well, and I wonder, producer Brad mentioned that the Americans tried to convert it into a patriotic film, and that it struggled in America because it wasn't patriotic. The French in this context post-first World War, despite technically winning, were not feeling very patriotic, and there was a lot of anxiety about the war, and what a disaster it was. So I want to say a couple of other things about the First World War. For those who don't know, the First World War was primarily France v. Germany and Russia. Germany was the sort of one country being attacked on both sides. There have been, Andy, you recommended a book to me by Max Hastings called Catastrophe. Yeah, about the beginning of or about the first year of the First World War, 1914. In that, and here's why I wanted to mention it. In that book, he says in the intro, there are more than 25,000 books written about how the First World War started. Like no human being could read all the books. But the point is, the reason there's so much anger and ink spilled about the First World War is if the 20th century had never featured the Second World War, the First World War would have been the greatest disaster in maybe human history, certainly continental European history, because it was so gruesome and deadly. I think World War II between the Holocaust and everything else was so much worse that we forget about that. But the First World War was like ruined a generation, literally. I think I read a stat that one in four German men died in the First World War. You know, it was just crazy. So I don't know. Do you want to add anything to that? I kind of want to say one more thing about it, but I feel like I'm running over you here.

I don't think so. No, this is interesting, John. So let's hear more.

Yeah. No, just my last thought is that two things are happening in 1919. One is the war is over. It is the most destructive thing that this whole generation has seen. One of the most destructive things ever. And I think what differentiates it's from other horrible historical facts. And I hate to say it, but things like colonization of the Americas or slavery is that they didn't happen to Europeans. They were done by Europeans. And second, they took a long time and they were far away from Europe. So this is something that happened in Europe. It only took four years. It killed a huge amount of people. And as soon as it ended, fingers started pointing. Who started this? Why did it start? This was such a horrible idea. And in 1919, every country is literally engaged in a propaganda campaign to say it wasn't us. The Germans are saying it was the French or the English. The French are saying, well, obviously, it was the Germans. The Russians are saying, well, it was the stinky Austrians. You know, so I think J'accuse is actually part of an interesting artifact because the French military and leadership are trying to say this was Germany's fault. And what this film is saying is that this is France's fault. Not that the war started, but all of these people had to die.

I have some more about that that I want to flesh out, but I think I'll wait until we get into our discussion of the film.

I would just add that in reference to this film not doing well in the US, that for Americans, all this happened a continent away. So in France, you see in this movie that you could take a train to the front. You could be in the war on a train ride. And so the war was present for every person in France. And for Americans, it was just a newsreel or a radio report, and you didn't see it. I mean, I don't think Americans really felt wars until Vietnam when it was televised.

Yeah. And I think, yeah, there's a famous event that happened in the middle of the war where all of the, where they needed to get about 4,000 troops to the front to save Paris, and all the taxi cab drivers in Paris drove troops to the front. So it's like immediately in their lives every day in a way that it wasn't for us, yeah.

Well, thanks for walking us through that, John. That's really helpful context.

So how do we want to do this? I don't think, well, give us our 60-second summary, Andy, and then we can talk about how we want to discuss the film.

Yeah, we know you guys listening to us are here for the zombie stuff, so we want to respect that. So this episode will play out a little bit differently than our normal ones, but I will do that 60-second overview of the film. And John and Brad, correct me if I miss anything crucial. So this is what I would call a war movie. It falls into that genre. But the lens that it takes is it looks at a very specific love triangle in a rural French village, starting right on the eve of World War I. We have three characters. We have Edith, a woman who is married to Francois.

Who is described as a drunken brute.

Yeah, he's a brutish, abusive man. And we have Jean, with whom Edith is either carrying out an affair or wishing that she could carry out an affair with. So we have this love triangle. And when war breaks out, both Jean and Francois, these two rivals for Edith, you might say, are sent to serve at the front in the same military unit. It's a long movie. A lot happens. But what happens? We follow these three characters' experience through the war. Jean and Francois on the front come to a sort of peace with each other as the movie progresses, understanding that they both love this woman. Neither of them is prepared to step back from that love. And Edith, as the movie goes on, becomes really the real victim of this film. As she's captured by the Germans, she's sexually assaulted and she ends up returning home, but with a child born as a result of the assault. So Francois, Jean, and Edith kind of reunite for a bit while the two men are on leave from the war front. They establish a sort of a sort of state of understanding. And as the movie ends, Francois and Jean go back to the front. Francois is killed and Jean basically, he basically goes insane. He has a mental breakdown and he is shipped home from the front because of it. When he returns to the village, he has been consumed by his madness and he sort of, I almost prophesied to the villagers that the dead of the war are going to rise from their graves and return to their loved ones in the village. And so...

To judge them, to see if their death was worth everything that happened.

Exactly. And so we're gonna, I know we're gonna talk about this final scene in depth, so I don't want to go into great detail here, but the movie ends with that scene of World War I's dead returning to the people they loved in life. And we, and you have that confrontation between the dead and the living who sent them to die. And then at the end, John dies, his last act being to sort of, to accuse or condemn the son, I assume sort of a stand in for God or whatever else, for standing by while all of this happened. He passes away and that's a wrap on the film.

When you say the son, you mean the son in the sky.

Oh yes, the son in the sky. Yeah, he looks up to the heavens and he accuses it of standing by and doing nothing to intervene while World War I happened basically.

Yeah, so the plot is complex and I literally think we can smoothly just go through the film, but I think we should each take turns maybe and just say things about this film that we really liked or enjoyed at the beginning, and then together we can talk about the actual zombie rising dead portions of this movie. What do you think about that?

Yeah, that sounds great.

Do you want to start or would you like me to start?

I can jump in. I'll say something. I liked the soundtrack, I guess. The score of this movie is incredible.

Yes, and throughout, right?

Stunningly good. It is mostly classical pieces I recognized, but some that I didn't, and that might be because I'm not well-versed in classical music, or maybe there was some original music composed for this. Brad, do you have any context for us?

I do. So Andy, you watched it on YouTube?

Yes.

John, you watched it on the Internet Archive?

Yes.

I did an A-B test between them. They're different soundtracks.

Oh, no. What? That's interesting because the only music I recognized for sure was Carmina Burana during the Dead Rising.

Okay. There was a lot of familiar classical pieces in the version I watched.

Including the Star Spangled Banner.

Yes. Yes.

Yeah. That was not in my version. Now, I don't know which one is like, who knows? Like, do you know which one is more accurate, Brad? I mean, who knows?

I don't know, but I know the one on YouTube. The reason I did this is because it was playing a song as a piano piece, which I found very striking. So I shazammed it and it was from Killer Tracks. So it's a piece that's like from a music, a modern music library.

Interesting. Okay.

But it also brings up another point that, you know, silent films didn't have sound. And so originally a pianist or an organist would play something that was felt to be appropriate. And as they developed, sometimes the studio would send cues and music that should be played. But other times people would just play classical music with it. So it could be up to the person in the theater who did it. It wasn't always, the music wasn't always the intent of the director. So I think you've experienced something that people back in the day may have experienced.

Interesting.

That is fascinating.

I'm curious because I felt the music worked for me in my version.

Me too. And in knowing that maybe the music was not always intentionally aligned by the filmmaker with what was going on, makes it even more remarkable that the music really hammered home a number of the scenes on this. I can't, this was my single favorite thing in the movie. So I'm, I don't want to beat a dead horse, but like if you, I was stunned by the music. So like, please listeners, fire this up on YouTube and just enjoy the music.

One thing I found striking in the version on YouTube is during some of the battle scenes, they played the War of 1812, which sort of glamorizes war, which is the opposite intent of this film.

Well, I think that there, maybe we can tease this out. I think that there is a strain of patriotic sentiment in this film.

Yes.

That I think the anti-war themes are enriched by the presence of this kind of lesser and contrary theme of patriotic pride. I think it makes for an interesting mix. So, okay, but the music was what I wanted to call out, John. So how about you? What's something that you loved or found striking about this film?

Well, there's two things I want to talk about. Let me start with just sort of the visual storytelling of this movie, which is unlike anything I've ever seen. What I'm really loving more and more as we do this podcast, other than talking to you guys every week, is how much I'm learning about film. So there was an offhand remark. I was listening to The Rest is History the other day, and it was talking about, it was an old episode I had downloaded. It was talking about sort of the Americanization of everything. And just an offhand comment they made, they said, yeah, after the First World War, American cinema really took over for French cinema and sort of the world's view as the center of cinema, which I had never really thought about before. But seeing this film, that really drove home for me. So here's what I want to say, and I'll give one example. So in our movies now, where people talk, the way we tell stories is just very different. We use exposition, we have verbal wordplay. But here, the perfect example is, early on in the movie, Jean Diaz moves to this little town in Provence with his mother. And the point of this movie is to show how happy France is prior to the war. And it's just scenes of people experiencing joy and drinking and dancing. And at one point, Jean, who is a poet, says he's a melancholy poet, is how he's introduced, writes a poem about how beautiful the world is. It's called La Pessefix, or the way I translated it was The Peaceful or The Peaceful Ones. And it's about this sort of bucolic village he lives in. And at night, he reads the poem to his mother to help her sleep. But it doesn't list the words of the poem in cards. It tells the story of the poem with stills and animated scenes of a beautiful country landscape that the poem describes without ever using a word. And I just thought that was just such a revelation for me about how to tell a story when you don't have sound. Did you have that reaction, Andy?

Yeah, absolutely. And he reads that poem again at the end of the film, and you see a repeat of those same idyllic scenes. But it has a much different impact, of course, at the end of the film than it did at the beginning.

Yeah. And then the tinting that Brad brought up early on, as soon as I noticed the tinting, I'm like, well, you've got black and white, you've got no sound, you've got to come up with other ways to tell your story. So have the beautiful things be tinted yellow, and have the dark things be tinted red. I mean, it sounds really ham-fisted, and in a way it is, but it's also so different from how we make movies today. That's a big thing that I really liked about this movie.

To add to your discussion about France being important in film, did you notice at the beginning that there was a name Path? Was it at the top with the credits?

I didn't.

It's on the poster. That was a company formed in 1896, and it's still around today. So that, I believe, predates all of the American studios that we think of as the big studios.

Well, there you go. The rest of history, you guys might know something. I did have another thing I want to bring up, but why don't you take a turn?

All right. So here's another thing that struck me. And this one has maybe pulled us a little closer to our zombie and horror genre. This movie makes frequent use of, I guess I don't know the technique they used for this special effect, but it's a special effect of animated skeletons dancing, which would be superimposed over another scene. It's very unsubtle when this is done, but this is superimposed over the scene when the director is, I think, trying to call to remind us of the ultimate horror that is coming as a result of what you're seeing. So people heading off to war jubilantly will be, there will be skeletons, dancing skeletons will be superimposed over it because we know that they're heading to the bloodbath at the front. And I thought it was a neat special effect. And I don't know enough about the history of special effects to know how they were animating dancing skeletons in 1919. But if either of you guys has knowledge of that, I'd love to hear it.

So first of all, this reminds me of Siskel and Ebert. Do you ever watch that show in the 80s?

Yes.

They had an award show recap where they were, I don't know, it was like 85, 86, and they're talking about what should win the Academy Award for special effects. And Ebert goes on about Young Sherlock Holmes because it was the first scene, one of the first movies that had computer-generated effects. The stained glass jumped to life out of the frame.

Oh, yes.

And Ebert goes, I don't know how they did that. I don't want to know how they did that. It should just win an award. And then Siskel looks at him, well, I'll tell you how they did it. He just laid out that it was computer and like ruined it for him. So if you want me to ruin this for you, I can.

Ruin it for us, but maybe listeners skip ahead like, you know, two minutes.

Well, if you notice, those skeletons are people in black outfits with a skeleton painted white on top of it. So it's superimposed over another image and it's done in a way so the black pretty much disappears and all you can see is the white of the skeleton.

That explains why it looks so smooth. It really looks good.

And they did it a couple of times. There's one where they're about to do a charge and they invoke the Gaul like this mythical creature, this mythical Viking who's going to lead them into battle and he is superimposed as a sort of ghostly figure over the trench with the soldiers. And like for a hundred year old movie, I would say the special effects are pretty good.

Yes, they are not worse than many movies we've seen in the 30s, honestly.

And one of the things I think that helps them is the fact that the film has been restored and cleaned up. Every frame in this is clean and clear and beautiful. It's stunning how good it looks.

Yeah.

All right, John, that was one of mine. So back to you, unless you had more to say about the dancing skeletons.

No, I loved the dancing skeletons and some of these other effects were super. And I don't want to use the word hamfisted because it sounds dismissive, but the other visual storytelling thing that's here is really obvious imagery that's repeated visually without language. So the skeletons are one, there's an owl, right? There's a bird that at the end dies, a bird that lives in a cage in a house and at the end it's dead. And so all of these sort of very, not obvious. I sound like they don't work, they totally work, but they're not subtle and they're 100 percent visual.

Yeah, this is not a subtle film at all. No.

So I have a question. So famously Francois Truffaut in 1970s in an interview said, you can't make, it's definitely, I think the way it's mostly translated is you can't make an anti-war film. But I think what he was saying is that all war movies end up looking like pro war movies. You know what I mean? And I always thought that was an interesting thing to say. Famously Stanley Kubrick disagreed with him and I think that's how we got Full Metal Jacket. But what I wanted to say is, do you think that's true after watching this movie?

So, I didn't know entirely what to make of the finale of this movie. Yeah. Which, so, we're going to talk about the scene in more detail later in this conversation, I think. But at the end, the dead return to judge the living and they let them pass.

Yes.

They judge them worthy, I guess. And that felt very different. I mean, the rest of the film, it has this recurring theme. I mean, the words J'accuse keep showing up on the film itself.

Yeah.

And there's a very stirring scene at the end where John is going from person to person in this village, asking them to account for their actions during the war. That feels very anti-war and very unsparing of people who sent others off to fight. But at the same time, then they all get kind of forgiveness from the dead at the end. And I just didn't know what to make of that. To me, it made it a complicated, it left me with complicated feelings. So I don't know. Is there a pro-war strain in this movie, do you think?

I'm not sure. I wonder how much they were constrained because, I mean, European countries at this point, just because of the state they're in after years of war, are functionally in many ways dictatorship. So maybe the director wasn't able to make a clear statement that like, I accuse the military leadership of sending all these people to their deaths, and so he has to sort of mix it up because he also has a message about the positive effects of war, which is a very Teddy Roosevelt kind of message, which is Francois, who is the drunken brute, goes to war and he comes back a better man, despite everything he experienced. So I don't know, but I thought it was really interesting. I'll say that.

I thought so too. I mean, there's parts of this movie that are a very blatant finger pointing the finger at the French military command. There's a scene early on in the war where you see these war veterans from the previous war excitedly pushing markers around on a map.

Like they're playing a board game.

It's ghoulish. And in those moments, this movie felt very, very anti-war. And I do think that's the overall theme by far. But there is a strain of something else in there. And it does make me wonder if there's a little bit of truth that like it is, this is a topic. It is just difficult not to be on some level, to be swept up in it.

Yeah.

As like an enthusiastic participant.

So I did have a couple of little things. I wanted to mention that I thought we're just sort of weird or funny.

Yeah. Can I mention one last big thing then?

Yeah.

All right. So the other big thing I noticed is the middle portion of this movie really is the story of the horror that Edith experiences. She's not fighting on the front of the war, but she has a miserable life. And there is a scene, and listeners, this is a scene of, I'm not going to describe it graphically, but there is a scene that could have come out of any other horror movie we've watched in this podcast, John, where it is the scene where it is implied that Edith is about to be sexually assaulted by German soldiers, where she is cowering and the shadow silhouettes of soldiers are advancing on her in a way that is very similar to like how shadow silhouettes are used in Nosferatu and other films. That was the most horror movie moment in this film, I think, and not just in the theme, which was awful, but like in the visual way, it was genuinely scary. It suggested the horror to you.

Yeah.

And so the parts of this movie that made me kind of choke up were the parts where Edith has to suffer not only this horror, but when she goes back to her village, like both of the men just treat her with such contempt and ownership.

Yes.

And I wasn't sure what to make of that. This was a movie condemning war. Was this also a movie condemning the fact that Edith just lives a life feeling owned by these men that feel entitled to her? What did you make of it? Was I supposed to just reel in disgust because that's what I did?

Yeah. There's another part of that story, which is her daughter, who Edith says, when my husband Francois comes back and he finds out that she is the child of a German, he will try to kill her. And that's a big plot point that they're trying to avoid. And that was one where I was like, that is crazy because there's this, I think, idea of honor that the movie is trying to address, French honor. And in fact, I think when her father finds out, he does go hang himself.

Yeah, I don't know what he did, but whatever it was, he leaves.

Yeah, he leaves to go avenger. He goes to look for the Germans.

Okay, so that's, and then he dies and comes back as one of the walking dead later.

Whatever happens, he dies off the screen.

Yeah, he can't look at her or her child anymore. This is a person who presumably loves Edith about as much as it's possible to love another person. It's her father, right?

Right.

And their fear that Francois might try to kill the child is born out because Francois does attempt to kill the child. And he is talked out of it, fortunately. But I didn't know, was I supposed to be impressed by these men's code of honor or their quote love for Edith? Or was I supposed to be disgusted by their inhumane treatment of this horribly abused pair of people?

I'm not sure because they do set up John as like the nice guy who loves the daughter and Edith. So I'm not sure.

They set up as John is going to make her French.

Yes. Yeah, the only way she has a chance is if she doesn't appear to be German. So he teaches her French. Yeah.

So I just wondered if that was meant to challenge our understanding of those bucolic opening scenes of the pre-war village.

Right.

Yeah, I don't know. If this is the strain of kind of relationships and morality that existed in the village before the war, it was pretty awful already for some members of that village.

Right. No.

I don't know if the film was asking us to make that connection or not. I think it was, but I don't know.

Well, the other thing, the scene that really choked me up is at one point, the other children in the village are teasing and making fun of Angel, Angelie, this girl. They put a Kaiser helmet on her and they make her pretend to shoot one of their friends because she's an evil German and she runs home crying. And I am pretty sure that the actress playing this small child was actually crying.

I wondered about that, too.

It was pretty bad. Yeah.

Okay. Well, that was my last big thing I wanted to mention, John. So, if you want, I do want to get to that. I mean, we're teasing the big zombie scene at the end. But before then, what are the other little bits that you noticed?

Just little bits. In the trenches, there were these signs that would show up. And one of them was a sign that said to the opera with an arrow. Yes.

What was up with that?

I don't know. But the one I wanted to bring up is there's one that says, Moulin Rouge. And Moulin Rouge is a famous cabaret that was made into a crazy American movie, but literally translated, it means red mill.

My guess is those were names used to help them find their way along the trenches.

I think that's it. But I thought that that use of the term red mill in the middle of a war film was kind of interesting and maybe it was totally unintentional. And it was really referring to the cabaret just as a sort of smirky French joke, but I wasn't sure.

Well, a little thing I noticed as well was there's a scene where John bravely decides to go on a dangerous scouting mission to the German base.

He single handedly sneaks across no man's land and invades the German base. That's the most action packed part of the movie.

It felt like, it honestly felt like an action scene from a movie 40 years later. Because he sneaks, we watch him sneak under a bunch of barbed wire. He creeps into the German trenches, he's avoiding the guards, he plants a bomb, he gets into a fight with a German sentry, and then he sneaks his way back. It just felt very, just the cinematic vocabulary of an action scene felt very familiar to me despite that this is a 100-year-old movie.

Yeah, I agree.

I would add that what's interesting is the realism in the film. When you see a film now, at the end, it says no animals were harmed in the making of this film.

Yeah. Did anyone else worry about that deer at the beginning, by the way?

In the beginning, there's that dead deer on the table, dripping blood as its head is hanging off the table under the floor. The two birds are killed.

Yeah.

Then as John said, they make the child intentionally really cry to get a performance out of her.

Yeah.

Nope. I don't believe it, guys. There were no animals killed, and I won't hear you guys. No animals were harmed, and I will not hear you guys say otherwise.

Fair deal. I always have this question about old movies. They have an owl as an omen early in the movie, and it just sits there and performs for long stretches. I'm sure they just reuse clips and stuff, but how do they do that? How do they get the owl to stand still? Do they tie its feet to the post? I don't have any idea. Yeah, that was crazy.

You probably don't want to know.

I don't want to know. You know what?

You're right.

Let's just move on.

All right. I have one last little thing, John. It sounds like maybe you're moving to the end zombie scene, and that's fine. But I just wanted to say, watching a movie like this and then thinking of some of the other, even kind of trashy movies we watch from the 30s and 40s, I feel like we have, there is a use of shadow that is something special in this film.

Yes.

Shadow and lighting. Do you remember in our discussion of, oh, White Zombie? I'm trying to remember it. A Valley of the Zombies. Our favorite scene from that film was a scene where, I think the character Susan's head is all that you see is surrounded by darkness. This movie plays with lighting in a similar way. And man, I would just love to see filmmakers today rediscover just how effective some just nice, stark lighting and shadow choices can be. Because this movie is full of clever use of shadow and lighting. And it's neat to see, and it's neat to see in some of even those trashy movies that we've been watching in the 30s and 40s.

Yeah. You've just unleashed a brief old man rant. So first of all, I want to agree with you. The White Zombie had a very similar scene that I found evocative, which was the inside the sugar mill with the zombies processing the sugar. And it was all silhouettes, light and dark. And this reminded me of that a lot. So here's my old man rant. James Cameron, in a sort of casual conversation with another filmmaker once said, it took him three days to get the perfect shot on the bow of the Titanic of Kate Winslet with the sunset on her face and everything, because you can't pause the sunset. And it was cloudy one day or whatever. And he said, today I could have just fixed it with CGI. But I thought, yes, but would the scene have had the same character? Maybe, maybe not. I don't know. But I think those constraints and those kind of techniques are really interesting. And I want to learn more about them. That's what this podcast is doing to me, Brad. I want to know more about old silent films with, yeah.

Andy mentioned Nosferatu earlier. Did you mean the 2024 version or the 1922?

Well, actually both. I think the original version was what I had in mind because its use of silhouette is so strong. The modern version also uses shadows and silhouette well, but it feels like it's mimicking the original when it does it.

Right.

Yes, it mimics, but I also feel like it's ignoring CGI and just using shadows on the wall, and it's effective.

Yeah. Oh, definitely. And I like the, that is the most striking part of the modern Nosferatu remake for sure.

Yeah. So just to close up my old man rant, I think often the most interesting things that happen in movies are because of technical constraints that directors and actors work under. So the reason noir films exist is because they had low budgets and they couldn't afford all this lighting. So they use dramatic black and white lighting to make the films darker and it totally worked. The reason Jaws works is because you can't see the whole shark all the time. You know, so anyway, sorry, there's my rant.

There is something thrilling about having to ask the question, how did they get it to look that way?

Yeah.

Today, the answer is very easy. They just tweaked it with a computer. Right. But in this movie and in Valley of the Zombies, how did they get Sudan's face to be highlighted like that against this background of darkness? I don't know. Right. It's thrilling to me to not know the answer to that question.

Yeah, yeah. All right. I think we're done ranting.

That's my last little minor thing about this film before the big zombie sequence. So I don't know. Did you have anything else?

No. Let's just go to the end and talk about the zombie sequence. So first of all-

Will you describe it for us, John?

Yes. So I'll break it down. And I took some quotes. And if you want to stop or interject, I'm going to talk through the zombie film. So-

You bet.

So John comes back to the village. He's mad. And he-

Mad like he's had a mental breakdown. Correct.

He's lost his mind. That's a better way to say that. Or- And he goes around and he sort of hands out invitations to the village. And he has everyone assemble at their home. And he tells the story. He says, you know, one night I was on guard duty on the battlefield. And he tells him this vision he has. It starts as a vision that he's telling them, right? And he says, all your dead were there. All your dearly departed, all of them. And he says it was kind of like a miracle. And then one of the dead soldiers gets up and he, he looks very zombie like to me, to be honest, right? He's got like, he looks gaunt. He's got a headbandage on. He looks pretty roughed up. And this dead soldier comes up and says, friends, the time has come. And when I say says, this is on a card. He's speaking, and this is on a card. Friends, the time has come to find out if our death has done any good. Let us go home to see if they were worthy of our sacrifice. Awaken. And so all the dead rise and start to shamble towards, we don't know where, but it turns out to be the village. But there's two other things I want to point out. First of all, there's this wonderful line that describes the dead as they're walking. And it says, they had soiled faces and eye sockets full of stars. They were rising waves from across the horizon. And then as they march across the landscape, the screen is split between them and like triumphal marches through the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, about soldiers returning home. And those two things are superimposed. And then they finally get to the village. And John tells them, if you have been faithful to your dead, you have nothing to fear. And then he accuses everyone in the room. Like you didn't run your father's business as well as you could have. And you cheated on your husband. And you did this. And then the dead show up. And all of the living want to go see the dead. It is this huge, describe the horde, Andy. I've sort of been using a lot of words, but it is a zombie. It is a horde of the dead. It's what we've been looking for this whole time.

Yeah, I think this, I mean, isn't it funny to say this might be our first true zombie horde back here in 1919?

Exactly what I thought.

One of the things this film plays with is that after experiencing the war, these vibrant living people have been reduced to these ragged, skeletal, filthy zombie looking states. And they are moving in a big column of the dead down the road to the village. And they sort of mass outside the village inn or tavern, much like zombie hordes will surround survivors in modern horror movies, honestly.

Absolutely. And it's a large horde. Like none of the movies we've watched so far have had anywhere the kind of budget or scope to have this many people in a movie. There's hundreds of them.

Yeah.

So there's another line I wanted to say is the living are sort of looking at the dead. There's a John says to all of them, these great dead said, no, actually, it's just a it's just a narration of the movie, but it says these great dead said many things more in the moonlight, mysterious words of the future that the living did not understand, but found soothing, which I thought was amazing.

Yes, agreed. I marked that down as well. Just incredible. But ultimately, though, the dead are peaceful, right?

They are.

It's the scene. It was a little unclear to me what was going on, but the dead have a sort of peaceful joy, and the scene ends with the dead choosing to retreat and go back into death, satisfied and happy that their lives and deaths were not in vain, perhaps? How did you read this?

That's how I read it. And I have a lot of questions about this. So at the end, John says, they tell you the dead have decided that you are worthy, that their deaths were worthy. And the other big theme here, right, which is not one of my pillars, but I found interesting is all of these dead rising from their graves and looking at French society in this way, it is a metaphor for judging the French society that created this war, right? Like that's what is happening. And if I take a movie like the original Dawn of the Dead, just to pick one, that movie is about the dead sort of persecuting a consumerist society for their shallowness and their sort of lack of faith or anything of real substance. And I'm wondering if we've missed something, and it's something I'm going to have in my brain now about zombies as a metaphor that I didn't see before, right? Like zombies as a metaphor for judgment upon society for its evils. You know what I mean?

I love that, John. I think we need to incorporate that in some way into our zombie discussions going forward.

Yeah, I think so, too, and it's interesting. This movie is the most, this has the most bits that I recognize as zombie bits of any movie we've seen so far.

Yes. I was thinking, as I was watching, I was like, I think this is not a zombie movie, and I think it's going to hit more of John's zombie pillars than any of the movies with zombie in the title.

Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. What did you make of that? Do we want to jump to the questions, or did you have more thoughts here?

I don't have more thoughts really. I found that an interesting, thematically ambiguous ending to this film, because remember it's followed by John calling out God for letting this happen.

Yeah. Then the last thing is John takes his poem about the peaceable ones, the peaceful ones, and he throws it away.

He rips it apart.

Yeah. Writes his new poem about how there's nothing good in the world and how could you let this happen.

I don't think that diminishes the power of this film. I think it speaks to the complexity of these issues and the complexity of a French person in 1919's feelings about what just happened. Right? You would have a mix of all of these feelings. Other horror and maybe that is your main feeling. But you would also feel pride and defensiveness and all of the other things as humans we bring into. Situations that are just simply too big to be understood in only one way. Right?

That's such a great way to say that. Like, the First World War, I think the reason, at the beginning, I said there's 25,000 books about how it started. And the reason is nobody really knows. It's complicated and it's not simple. The French are not just the good guys and the Germans just aren't just the bad guys. And it's sort of a story of a society who'd become really complacent and thought it would be kind of interesting to settle their disputes because they hadn't had a big war in 50 years and learn to lessen the hard way that they then forgot 20 years later. But that's another story.

What's interesting in the film is in the film itself, the villagers, they feel judged, but they passed the test.

Yes.

And so in some ways that seems pro-war. But then I think about the review from the London Times where the reviewer said this causes the audience to think. And it makes me think that every audience that went to it in England and France, they all had people who were in the war. And while watching it, they probably were judging themselves. Have I lived my life and earned the death of those of my family who died during the war? And I think that might be the power of the film.

I flashed actually, ironically maybe, to the end of Saving Private Ryan at this end scene. Did you too? Where Matt Damon's older self was sitting on the ground crying, saying, you know, did I deserve it? You know, and was very moved in that same way.

All right. Well, hey, John.

We're all fun and games here in early French cinema from Zombie Strains.

So it feels a little weird to be doing this, but let's go into our Zombie Strains wrap up questions here. Right. Not a zombie movie, gonna score well on our zombie criteria. So here we go, John.

Andy, are you now creating a point system?

Yes, please.

I think we should. We should chart it over time.

Oh, man. Yeah.

John and Brad too. Is there a hero party in this movie?

The reason really because I think a hero party suggests that there's heroes united against the zombies. There's a friendship between Francois and John. But I don't really think they're a hero party because what they're trying to survive is the war, not the zombies.

Yeah. And so we usually ask how does the party of survivors do while Francois and John both die?

Yes.

It is alive. None of that is of course, the result of quote zombie activity, but. Right. Okay. I'm so excited about this one, John. Is there a zombie horde in this movie?

Absolutely, yes. A very recognizable, beat up, like dead looking horde of zombies. There's nobody walking around in like regular street clothes. They're all dressed like shoulder soldiers that have been shot and stabbed and trampled. Yeah.

Yep, absolutely. And I think this movie captures the feel of a horde. It's not just a matter of like having enough money to pay enough extras. But as the villagers are kind of cowering in that tavern and the dead are pushing up against the door, it just captures a feel that only the best zombie movies are going to evoke again, I think.

It was so recognizable as a zombie human terrifying interaction from a modern movie that I thought it was great.

Yeah. So normally we ask how are the zombies destroyed or killed, but they are not really, except I guess the zombies are put to rest by passing their test, right? Right.

Yeah.

So they are sort of destroyed.

In that way, they feel almost more like ghosts.

Yes, exactly.

Like a ghost is defined as a creature that had unfinished business in life and can't let go. I feel like they feel a bit like that too.

Yeah.

Which is interesting because the one special effect they use when the dead rises is they superimpose the dead over the land, so you can sort of see through them briefly, so they're ghost-like.

I wonder about, we should talk about early definitions of the word zombie because it's actually a French word, right? Like, well, let's not go there right now. But I think again, it's the categories aren't clear cut. They're clearly, they feel like a zombie horde to me because there's so many of them moving together. In traditional ghost stories, it's about a ghost or some ghost, but this is like a horde of ghosts.

Yeah.

But they have matter and weight. You could touch them.

Yes.

All right, John, this is a loaded question. Is the world threatened in this movie?

I would say yes twice. It's threatened by the war, but also it's threatened by the zombies. There's a really feel that if the zombies judge them too harshly, that they will bring judgment down upon them. We don't know exactly what's going to happen, but I would say that's here.

I would agree too. It is a tense moment while you wait to see if the people will pass the test or not. What sort of zombie are we dealing with? Do we see any, I guess it's hard to say new strains because this would have been one of the earliest possible strains. But what is the strain of zombie we're dealing with here, John?

We're dealing with reanimated dead. There's no science, there's no voodoo involved. I think the only choice is that it's a mystical horde of reanimated dead creatures. That's what I would say. What do you think?

I agree. This is supernatural undead. The word that springs to mind is revenant, maybe. Yes. You know, a dead being of maybe somewhat vague properties that has unfinished business, like you said earlier.

Right, right.

All right, and then let's go through your four zombie pillars, John. Right. So I imagine you have them memorized at this point, but is there an apocalypse in this movie?

Yes, but not what we would know. The apocalypse is the First World War, right? Now, there's a potential apocalypse that the zombies are going to kill everybody in this village. But I'm going to say yes, there is an apocalypse. It has that vibe. The whole movie has an apocalypse vibe.

Yes, absolutely. I'd agree with that. Is there contagion in this film?

No, it's just if you got killed in the First World War, you can come back as a zombie. So I'll say no.

I love the open-endedness of your dead are returning to you, by the way. It's just kind of a delicious, deliciously vague statement. Are there tough moral choices in this film?

I think it's full of them. And as it regards the zombies and everything else in the movie, I think that's part of the nuance of the movie. It's should I go to the front? Should I not go to the front? How should I treat Edith? How should Edith behave? Like, a lot of them are horrible, but I think the movie is full of them as they regard to the living and the dead. So I'm going to say yes to that one.

And lastly, do loved ones turn against you in this movie?

Absolutely yes, right? There's a horde of... Every zombie is an individual that somebody in the village knows, and they're scared when they first see them. Yeah, for sure.

So I gotta say, I think this movie... This movie hit three of our four criteria. I think that is a record.

I think so far. I have a question about George Romero, right? Because it's all... We're all leading up to George here, in one way or another. Now, zombie movies continued past George Romero and past Night of the Living Dead, but that's sort of our north star at the moment. So there's a famous story of George living in, I think it's the Bronx, and going to the library where you could check out movie reels and watching movies. And of course, New York is filled with theaters, and there's one story, maybe apocryphal, where George goes to check out a movie and somebody had it checked out, and he would always check to see who it was, and often the last person to check a movie out would be Martin Scorsese. So there's this sort of competition between them. But I wonder if George saw this when he was young. I got it. I want to know. I haven't looked it up, but I want to know if he saw it.

That zombie horde at the end is such a modern looking zombie horde. This movie has to have been viewed by the fathers of the modern zombie genre. It just has to have been.

Yeah. And I think that one reason questions like this are interesting, because when we're talking about the 40s and the 50s, when George Romero and Martin Scorsese are young, the only way you could see a movie is in the movie theater or on the TV. I don't know that they're putting J'accuse on the TV. So seeing movies that aren't popular, or even ones that are, is really hard, and that's why I'm so curious.

All right, John, last couple of quick questions here. Would you and I survive in this zombie world? And this is a loaded question too.

Yeah. I think I would die in World War I and become a zombie.

Yeah. Same here. There's no way I make it through World War I alive.

Did you notice during the war scenes that in the beginning, they started off in sort of formal uniforms, and then later they end up in uniforms with helmets, and then they end up with gas masks, as you can see, the worsening of the war?

I think that they, and those are, I think, all very realistic. I think the French, the French notoriously marched into the First World War wearing like colorful uniforms with cavalry charges and stuff, like, just like, and then encountered machine guns, and then got smart and started to do things like dig trenches and wear helmets. But that happened over the course of the war. So I think that's actually really realistic too.

Yeah. All right. And then lastly, our big question, do we recommend this movie to listeners of this podcast and to zombie fans in general?

So do you want to answer first or would you like me to?

All right. All right. You can throw me under the bus. I'll answer first. So this is a great film. Yes. It is. I am glad I watched it. I'm a better person for having watched it. I think you should watch this film. I think you, whoever you are, you should go and watch this film. That said, it is a demanding film. It is. I mean, we haven't we haven't made complaining about this movie because really it's a great work of art. But it is very long. It is slow moving. It asks a lot of you, especially if like me, you're used to, you know, whatever, Iron Man busting in every seven seconds with quips and one liners, right? Right. So you should watch this movie. I think you should challenge yourself to watch this movie because it is a challenging viewing. For Zombie fans specifically, yes, you should watch this movie. You should watch the last 15 minutes of this movie. If you're not going to follow my advice and watch the whole film, 100%, you should watch the last 15 minutes of this movie. It's on YouTube. Go watch it. It's the first Zombie horde we've seen. It's great.

I agree 100%. And one thing, like I said this earlier, but I recently, in the last year, even before we started this podcast, this, I think it's Fathom Events, has been bringing back old movies to theaters. And I've been able to see some movies. I saw, I think it started when I went and saw Jaws in the theater. And I think that was the first, it's one of my favorite movies. And I could not tell you if I ever saw it in a theater before. And then I saw Princess Mononoke in the theater. And I sort of texted our friend group, Brad, at the time, like, I think I want to go to more movies. Like, I signed up for the Michigan Theatre newsletter and all this stuff. And so that's coincided with starting...

The Michigan Theatre being a theatre that runs old movies.

Yes, in the town where I live, there's a theatre, the Michigan Theatre, that plays old movies and new movies. But I just got excited about movies again. And then this podcast started. And then I come across a discovery, like this old silent masterpiece. And I'm just really jazzed about movies. And that's where I'm at. And I loved watching this movie.

One of the challenges to watching this film is, we are used to watching with two screens. Meaning you watch the movie in front of you, and you dip down to look at your phone. But you can't do that with a silent film when you have to read cards. Because you don't know when those inner titles pop up. So you really have to focus.

And I found I was so engaged in the story that I wanted to focus on it. Now, I did have to take a break. I think I watched it in three parts. I did not watch it at a stretch. I will admit that.

And at least the version I watched is broken in to three parts. So that makes for... And they're each about an hour long. So that makes... You can do this, listeners. You can do this. And you should do this. Please go do this.

Yeah, I like that. Well, we've just watched an amazing movie, Andy.

Yes, I have absolutely no idea where we're going next. I am... Yeah. Brad, do you want to tell us?

We are continuing to watch films we missed. So we're going to 1936.

All right.

And here is the poster. This will be our first film with Boris Karloff.

Well, this is... This movie is The Walking Dead, but not the Walking Dead you're thinking of. John, why don't you describe this poster?

I will. So it is a poster. It says Karloff across the top. Pictured is Boris Karloff's giant bald head, sort of filling the frame. You know, it's pasty white with sort of a green background, and standing in front of his face is a woman. She looks like, for lack of a better word, like a flapper. She has short blonde hair. She's wearing like a slinky red dress.

She is the tallest, thinnest woman I have ever seen in my life.

She's unrealistically tall, and it says, The Walking Dead in red letters, and underneath that it says, Warner Brothers, which I believe makes this our first Warner Brothers movie. So, okay.

Yeah, I'm excited.

And to whet your appetite, it's directed by Michael Curtis, who is a very good director. He did many Errol Flynn films. So not having seen this, I'm hopeful this is a high quality production.

Maybe we'll get another, I walked with a zombie situation.

Or else we're dealing with a famous last words situation.

Ooh, yes, possible. All right, we'll see you next week, folks, for The Walking Dead, but not the TV show. 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.