Welcome to Zombies 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, producer Brad. Hello, Andy. How are we doing this week?

Hey, John. Hey, Andy.

Hey, John. Hey, Brad. Doing great.

We have an exciting movie this week. Can I say that? And here's why I find it exciting. It is The Frozen Dead from 1966. And the reason I was so excited about it is, while I was watching it with all the schlocky stuff that's in it, I was like, yes, this is what I was expecting when producer Brad invited me to do a zombie horror movie podcast. It's got a severed head on a table and these arms sticking out of a wall. And it's just bonkers and fun in a way that I was hoping all the movies would be. So I don't know how you felt about it, Andy, but that's what I wanted to know.

This is a pretty delightful movie.

Yeah, yeah, it has some set pieces. I think what I'm discovering is that over time, your brain sort of filters out all the boring stuff, you know? So like, there is some boring stuff in this movie, which we will not burden you with. But the memorable bits are those wonderful bits that you remember from old Shockey movies.

So is it safe to say this is the only movie that you physically own?

It is. So apologies to our dedicated listeners. This is not available to stream. So Andy and I bought it on DVD and watched it. So we won't be doing that a lot, but we really wanted to for this one. And also, the second, and we'll see how many we're going to do, Brad doesn't tell us what our next movie is going to be. It's our second in a series of zombie movies about Nazi zombie.

Yeah, but the big question is, will this movie mention Germany or Nazis, or will it continue to refer vaguely to a European country?

Exactly. No, it's pretty explicit. So we moved to 1966, taking a little jump, and it's much more Nazis as horrific creatures than the last one.

All right. So hey, before we start, this is the part where I talk about anything that might be upsetting to hear about or any troublesome content in the movie. This movie is pretty devoid of anything too shocking or transgressive, I would say, John. It's a pretty schlocky film, but unlike some of the other ones we've covered, maybe because we're in the late 60s now and not in the 30s and 40s, a lot of that sort of ambient background racism and other stuff is not as present in this movie. There are a few exceptions that we can talk about once the movie gets going, but nothing too shocking in this one, folks. So unless severed heads and severed limbs, I guess, there's a lot of that in this movie.

And we're expecting that if you're watching zombie movies and listening to a podcast about them, that you're okay with those things. So just to be clear.

That you, in fact, might demand those things.

Yeah, exactly.

All right. So Brad, will you talk a little bit about this movie's release?

The Frozen Dead is a British film released in the UK in 1966 and in the US in 1967. It was given an X certificate in the UK, meaning it couldn't be shown to anyone under 16. In the US, it received a motion picture production code and was approved for general release. There isn't any reliable box office info for this film, so I can't tell you how it did. The film was written and directed by Herbert J. Lader, who also wrote and directed It.

Can we talk about It for a second?

We can.

We don't have to go into details, but so first of all, if you're going to Google this, it's It with an exclamation point. It is the only other movie this studio released, and here's the one-liner on it, Andy. It is about an archaeologist who revives the Golem of Prague. Wouldn't you want to watch that movie? Yes. I actually want to bring that up later. I read that description. I'm like, let's watch that one too. Why not?

The Golem of Prague might count sort of as a zombie adjacent for sure.

I actually want to talk about that when we get into the zombie bits here, so we'll come back to that.

Okay. All right. The only other movie like that, did you watch them when you were kid?

Yes, them with an exclamation point.

Also with an exclamation mark about giant radioactive ants. Giant radioactive ants. That was a glorious age of film when they just used those words with exclamations.

Yes, absolutely. Sorry, Ben, I interrupted.

It's all right. Well, Golden Star Productions, as you said, only did two films, them and The Frozen Dead. And in the US, these films were bundled as a double feature. So it sounds like you guys would have been very happy to go watch this on a Saturday.

For sure.

Dana Andrews is the star, he's Dr. Norberg. He's best known for his roles in the 40s in both film noir and western films. One of his famous films was Laura, directed by Otto Preminger. Anna Polk plays Jean Norberg. She was also in the British zombie film, The Earth Dies Screaming. And if all goes to plan, we'll watch that in season two of our podcast. Alan Tilvern plays Essin, and he was the voice of RK. Maroon in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. And the last name of note in the cast is Edward Fox, who plays prisoner number three, who we come to learn is Norberg's brother and Jean's father. He was in The Jackal in 1973. He played The Jackal and he was M in Never Say Never Again, which was Sean Connery's eighties return to James Bond.

Yeah, he is a that guy of the seventies and eighties. He was also in A Bridge Too Far and Gandhi. So I saw him and I'm like, oh, I recognized him immediately, but this is an early role for him. So he's playing a shuffling zombie. And I just, he just jumped out so clear to me as M from Never Say Never Again. It was a bit of a contrast.

Do you think he looks back at this role as his most treasured prize?

Well, according to IMDb, he's still alive. So we could ask him. He probably doesn't remember it. He was born in 1937, but yeah.

If you're listening, get in touch with us.

Please.

I want to provide a little bit of historical context for this movie. I want to go through a couple of what was going on in the headlines and the box office. But I also then have some specific cultural themes that were burbling in the background when this movie came out. So this year, 1966, the SR-71 Blackbird goes into service, a very space-age sort of aircraft, I would say. Batman and Star Trek made their TV appearances. The Beach Boys released Pet Sounds. The Fermi nuclear reactor in Michigan has a partial meltdown, which I would like to read more about because that sounds amazing. And Ronald Reagan is beginning his ascent as he's elected governor of California. And then Jack Warner sells Warner Brothers to Seven Arts Productions, which will be apparent in the credits of this film.

Interesting.

So there's a few things that I think aren't evident just from the date. These things sprung to mind. First of all, this movie is about Nazis who escaped justice in World War II.

Right.

Basically stories about Nazis who evaded justice and like fled and blended into the background of different countries, whether it was in South America or in the United States. Those sorts of rumors started almost the day World War II ended.

Yes.

And although World War II was quite a while in the past.

Well, 20 years, I mean, 20 years ago for us is roughly 9-11. So, you know, it's not that far in the past for these people.

Exactly. And it wasn't that long. The vast majority of Nazi war criminals who were imprisoned were released in the 50s. And so I think, well, at least I wonder if there was a lot of this sort of pretty easy, I think, to imagine, that a lot of horrible people had maybe blended into. Maybe they were your neighbors now, right? There's a little bit of that Cold War paranoia. And so I think people were probably primed to imagine that there might be some faithful Nazis still out there, which is the centerpiece of this movie.

Yeah. And what's interesting is, I don't know if this is the first instance of that trope. I'm guessing probably not. We'd have to do some real archival research to find out. But it became a popular trope in movies and TV shows and lasted for a long time. You know, 1978's The Boys from Brazil, starring Gregory Pack, of all people, was about a plot to genetically create a new Hitler. You know, so it was like, this was a major movie trope for a long time in movies, which is interesting.

And on top of that, I don't want to, again, John and Andy's history podcast will have to be a different show, but I think there was some knowledge of things like Operation Paperclip and other ways that the Allies recruited Nazi thinkers and scientists after the war to gain the benefits of their knowledge and their research. I wondered, watching this, if the character of Dr. Roberts in this movie, we can talk about him a little bit later, is meant to be a little bit of a stand-in for, like, the Allies maybe collaborating with the Germans, albeit with a certain amount of naivety.

I'm super curious about this, because just to expand on that for people who don't know, a lot of the American rocket program, we're in 1966, so we are starting to launch orbiting rockets into space, and that program doesn't happen, certainly not as quickly as it did, without some of the Nazi scientists we recruited, basically gave a pass to and let live in the United States, right?

So, I think that's just in the background when you're watching this movie. The last thing I want to mention, I don't know the history of the use of cryogenics as a feature in science fiction films, but I just want to point out, in the 60s, home refrigeration probably still felt somewhat exotic.

Yes.

It hadn't really become widespread until the 40s or even the 50s. And I just wonder if the possibilities of freezing stuff were in the air. I will say, when it comes to cryogenic freezing, so this movie is about cryogenically frozen Nazis.

Yes.

So, it was the 60s that this idea of freezing a human body to preserve it and then revive it later kind of entered the mainstream. There is a book in 1962 that I think is the first to actually propose the idea. And the year that this movie came out, 1966, was the year that the first person was cryogenically frozen. He later thought out and they had to bury him, so it didn't work. It probably felt like an exciting and maybe a little bit transgressive science possibility at the time. Cool. That's a good idea. That's my really long monologue about the history stuff. Do you have anything to add, Brad or John?

Don't forget Captain America.

Oh, what is Captain America doing at the time?

He was cryogenically frozen, right?

Oh, of course. Yes.

Yeah.

But not intentionally. Right, right, right.

Yeah. I forgot that. So, yeah.

Okay. Good one.

Okay. Well, can I give a brief summary of this movie?

Please.

And the plot? So, this movie centers around the work of one, Dr. Norberg, who is a German scientist living in England. Early in the film, he's visited by sort of two Germans, Lubeck and Tirpitz. The broad strokes of what he's doing is, he has frozen around 15 Nazis and has them in his lab, and he has been conducting experiments, thawing them out and trying to get them to... They are supposed to be the cream of the Nazi leadership, and he is trying to thaw them out and basically recreate Nazi leadership in 1966. This plot is thrown into a little confusion when his niece, Jean, shows up with her friend, Elsa, and he has an assistant, like a lab assistant, like an Igor-like assistant named Essin, who further complicates this thing by murdering Elsa and taking her head and mounting it on a table so they have this disembodied living head of Elsa, and then things get even weirder. Is that a good summary of what we're doing here?

It is indeed. Hey, John, so imagine you are a young actress in the prime of her life and you're auditioning for this.

I had the same thought.

Yeah. So there's two roles. You can be the romantic lead heroine or you could be the head on the table. And it's like, well, good news. We've selected you for a role in this film. Like, which one would seems like the better career maker?

If you want to tally the numbers, Anna Pollock, who played the romantic lead, she had 39 film credits, and Kathleen Brack, who played the head on the table, had 21.

Oh, there you go.

Okay, yeah. I mean, there's just not a lot of range that you can evoke when you're ahead on the table, although she manages some.

She does manage some, yes.

We'll get to that. I'd like to jump into this movie here, but let's take a quick moment to just review the poster. The poster, I'll describe it. The poster I'm looking at, it's blue and white. It has a big tagline, frozen alive for 20 years. Now they return from their icy graves to seek vengeance. Yes. And so I have to say, this is not the first poster that is, it is promising a slightly different movie than it delivers. And I always wonder, when you're making the poster and you have to change the plot to sound it more exciting, if there's any sort of self-awareness that sinks in at that time. But the Nazis don't really, well, I don't know, we'll get into it.

We'll get into it. I do have one last production question, which I forgot to ask. Is this movie originally in black and white and colorized? Are we watching it colorized?

It's a color film, but it looks, I couldn't verify, but Wikipedia says in the US it was often shown in black and white because it was cheaper to reproduce in black and white. But it did start off in color.

Okay, all right. So I wasn't sure, because I'd seen some black and white clips and I was like, okay, but this is in color. And it didn't look like a terrible colorization job. It looked plausible, so I wasn't sure.

So, hey, I'm going to jump in, John. I'll be walking us through this movie. And I just want to tell you up front, I think the most interesting zombie stuff happens at the beginning of this movie and at the end of the movie. So I'm going to focus my walkthrough on those parts. And we're going to skip like a fairly uninteresting middle section of this movie. Listeners, you'll just have to go discover that on your own, I guess.

We should note it is a 95-minute movie, too. It's not one of the 60-minute ones we've been watching. Yes, that is true, too.

This is a... I had the thought that this... I personally felt this would have been a better 60-minute movie than a 90-minute movie, but I guess we can get into it. All right, so the movie opens to some very frantic title credit music over some painted scenes. And I will say, I don't know if this movie ever states the year that it takes place, but my understanding is that it seemed to be set in roughly the same time that it was being filmed, like it was supposed to be kind of contemporaneous. Is that your sense?

Yeah, they said at one point, these Nazis have been frozen for 20 years.

20 years, yeah, so late 60s. So we open with a strange scene. A man, we're going to later learn his name is Carl Essen. All my notes call him Carl. I think his last name is Essen, though. So he is leading a group of chained men across a yard into an English country manor house. And these men are sort of fumbling around, and they're clearly in some kind of distress, although it's not really clear what we what you will know when you watch further into the movie is that we're actually getting our first look at this movie, Zombies. Right. So we see them sort of shuffling around, they're chained together, and a couple of them try sort of try to resist, but they're easily kind of manhandled back into line. The overseer Carl here is barking some words in German, which I know are totally everyday normal German words, but as an American, I associate them with World War II Nazi movies, like Schnell and Javel and things like that.

Yes.

So I think we're being telegraphed that like, I think the word Nazi is already on our mind as we're watching. John, do you have any thoughts on this first glimpse of our zombies?

So they seem very zombie-like, first of all. The movie never calls them zombies, and I don't think they're actually dead. But they shuffle and feel a lot like the early shuffling zombies. And one of them is violent and attacks Carl the Handler, and it almost looks like he's going for his neck trying to bite him or something. So these seem, maybe it's just my mind projecting backward, these seem like the shambling zombies that we encounter in like Dawn of the Dead kind of thing. You know what I mean?

They're at least closer to it. We are later going to get an explanation of why that specific zombie is aggressive, whereas the others are less so, but yeah.

And that would be Prisoner No. 3, played by Edward Fox.

Who is the brother of Dr. Norbert. We may or may not get into that convoluted plot, but that is...

Yeah, there's a lot of convoluted plot. I'm going to try to skip this over here. So anyway, Carl goes inside. He locks these, again, we don't know they're zombies yet. At this point in the movie, even though I knew this was a zombie movie, I wasn't entirely sure what I was looking at. But he goes inside the manor, and he meets up with a scientist-looking guy in a movie scientist-looking lab. This is Dr. Norberg. They're both speaking in German accents. This lab is sort of a hodgepodge of mad scientist lab props, I would say.

Yes.

And they are having a conversation. They are kind of eagerly awaiting the arrival of somebody else. They are waiting for a General Lubeck to arrive from Berlin. And we start to get a sense of who these people are because one of them says, nobody's more exacting than our ex-general. So you do the 20-year math there, and you can kind of guess that these guys are former Nazis, maybe current Nazis, and they're going to be visited by one of their superiors from the war. Any thoughts on this stuff, John?

Well, so I got two vibes here that were really strong. First of all, there is a strong Frankenstein, mad doctor, assistant vibe to these two characters, right? There is something of Frankenstein in this movie, and I wanted to talk about that, especially when we get the head on the table later. This feels closer to mad scientist Frankenstein than it does to sort of zombie hordes kind of thing. And the reason I bring that up is the first time Brad and I ever talked about even doing this podcast. We were talking about what we'd watch, and I just made an off-end comment. I think, Brad, you said, well, will we start with Frankenstein? And I said, well, Frankenstein is not a zombie, he's a golem, right? We were just talking about the golem of Prague. So the vibe here has that Frankenstein vibe, and these zombies seem like zombies in other ways, but in some ways they feel like Frankenstein's monster. Do you know what I mean?

Totally, and this is a pretty service level thing, but if you Wikipedia this movie, it'll be described as a science fiction movie. So I think we're at a time when zombie was at least as evocative of science fiction as it was of horror. Whereas today, I think if you see a zombie on a poster that clearly telegraphs you're going into a horror film. But there's a lot of like a lot of the equipment in his lab. It's just very lots of blinking lights and dials, like things that evoke science fiction, I think a little bit more than horror.

Yeah. And the one actually, a lot of these movies we've watched so far, and I don't want to give this movie too much credit, but there's a relationship between Carl S and the Assistant and Dr. Norberg, where there is a little tension between them. It comes out that Lubeck is visiting because he had a success in throwing out his zombie subjects and Carl Essen reported it to the General Lubeck, but Norberg didn't think they were ready to report it. So it's almost like Carl is driving this project forward against the wishes of Norberg in some ways. So there's a tension between them that exists throughout the movie. It's actually kind of an interesting relationship.

I agree. There's a sense that maybe Carl exaggerated Norberg's progress. But so they're discussing here and over the course of a couple of minutes of dialogue, we start to kind of figure out what's going on here. So they have at least one frozen body down here. And it's going to be a little while before we put all the pieces together. But the zombies in this movie are being pulled from an idea I don't think that we've seen in the movie so far, John, which is this cryogenic freezing. Let's hear an audio clip of Norberg and Carl. Before we really know what their plan is, talking about the work they're doing here in this lab.

When an organism starts to defrost, it cannot be refrozen without destroying the cells. You know that.

But Miller has been frozen for over 20 years, ever since the war ended.

20, 10, one year. The principle governing the decomposition of an organism still applies. You ought to know that by now.

So this is where if you're doing the math, you're piecing together maybe what they're starting to do. Have they frozen a Nazi soldier here? But a couple of key points here about their process. Like once you start, the idea here is that you can freeze these corpses, but once you start thawing them out, you can't reverse the process. And so Dr. Norberg has basically one chance to revive them correctly as they thaw, and that's going to be a key plot point later. There is one more audio clip. I know we just heard one, but I want to play one more where they are talking about the impending visit from General Lubeck.

I can't understand this sudden request of Lubeck to see us revive one of the frozen bodies. I'm afraid at best Miller will turn out like one of those seven failures.

You call Joseph a failure?

Well, he's certainly not a success.

Yeah, so that's where the tension comes in.

Exactly. You hear some of that in conversation. So between these conversations and some other stuff, here's what we learn what's going on. They've got a dozen or so frozen Nazis in their basement lab here. They have been thawing them out for some time. And their goal is not to create, I guess, what we would call mindless zombies, the way that some of our other zombie masters in past movies have done. But their goal is to revive these people in the prime of their physical and mental health, right? To bring them fully back to life. Right. But we also learn that they really haven't had a success so far.

Right, and the seven or so zombies we saw earlier, the seven people who are not... They are sort of mindless. They'll get into it more. But these are the first seven thought out Nazis they were trying to make work that didn't quite work.

Exactly. They've had the only one that could be maybe described as a success. We're going to learn more about him later. You hear them kind of expressing doubt of like, well, is that really... Could you really call that a success? We'll meet him in a few minutes here. So the body is thawing out though. It's time to try and revive it. And the general wants to be there when it happens. So at this point, they talk about receiving orders from the party in Berlin. I am assuming they're talking about, like, sort of some sort of a shadow Nazi organization and not, like, the German government.

Yes, I think that's the case.

Okay, because that... Okay. I was confused, but then I'm not the sharpest movie watcher. So the general does arrive with his companion or assistant, Tirpitz. And he is very eager. He is under the impression that Norberg's been able to successfully revive Nazis, and he wants to be there when the first of an army is revived. They are met at the door by Joseph, who they had described as one of their, like, I guess, a failure, but maybe a partial success. You know, did you want to describe Joseph?

Yeah, he is the butler or servant of this house. He has a shaved head. He seems to know what's going on. Like, he walks around, he can answer the door, he can accept directives, but he doesn't really speak. And his knowledge seems to be limited to, like, the layout of the house. He seems somewhat but not entirely mindless.

Yeah, so you can see why this would be a dubious success if you're trying to revive, you know, the cream of the Nazi leadership, I guess.

And I think we found out that Joseph was just, he was only frozen for a short time. He's not one of the original Nazis. He was frozen for a brief time.

Yeah, there's a little, there's some complication there, but it's not that important. But here is where we hear General Lubeck, who is really the driving villain of this story, even though everybody here is morally compromised, of course. General Lubeck kind of describes a master plan that even Norberg and Karl weren't entirely aware of its scope.

I can wait. I've waited 20 years for this moment. I can't tell you what it means to me and the party.

I have a good idea.

Oh, no, you don't. But I will tell you. It's time you knew.

But General...

Hear me out, please. It's something you must know. Your achievement will mean the revival of over 1,500 of the elite of the Nazi Party who had been frozen and hidden away all these years in caves, mostly in Germany, but also in France and even in Egypt.

1,500?

Did you think the 12 you have put into suspended animation by your instant freeze method by the only ones? Oh, no, Herr Doctor.

Ooh, the plot thickens.

So there's our master plot. Norberg is, if he can successfully do this, they're going to replicate this on 1,500 elite Nazis scattered around the world. That doesn't seem like a really scary number of Nazis, but I guess any number of Nazis is-

It reeks of overconfidence, doesn't it?

Yes, it does.

I guess it's historically accurate in that sense. So what we learn here is that, so it's clear now, Norberg is a Nazi, a secret Nazi, so is Carl. And at the end of World War II, all these Nazi soldiers volunteered to be frozen with the hope of being revived later when I guess- They don't actually describe what they're going to do once they're revived. I mean, obviously, world domination is the plan. But I would be curious to get a little more detail than that, but we don't get it. So, but Lubrick is frustrated here because what he learns in the scene is that Norberg hasn't really successfully raised somebody correctly back to life from their cryogenic state. And there's- I don't have a good audio clip of this because it is conveyed across several conversations, but I thought the science behind this is pretty interesting. I mean, by science, I mean movie Hollywood science here. Yeah. Here's what's been happening. Dr. Norberg can revive the bodies no problem. So he can bring them back no problem as a sort of empty animal shells, but he can't restore their mental capacity. And the way he describes it is that the brain is full of different sections, each of which has a certain memory or a certain experience in it. But he's only ever really able to revitalize one of those sections, which means that when you revive, your entire mental state is dominated by that memory or that emotion. And so he sees this when he takes Lubeck to see sort of the failures, which are the zombies we saw earlier. And this is a really interesting scene, John, as they're in the kind of the little dungeon, meeting each of these failures in turn. Do you want to describe like this scene a little bit?

It's interesting. It's almost sort of like they're introducing like members of a family or something. And so as they introduce each of the revived Nazis, they say the name and they say, you know, he's trapped in this moment where he was under fire or something like that. And so he sort of describes the moment in which each of them are trapped. And I think there's one who's just counting, but they all, they all look like they have like OCD and can only engage in like one behavior. And that's all they can do.

They're all just reliving a moment and mining it over and over and over, whether it's crying and, and one of them, who turns out to be Dr. Norberg's brother, his memory was of a moment of violence. So he's aggressive.

So that's the violent one.

He's the violent one. I thought this was an interesting idea, John. Yeah. At some point, zombies and brains are going to become really closely linked. But I don't know, and you correct me if I'm wrong, I don't know if we've seen a lot of brain stuff in these movies so far.

The only one I can recall is from our last one, Revenge of the Zombies, where he points out that, as long as their brain functions, they can keep going. And that's the only one from what we've watched so far of the older movies that I can recall.

Yeah. So at some point, I mean, we have already seen a little bit of a shift from zombies as a purely supernatural type of being created by supernatural means by a sorcerer to zombies as sort of a scientific achievement, right, that a scientist brings into being. This movie, although it does have some supernatural elements that, in my opinion, lessen the movies, don't make a lot of sense. But generally speaking, these are science zombies, like purely science zombies.

Agreed. Yes.

So Lubeck's mad about that, and you mentioned, John, that they introduced these failures like Family. And I did think this was kind of interesting. These aren't the disposable, you know, human chattel that most of the zombies in past movies were.

No, they have names.

They have names. They have personalities. And they mean something. I mean, they're all Nazis, so they're bad. But they mean something to the Nazis who are trying to revive them. Obviously, one of them is Norberg's brother. But these are all... It's sort of suggested that some are all of these. You know, they serve together in the war. So that had a surprising impact in my mind on like this, the general tone of this film. Just having the Zombies be not loved ones exactly, but pretty close to loved ones that they're trying to bring back.

Right. And there was one that is a loved one. So we keep saying Dr. Norberg's brother, but when we get introduced to Dr. Norberg's niece, we're talking about her father, right? Prisoner number three. So there is a familial connection here, which I think becomes important.

So the next thing that happens is... So we now know the plan. We know what they're up to. Norberg still has some work to do before he can do this process perfectly, but he's under a lot of pressure to speed up and figure out how to revive these Nazis. At this time, the movie changes, and we cut to two young ladies arriving at the manor. One is Jean. This is Dr. Norberg's niece, who has lived with him, but knows nothing of the real nature of his experiments. She knows he's a scientist. She does not know he's a former Nazi. And in fact, I thought this is kind of interesting, these Nazis are suggested that they told all their loved ones that they were the victims of the Nazis when they were, in fact, the Nazis in control. So like, I think Jean, the niece, thinks her uncle was in a concentration camp as a victim.

Okay, I think you're right.

When he was there as an overseer. So, all that to say...

And Jean's also been told to stay away from the dungeon lab. She doesn't know what is there.

Yes. So all that to say, Jean is like, you know, a young innocent here who's arriving at the scene, and she's brought her friend Elsa. Elsa is an American and a friend that Jean met at university, and she's here for a visit. And she is here earlier than planned. The Nazis in their basement don't realize that she's here. And John, would this not be the most incredible surprise upon coming home from college for vacation? Is it come in, you get there a day early, and your family is reviving frozen Nazis in the basement? I don't know. What might run through your mind?

Yeah, forget about like your dad has a new girlfriend or something when you come home from college. Like, yeah, your uncle is actually an evil Nazi scientist, which is quite a jump. Yes, but they don't know that yet.

No, no. So the Nazis adapt and they still they're working very hard to keep Jean and Elsa in the dark about what's going on. But Jean and Elsa move in, they stay the night. And while that's been happening, we've been learning what Norberg needs to do in order to to perfect his zombie raising scheme. He needs a live brain to study.

Right.

And he specifically is thinking he's going to get an ape brain.

Right.

But John, do you want to describe the eager alternate suggestion that Karl makes?

So just to put it in context, Karl is kind of on the hook here, right? Because he is the one who summoned Lubeck to come check their progress by telling him they had this huge success. So he is sort of realizing he's got to do something to push this project forward. So he suggests they get a human head that they can keep alive and study that brain. Now at this point, does he actually suggest they get Elsa's head or does he not suggest it?

He doesn't, but I guess it's a pretty suggestive scene, because where is he going to find the head of a fresh person here, right?

Yes.

So that night, Gene and Elsa, still oblivious to what's going on, go to sleep, and Karl sneaks in and he strangles Elsa. John, do you have any thoughts about this scene?

He sedates her first and then strangles her. It's a little creepy, so, you know, we were talking about, is there a trigger warning here? Like, it kind of, he's a total creeper. He hides in a room, sedates her and then strangles her, but they don't show it to us in detail.

We do get kind of a creepy shot of hands closing in on a sleeping Elsa's throat, which I thought was a nice little creepy bit. So he strangles Elsa, he brings her down to the basement, and then he sets it up to look like he frames the Zombies for Elsa's murder.

And specifically Norberg's, Dr. Norberg's brother. He frames him as the murderer, because he's the violent one.

Yep. So Norberg comes down and he sees Elsa's body in the lab. A zombie is standing right next to her and Carl is like, your brother, your zombie brother just murdered Elsa. I just came in right as he was finishing strangling her. And so it's a bummer that Elsa was dead.

But well, we're here since it happened.

I mean, let's hear an audio clip of what we hear when they encounter Elsa's body.

Doctor, there is your live head. You only have about two or three minutes left.

This is impossible, Carl. This is murder. It has to be reported.

Would you want the police snooping around? Time is slipping by, Herr Doctor. Soon her brain will deteriorate.

I can't.

What do you think General Lubek would say if he knew you had this opportunity and rejected it?

Right. So it's Carl putting pressure on Doctor Norberg to take Elsa's brain and continue its experience.

So Norberg reluctantly agrees that while they've got Elsa's dead body there, they have a couple minutes before her brain dies to chop off her head and preserve it. So he does. The science has to come first sometimes.

That's right.

So that's the end of the first act of this movie, and it's been a lot. Before we move into, I'm going to breeze over the middle section here. But John, do you have any thoughts on what we've watched so far? Is this feeling like a zombie movie to you so far?

It really isn't. We have zombies, but they're chained up, they're not really active, they don't really do anything, and certainly Elsa's reanimated head does not feel very zombie to me. But she does turn kind of blue and sort of look a little bit like a zombie, but I'm not really feeling it.

I can't wait to describe when we get our first good look. The movie teases us for a while with getting a look at Elsa's head, which is in this little head.

They keep it in a wooden box.

Like prominently in the middle of their lab, which is a problem. But, okay, so having secured their head, it's looking good for Norberg. He's going to experiment on Elsa's still living brain and figure out how to revive these Nazis. The movie then shifts over to kind of a secondary plot. So two things of note happen next, and I'm going to breeze over this a bit. First is the American Dr. Roberts appears. He arrives at the manor. He's been invited by Dr. Norberg to help with this research. He's a scientist who has had success in preserving and reviving animals.

Yes, and organs, too, right?

Exactly. And he doesn't know that Norberg is a Nazi, and he doesn't know what the ultimate plan is for this research, but he arrives excited to help research how you might preserve or revive human organs. Right. So that's one, and he's kind of like the romantic lead. I found this character to be just a real jerk through most of the film.

And boring. A boring jerk. Yeah. Again, with the American boring jerks, but that's just where we are.

Yeah. So from here on out, the movie is going to try to convince us that there's some sexual tension between Dr. Roberts and Gene. But the second thing that's happening throughout this section is Gene basically doesn't buy the strangely elaborate scheme explanation the Nazis came up for with why your friend Elsa vanished during the night.

Yes.

So I'm not going to go into it, but Gene doesn't buy their excuse. She knows that there's something fishy. So there's these extended sequences where she's basically driving around the countryside, investigating what really happened to Elsa.

Yes.

At the end of all of this, she's going to talk to different people. At the end of all of this, she's going to figure out that Elsa didn't really leave the manor. That's going to bring us back into our final act. Were there any parts of this investigative phase of the movie that were interesting to you, John? Because otherwise, I'm going to move on.

Not really. I was confused. There is a character that's introduced here, Mrs. Schmidt, who has a horribly scarred face, and she wears a normal human face mask. I don't know why she's here, which is why I didn't want to get into it. I just found it very strange, but she comes up in the course of Jean's investigation.

Yeah. There's some weird stuff like that. So this is the part of the movie where I wondered if there is just a little bit of kind of, I don't know if racism is the word or just paranoia of like, hey, does your neighbor have a German accent? Do you know they're not really a Nazi? Because it turns out there's a small network of Nazis in this town that has been helping out Norberg or whatever, which I don't know. I'm probably reading a bit much into it, but that's a lot of Nazis to wind up in rural England, it just seems.

Yeah. The whole thing is very strange. But yes, other than that, we can brush past it. We just need to know that Jean is investigating Elsa's disappearance and Dr. Roberts is getting in deeper with the young American doctor, excuse me, and that the young American doctor, Dr. Roberts, is getting in deeper with Dr. Norbert and being drawn more into his investigation.

Yeah. So in my notes here, I wrote that, quote, some boring stuff happens, but then it gets good again, because we're about to see Elsa's living head in the cabinet. So while Jean is out doing her sleuthing, Norberg and Roberts get to work on their research. And that means giving Roberts a tour of the lab. We see a lot of living human organs preserved in jars. John, did you have any flashbacks to Maniac from this scene?

I did.

Okay.

Yes, very much so. Like Mad Scientist, there's beating heart in a jar, just like in Maniac, 100%.

So there's two wonderfully grotesque things that we get to see in this part. I love them both. The first thing, obviously, we're waiting to see Elsa's head. I mean, I was very excited to see Elsa's head.

What's that gonna look like?

They draw that up for a long time. But before we do that, we see something genuinely bizarre and weird. John, do you wanna say what it is?

Yeah, so apparently, Dr. Norbert is experimenting on animating just certain body parts. So there is a wall lined with arms, naked arms up to the shoulder attached to the wall. And there's a great moment. And Dr. Norbert shows off how he can sort of control them with electric current. And there's a great moment where Dr. Roberts looks around the wall and is like, well, what is on the other side of the wall? And it's just a bunch of electric patch cables. So there are these disembodied arms that can move at Dr. Norbert's will.

And I don't know, this is like Chekhov's wall of arms. Because you know something awesome is going to happen with this wall of arms.

But they don't put that much effort into it. This is half their effects budget here, this wall of arms. They have to do something with it.

So speaking of half their effects budget, the other half went into Elsa's head. So we finally get a look at Elsa's zombie head in this cabinet. And I don't know, John, I keep passing the ball off to you for these descriptions. But I would just like to hear, can you just describe for us what Elsa's head looked like?

It's amazing. So it's stored in a box, like one of those magician's boxes that drops on the sides. Because it has to be, because they have to be able to open it, because it's an actress under the table with her head sticking through it, right? But what it looks like is, they said earlier, we didn't really go into it. They have to look at the brain while conducting their experiments. So they've taken her skull and put a transparent dome on it. Then they have all these tubes and stuff passing blood in and out. She's painted blue. She has this dramatic black makeup on her cheekbones to just make her look dead. She's blue and-

It's this real old school looking corpse makeup. If you think of really stark lines and shadows and stuff.

Reminds me of Bride of Frankenstein, actually.

Totally. It has incredible Frankenstein vibes at this point. Also, the brain is pulsing, so I like the idea that our brains are creepily pulsing all the time.

Yes.

I suppose that's because she's got all these tubes going and electrodes plugged into her and stuff.

Yeah, it's amazing.

The head is amazing. This was honestly genuinely my favorite part of this movie. I loved every minute of this film that was in which Elsa's head was in the shot. Yeah, yes. It's really creepy. She looks very zombie-esque, but at this point in the movie, she's clearly alive, but she's not really responsive. And the most she can do is give these sort of hateful stares at Dr. Norberg. So she can't speak at this time, so she can't tell Dr. Roberts what really happened to her or anything like that. But she seems to be able to hear and understand. She's aware of her existence as a head in a box. So I wanted to say, so obviously, most of these shots where they had the actor sticking her head through from, like she is under a table and she stuck her head through a hole in the table. But there are two shots where I couldn't figure out how they did it. I was wondering if those had stuck out to you. There were two shots where I just didn't see how they could get a body under the table and not without having it be on camera. I was wondering if there were some special effects used for parts of this. But if that didn't jump out to you, then probably I just am overthinking it.

Yeah, I might have just made the assumption like it's so obvious she's under the table and just glossed over it.

Usually it is. That's why it was weird. A couple of times I was like, where are they hiding her?

Oh, interesting.

Well, if you notice, no one passed behind the table. And I think if they had, you would not have been able to see them because they had either projection of film or something to make it look like you can see under the table.

That's what it was. That must have been what it was. Because that's what it was. It looked like you could see under the table. Okay. Well, that was a pretty good effect then. I got to salute them for that because it confused me. So a lot of things are going on, but the Zombie Nazis are starting to get kind of restless.

Yeah. Can I actually take a step back for one second? At some point late in the first act, early in the second act, we see this giant door in the lab open, and there are these three zombies frozen in a block of ice. And I thought that would be checkoffs, frozen zombies, because I was sure at some point they were going to thaw these three out and they were going to attack somebody, and they never do. But that's one big thing, is that there's these zombies in this block of ice. You're looking at me like I'm crazy. Didn't you think something was going to happen with them?

No, I agree. I mean, somebody meets their fate in that room with those zombies, but I agree with you. Was it weird to you that these zombies were all frozen in their full military uniforms?

Yes, it was.

I don't want to see naked zombies either, but it just seemed funny that they were wearing their German military uniforms.

You could put them in, I don't know, just some overalls or something, because if somebody comes in and sees your lab, you could say, well, they're just frozen people. But if they're wearing Nazi uniforms, they're like, no, they're not German. I don't know what you're talking about. That's kind of a giveaway.

The movie proceeds like this for a while. Norberg and Roberts are doing more experiments, and Gene is doing some more sleuthing around. And a couple things happen. Again, I'm gonna try to be kind of quick with this stuff. At one point, Roberts sneaks into the basement lab. He bumps into a skeleton. Wouldn't you remove skeletons from like, your, from like sitting out in your hallway? I mean, I realize they aren't expecting visitors, but you know.

For somebody with a secret lab, his security is pretty nice.

Yeah, remove the skeleton. So, yeah.

The skeleton, there's one also in our last Nazi zombie film.

That's right.

In Revenge of the Zombies.

That's right. So, Roberts, at some point, he's snooping around the lab, and he basically figures out that something else is going on. He stumbles his way down into the zombie dungeon, and he gets attacked. And he's a little fuzzy when he regains consciousness. And so, but the zombies know they have to fill him in on at least a little bit more about what's going on here. So, they still don't tell him that they're Nazis, but they tell him what happened to Elsa. They like say that she was killed in this horrible accident. But the needs of science, you know, dictated that they cut off her head and keep it for experiments.

I know. And he's like, well, it's pretty terrible, but I guess you're right. Like, he's totally fine with it.

This is where, and so, just until the very end of the movie, by the way, Gene is still frantically searching for what happened to her friend Elsa. And Roberts knows what happened, and he just lies to her face. And the movie is going to end with them as the romantic couple. And it's like, I mean, what a sad, sad...

Yeah, that seemed pretty implausible. Like, wait, you lied to me about my friend being murdered for days, and now you want to kiss me? What is wrong with you? Yeah, it's a little strange.

So the law is starting to maybe close in on this, though.

Right. And General Lubick is starting to put the pressure on to get this done.

Exactly. So Gene, with her sleuthing around, she went to the authorities, and well, nobody expects that they have a Nazi zombie operation on their hand. The local police commissioner, he stops by to visit, and people are asking questions. And so there is the sense that the clock is ticking for them to get this project complete. And General Lubick in particular is getting pretty super villainish at this point in the movie. He's desperate for the experiment to succeed. Carl has been slowly kind of losing his mind as he's just losing it. He makes an attempt to, and he's convinced they need to kill Jean as well, because Jean is close to finding out what's going on. He makes an abortive attempt to murder Jean, in fact, by dropping a potted plant on her. It narrowly misses her. I want to know potted plants falling off balconies in such a way that you can't, you don't really know if someone pushed it directly. That's such a Agatha Christie seeming way to off somebody.

Yeah, I know. And I wonder about if it's efficacy of actually killing somebody. I'm not suggesting you wouldn't be horribly injured or have brain damage or something, but I don't think it would kill you instantly, at least at that scale. But I don't know, maybe I'm too-

If you flash forward to the recent years in the Fargo TV show, a window air conditioner is pushed out to kill someone.

Oh?

I would believe that.

So you can upgrade to- from a potted plant to an air conditioner.

I think the potted plant might give you a concussion if it hit you right. But what if it just hit your shoulder or something? You know what I mean? Right. We're getting near to the end of the movie, so I'll try to speed things along. So things are coming to a head. Lubeck is very angry now and he's very, very eager. And this part was kind of confusing, but they become convinced that Carl is out of control and might be leaking info to the police, which doesn't make a lot of sense.

No.

They torture Carl.

Like at some point, he had to acquire some bodies and they accuse him of stealing. I don't really know.

What happens is they start interrogating slash torturing him to figure what's going on with you, Carl, and he reveals-

Like he's the weakest link or something.

Exactly. He reveals something that I had just assumed this was what was happening already, but he reveals that the body parts that he had been providing to the doctor weren't from like the morgue. They were from people he was killing in the nearby countryside. So even though these are Nazis, that's a little shocking to them. So Carl has been going rogue for a while, and he's like this kind of loose cannon here. And how do they deal with, how do they silence this weakest link, John?

So to get rid of Carl, they put him in the giant refrigerator that has the other three frozen Nazis in it and slowly freeze him until he's like stuck frozen like with his hands up in the air.

In a modern movie, you would see like special effects of ice like enclosing him. But in this one, he just starts moving slower and slower until he stops.

Yeah, he's good acting, good acting is what's needed here. But just before they freeze him, he also admits that he's paranoid about Elsa's head and that the head will destroy them all. So yes, he's terrified.

He's not wrong, like just to be clear.

He's not wrong.

So the head throughout this has been like seemingly growing in power, so it is now able to sort of make noises and emote more effectively. And it has been sending these like psychic pleas for help to Gene.

Yes, which have been getting stronger.

They're getting stronger and stronger. And they decide that this part was a little confusing to me. But the final part of their plan here is they're going to use to see if they can use Elsa's brain to like control. I think were they thinking to control the human body parts?

She has a more functional brain, so can it solve a lot of the problems that we have in anime zombies?

And there is a fun little clip that I think you'll see why I picked this audio clip when we listen to it. But this is what they're talking to Elsa's head here as they're preparing to do this final experiment where they're going to see if her living brain can be used to control these different body parts.

You have no willpower of your own. You will obey my commands. At the count of three, you will raise your arms.

So that felt like a very old school zombie master.

Yes.

What do you think about that, John?

Yeah, it did. And he's trying to get her to raise the arms that are stuck to the wall by saying they're her arms. Yeah. And I don't think she succeeds at this time.

I think she either isn't able to do it or she is deliberately not doing it. I think the movie is ambiguous. But I wanted to say, so there's some, the willpower stuff is interesting. All the way back to white zombies, zombies have been defined as beings lacking their own willpower. But that's not the case with Elsa here.

As Elsa gets stronger, she becomes more independent. Yes.

And it's interesting to me, because they're not trying to raise willpowerless soldiers, I don't think.

No, they're trying to create the smartest leaders, they're trying to resurrect the smartest leaders in the Nazi army to bring the whole thing back.

So I no longer totally understand what they're doing with Elsa's brain, or what their plan is for it. But at any rate, Elsa is now sending much more articulate kind of psychic messages to Gene. And so Gene gets up, and I thought that was kind of interesting. Gene gets up in a very zombie-like fashion, like in a trance at Elsa's bidding. It's suggested that Elsa might be controlling Gene, not just calling to her. And Gene comes down to the laboratory where she discovers Elsa's head. Roberts follows her down and tries to explain why her best friend's head is down there.

And yes, I knew, and I'm sorry I didn't tell you.

And he's still going to ask her out at the end of this movie. So the movie is coming to a close here. So they now know something really bad is going on. While this is happening, someone has also tried to poison Gene to kill her. I think it's implied Tirpitz did this.

Yeah, I believe so.

So in other words, they figured out what's going on, and the Nazis are going to kill Gene. Roberts heads into town for help. Gene stays for, I don't know, I didn't know why Gene stays.

I'm not quite sure why.

I mean, she's in a house with Nazi zombies, and they just tried to kill her. So like, I don't know why she's staying here.

Or living Nazis, who also tried to kill her.

Living Nazis, exactly.

There's Nazis, Nazi zombies. Her uncle's a Nazi, she didn't know this. Like, it's bad.

So Roberts goes off to get the police. Gene, of course, doesn't stay up in her room with the doors locked, like she said she would. But she goes back into the lab to find Elsa's head. The Nazis basically burst in on her while she's down in the lab. Norberg tries to remember who is her uncle, tries to explain to her why he has the insane corpse of her father locked in the dungeon basement down there. Before anything can come of that, and Jean is opening the door to see the cryo chamber where the Nazis are. So she's about to see the full horror of the situation. When General Lubeck comes in, holding his gun in fine form where you hold it against your torso. Right. You're still, yeah. And he opens the cryo chamber and reveals all. So you see the frozen Nazis. He reveals that Jean's father was a Nazi, that her whole family besides her were Nazis instead of being the victims of Nazis.

That her father is still alive and he's a Nazi, but he's a zombie Nazi.

Exactly. It's just, it's a lot to take in, I think. So Lubeck and Norberg get into a fight. It's suggested that Lubeck is going to just like shoot them, I think, shoot them all. And Lubeck and Norberg get into a fight. But what do they drift too close to, John?

During their struggles, they somehow come up against the wall covered in independent arms.

Yes. It's beautiful. The arms grab them and slowly strangle them. It's great.

This was at Elsa's direction. Don't you think Elsa is now succeeding? Yeah. So Elsa is now commanding these arms to kill them.

Elsa controls the arms to kill them. And we know this because there's a really funny shot of Elsa's head smiling with satisfaction as they die. So the police arrive. I thought Jean was dead here in this scene for a minute, but she's alive a minute later, so I guess not. The police arrive, they round everything up, and then...

Oh, wait, there's one thing I want to go back to, though. The other thing that happens is that Jean is almost strangled by her father, who she's just, and Elsa uses her psychic powers to stop this from happening. But we think Jean passes out, so I thought she was dead, but I think it's important that her father is the one who does this.

I think so. I think I know where you're going with this, John. Yeah. So the movie ends with what I would say kind of a genuinely creepy thing. The movie ends with everyone crowded around Elsa's head while it begs them to bury it. And she's just repeating the words, bury me, bury me, bury me. And you get credits. So all these movies are so funny. No need for like a wrap up scene. It's just like, okay, the story is done. The end.

So this movie sort of solved our problem of having a five-minute act three, but they solved it by having a way too long act two.

Yeah, by having like a 17-hour act two.

Yes, exactly.

Okay, John, that is a wrap on The Frozen Dead. So now we got to ask our questions. So we watched this because the last movie we watched was from 1943 and it featured Nazi zombies. That was Revenge of the Zombies. So do these feel like cousin films to you?

So they both feature a German doctor using zombies to further an evil plot. I think two things, again, 1943, they don't say zombie or German or anything, but his plot is to figure out how to create zombies to create an unstoppable army. And here we're trying to thaw out former German soldiers to conquer the world, though it's a little more hand wavy, how they're going to do that. So they are cousins in a sense. I guess my issue is the zombies in this movie feel actually less zombie-like than the zombies in Revenge of the Zombies.

Yes.

They don't even say the word zombie in this movie.

They don't.

Can we be clear about that?

They don't. And in this movie, I felt sorry for the zombies in this movie. I mean, yeah, they're Nazis, so of course they deserve their zombie fate. But when you see these pitiable people down in the dungeon just like trapped, reliving one moment of their life.

Yeah, and none of them are reliving a happy moment. It's all some horrible moment, right? So, yeah.

So that was interesting. I don't know that any of the movies we've watched so far have invited us to really, I mean, have invited us to really empathize with the zombies. We've had a few...

But this one does, I feel like.

We've had a few heroes, like, get zombified or threatened with zombification, but it's not the same. I think this was asking us to, like, think of them as human beings.

Yeah. And I wonder, like, I think we're so used to, like, giant hordes being moaned down by Brad Pitt with a machine gun or something, that there really is no sort of empathy for them. But I think we're going to run into movies sooner or later where we do feel empathy for these poor souls that have become zombies. And I think that's a pillar that I didn't pick out, but I think it becomes important later in zombie-dom.

Yep. So, let's keep going through our questions. Is there a part...

I would add that, for me, this film was the first one where the zombies are Nazis, where in the last one, they were just raising the dead to help the Nazis. And going forward, that's when we have the sudden increase of Nazi zombie movies.

Yes. That's a good point. Because in Revenge of the Zombies, the zombies are mindless and have no control, and the Nazis are going to take advantage of that to their own ends, whereas they're trying to revive these people so they're actual Nazis again.

Yeah, it is interesting. You know, when I think of zombie movies, there's been some recent ones, like did you watch Overlord?

I did not.

And when I think zombie, Nazi zombies, you know, I think of like mowing down hordes of, you know, zombies wearing SS outfits or something like that, right? But this movie is quite far removed from that type of over-the-top Nazi zombie. And I don't want to credit this movie too much, but this movie really, it has more empathy for what's going on here than I think we're going to typically be experiencing in movies that have Nazi zombies in them in the future.

Yeah. I mean, my theory is they wanted to show something horrific about these creatures being trapped in their most horrible moments and have that be scary, which it kind of is, but what I think they did accidentally was also make them sympathetic in a way.

Yes. All right. So is there a hero party, John?

Well, I feel like the only hero is Gene, because Roberts is in on the plan.

Yeah. Roberts, what a tool. So this is why I wondered if are we supposed to be kind of contemptuous of or morally uncomfortable with Roberts in the same way you might be morally uncomfortable with allied scientists and governments making use of German Nazi technology research and science with better goals, but drawing on that fruit of that poisonous tree. Do you think that he's a stand-in for Americans?

I do, and I think it's an interesting question because first of all, this is an English film and England didn't get a bunch of rocket scientists out of this deal. So they're in a position to make this judgment, and I feel like he's incredibly callous. Yes. I think the only reason, and he's incredibly like, well, this technology is worth it, so I don't care about their politics guy. I think he becomes a romantic lead because it's necessary for because of the film of the time. But I think there is a judgment here on Roberts being like incredibly morally flexible in what is clearly a black and white situation. Do not raise Nazi zombies.

We've talked about the kind of two types. One of your pillars, which we'll get to in a minute, is tough moral decisions. And I think in modern zombie movies, the tough moral decisions often look like, what parts of my humanity am I willing to cast aside in order to survive? Right. But the movies we've watched so far, the moral decisions have generally been more like, what parts of my humanity will I cast aside in order to make progress, you know? Yes. And Dr. Roberts here is easily, instantly swayed by the promise of like, but won't the science we can achieve be amazing?

Yeah, he doesn't even think about it for a second. He's like, yes, yeah, exactly, I agree completely.

So it doesn't help that he looks like Norman Bates.

No.

So he looks kind of creepy.

So how many survive from our hero party? I guess if we're saying our hero party was Gene, then she does survive the movie.

Yeah, I guess we could say it's Gene and Elsa, in which case only Gene survives, but Elsa's not around long enough as a hero to sort of fulfill that. So yeah, Gene does survive. I think she's it.

Is there a zombie horde in this film, John?

Yes, because there's a group of them, and some of them are violent. So I'll say it's a small horde.

Yeah.

There's a horde of arms on the wall, too.

And the zombie arms. Sorry, I forgot about the zombie arms. I don't know how I could do that.

Is the world threatened in this movie?

Yes, but not in the way that other zombie movies. The threat to the world is that when these people are revived, they'll actually go back to being their own Nazi selves, and that's the problem. But I would say, technically, the world is threatened, because if they succeed with this plan, now, the world is saved, but the world is threatened.

It is interesting, the zombie is, the creation of zombies is the fail state here, and not the goal.

That's a great way to put it.

The Nazis don't want to rule the world with zombies, they want to rule the world with their greatest minds. Right, right. Did any of these guys look like the Nazis' greatest minds, by the way? I don't know.

They look like a bunch of enlisted men to me, but what do I know?

So John, let's talk about what type of zombie strain we're dealing with in this movie. I do think this is a new strain of some sort. What do you think?

Yeah, the movie itself is a mad scientist movie, but I think the actual zombie strain is new, because they're not the mad scientist zombies we've run into occasionally before.

Yeah. I am pretty curious about the hyperfocus of all the brain talk.

Yes.

Because in modern films, brains are mostly just the place you need to shoot the zombie to kill it. But I do think that there has been a pretty noticeable shift in what is the defining element of a zombie. Here, it's like a physical organ that can be scientifically manipulated, which is quite different than the past movies we watched.

Right. I think zombie number three, aka Norberg's brother, aka Gene's father, aka Edward Fox, is- AKA M. AKA M from Never Say Never Again. He could be considered a template for future zombies. He's immediately violent. He's violent all the time for no reason. He even attacks his own daughter, which we're about to talk to. But it is a different Zombie Strain, but I wonder if, you know, like a creator could look at all these zombies and pluck that one out and say, I want to make a movie about these kind of zombies. You know what I mean?

I am intrigued also by the idea of the zombies kind of reliving moments from their life. I've seen that in other stuff. In The Girl with All the Gifts, do you remember there was a zombie, like mother pushing a store? And I've seen this in some other media too, this idea that just enough of their memory or personhood remains for them to repeat tasks that were important to them. I think that is an interesting idea. Okay, let's move on though. We gotta get through your four pillars of the zombie movie. How does this movie stand up to them, John? What's the first pillar?

Well, the first one is in Apocalypse, which I would say no. It's a threat in Apocalypse, but we're not in an apocalypse. I'm going to pass on that one. It's not contagious. There's no contagion here. Now, tough moral choices. What do you think about this one? Again, I'm to the point where they're making moral choices, but they don't seem that challenging to them. Back to your point of just hand-waving any moral difficulties. What do you think about that?

These are mad scientist moral choices, which they are moral choices, and they are maybe a little bit tough, but nobody really wrestles with them. There's a little bit of hand-wringing about, like, we shouldn't have murdered Elsa, but nothing that really rises to a meaningful moral choice, I don't think.

No, but the big one is loved ones turning against you, because at the end, first of all, Elsa uses zombie arms to strangle people, but she doesn't love any of these people. But Jean's father does try to strangle her and almost succeeds. And I think there's something really scary about it. And I wonder, I'm starting to think about the Cold War and paranoia, you know, what if your neighbor is secretly a Nazi? What if your neighbor is secretly a communist? Right? Like, what if, you know, and what if your father was a Nazi all along and you're just finding out now? Yes. I think there's really something to that. And there's a genuine horror there. And then when he tries to kill her, you know, so I'm interested to see A, how we got to this point, but where we go from this point. We're not that far. This is 1966 from Night of the Living Dead. So I'd be curious when we go back in time, back to the 40s and move forward, if we start to see a little bit more of this loved ones turning against you thing, because that's always been the scariest part of zombie movies to me, and I wonder if they're starting to latch on to that.

Night of the Living Dead, I mean, it's, what are we? We're just two years away from it?

Two years, yeah.

It has an utterly iconic scene of loved men turning against them. So yeah, that is interesting. This movie doesn't really seem to think that that has as much weight as other stuff that it spends way more time on. It's a very fast, almost throwaway scene where his father tries to kill her. I mean, it's over in probably 15 seconds.

Yeah, I just wonder if that inspired somebody in the future.

I wonder that too, so. Okay, lastly, John, would you and I survive in this zombie world?

I don't know. Nazis are kind of scary, and there are Nazis with guns here. I don't know if we get killed by a zombie, but this plot seems more serious than John Carradine trying to use lilies from the swamp to raise zombies.

Yeah, I think this is, unlike a lot of the movies we've watched, where you really are only in danger if you let yourself get drawn into the little love triangle of some demented family in the Caribbean, this is something that could threaten you. And the idea that there's all these Nazi sleeper agents all over the place, I think, is almost more threatening than the zombie part of this, but...

Who are totally willing to just kill people to meet their own ends, right? Lubeck would kill you in a second if he thought you knew something. Karl would kill you in a second if he thought it would advance the research.

Yeah, the random lady Jean meets in town who's a Nazi is willing to, you know, is willing to kill.

Yeah, exactly. So, yeah.

So, John, do you recommend this movie to our listeners, to fans of zombie movies?

I'm of several minds about this because I love that there's a couple of just delightfully schlocky creepy things in it. The wall of arms, Elsa's head on the table. Like as a fan of horror movies, like that's a yes for me. But as a fan of zombie movies, I just am having trouble fitting the zombies in this movie into the broader zombie narrative, though I think you maybe changed my mind on that. So even though I feel like technically the zombies aren't very zombie like, I would say, I'm going to say yes, despite the boring second act. I'm going to say yes, watch this movie.

I think I would say that too. It's a little hard to recommend this movie on its own merits. If you're interested in zombie stuff, I do think there is just enough stuff in here that's zombie adjacent and zombie interesting to make it worth watching. I mean, it probably is worth watching it just to see Elsa's head in the cabinet, because that's a neat, practical effect.

And I got to say, the poor actress, of course, in this position, does make the most of it. She looks angry, she snarls, she begs for death. It's fairly moving, actually, at times.

Yes. So, yeah, I'll give this a tentative recommendation. But I don't think you're going to learn a ton about the zombie genre from this movie. Right. Okay.

Yeah. All right.

Do you guys know about the 1962 movie called The Brain That Wouldn't Die?

No.

Remember that film?

I have not seen it.

I knew that before I knew this one. That's the one that was on the Creature Future Saturday afternoons as kids. It's a scientist who's got a head and a box on his table, and he's trying to regenerate organs.

I must have seen it.

I think it's black and white, and it's a woman's head, and she's got a cap that covers her skull.

She's got a white skull cap on. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. I maybe did see that.

And it's very similar to this same idea with the props, how it's staged.

Interesting.

So I feel like this film stole a lot from that one.

Okay.

What I'm learning is that, like, mid-century America was just obsessed with preserving human organs.

Right? Like, what the heck?

Is there a medical advance somewhere around here that, I don't know, who knows? But this is the scariest part of each episode, John, because you and I are about to learn what we're going to watch next.

I'm ready.

All right.

I'm ready.

I have good news. Our zombie forecast predicts a flurry of Bela Lugosi. First, we're going to pick up where he left off in the 40s and watch Voodoo Man.

Ooh, there's Bela. He's holding his hands up like, yeah. I thought, okay, so it's 1944. Okay, let me describe the poster.

Do we have technology to not make things look green? Is that in 1944? Anyway, describe the poster for us, John.

So the poster is like split into three sections. At the top, there is Bela Lugosi in a tuxedo, holding his hands up with a sinister beard and staring.

There's a good shadow behind him too.

Yes.

Making it look very menacing.

Like I thought. I thought this was like just a regular photo, but I realized it's 1944, so it's probably black and white, but just like colored orange kind of to make him look natural. And then below that is a green photo. There's like a guy in like a wizard robe in the background and like these women standing in these white, like Greek robes. They look like Greek goddesses or something. And then it says, Bela Lugosi in Voodoo Man with John Carradine and George Zuko. So yeah, I'm very curious about the wizard robe happening in the background here.

All right, Voodoo Man it is.

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. Hello, everyone, welcome to this Zombie Strains Addendum. Just John and Andy here. We decided that even though we are devoted movie followers, the goal of this podcast really is about zombie cinema. And it's not that we don't like TV, I think Andy and I watch TV all the time, but we really wanted to keep the focus there. Having said that, in the year 2025, we have a giant zombie event, which is the second season of The Last of Us. So we are going to talk about that briefly. We'll do one addendum now, and then when the series wraps, we'll probably do another addendum just to sort of track what we learned. But yeah, we wanted to talk about it because we think it's important to keep current as well. So speaking of which, hi Andy.

Hey John.

So one thing I wanted to talk about to start this, so one thing we're not gonna do is we're not gonna summarize the episode. We both just watched the first episode of season two of The Last of Us. Now there will be spoilers because it's inevitable, but we're not gonna do a summary of the show. So we're not gonna give away all the plot points. We're just gonna talk about the zombies and spoilers for season one for sure. And then something about season two might slip out, but we're not gonna get into super detail.

Right, yep.

So just real quick, Andy, you have one advantage here that I do not have, and I think we should spend a couple of minutes talking about this, the video games, of which I don't know how many there are, but I think you've played them all.

Yes, there's two video games. I've played them both, and I consider them collectively to be one of the highlights of my video gaming over the years.

Yeah, I have not played it, but I could tell you, I have this distinct memory of that first game trailer for it, where you're following the camera and that person falls out of the window, like that whole scenario, and just being absolutely fascinated by it. It didn't look like anything I'd seen before at the time.

Yeah, when I played it, it pushed all of my horror and zombie buttons. I first played it when it came out for the PlayStation 4, so maybe a decade or so, the first one, maybe a decade ago.

Andy, the PlayStation 4 can't be a decade old, come on.

It's probably more like 13 years old. And I was riveted by both it and then later when its sequel came out, they were games where I just didn't do anything else for a week until I beat those games. Like Family Life just got put on hold.

Right, right.

So yeah, the video games are near and dear to my heart, both of them for different reasons. Right. I have somewhat complicated feelings about both of them, and that's one of the reasons I love them, is that I wrestled with each of them in different ways as I played them. So John, you haven't played the games, but you have watched some of the show. So we are here to talk about how this fits into the lineage of zombie film and cinema. So why don't we start by you just describing the zombie world of The Last of Us universe.

Yeah. My first question is, and I was watching the, I have a question for you before I describe it in too much detail. In the episode from last night, from Sunday, there was a moment where they're in a market and it says something like, you know, employee of the year 2003 or something. So my first question is, are these set in like the 90s? And then, and then we jump forward. So basically they're set in today, but if an apocalypse had happened 25 years ago.

Yes. I think that's, I think that's what they're going. That's the ballpark. The world kind of ended around the year 2000 sometime, I think.

Yeah. So just to describe the world and I, again, we're not going to spoil the plot, but it's about a world where the apocalypse has come and gone. And we, we see it happen, right? We see the first couple of episodes, it happens, but then we quickly jump to the future. And Joel and his brother, you know, Joel's daughter has been killed in season one. And he sort of has, in season one, has this opportunity to try to save humanity by escorting this girl who is immune, Ellie, to a place, a group called the Fireflies, who are convinced they can save humanity from this fungal zombie virus. So just take a step back. The zombies in this are not virus-based, they are fungus-based. One thing I learned when doing a little research is, actually it's sort of a toss-up between the novel, The Girl with All the Gifts, and the video game, as to where this came up first. And I think technically people say, it's The Girl with All the Gifts novel, but as video games are in development for a long time, like that may not be the case. I don't know and I don't think it's definitive, but the game at least was the first instance. Now I think we've seen a lot of zombies since then, but yeah.

Yeah, I think we touched on this in the episode about The Girl with All the Gifts. I think there was just some... I don't know who came first, but I remember a lot of just kind of excitement about the zombie... I'm sorry, the zombie ant fungus, which is a real thing. And yeah, I don't know who was the first one to imagine what would happen if that extended to humans. And it's possible that this idea... I mean, in the regular run of our podcast, John, we may come across another movie that hints at this idea.

And it could be a short story we don't know about, so I don't want to hit that too hard. But this is sort of the origin of that. So in the first season, there's an ending that we'll discuss in a second. But the second season opens with... Meeting with the Fireflies didn't work out. And so they found a community in Jackson... Is it Jackson, Wyoming? That is fortified. And so they're now living in that community and Joel is using his skills as a builder to help the people secure their town and make enough space for all the refugees that are coming in. So do we want to talk about that end of season one choice now?

So here's my proposal, John. Let's walk through our four pillars of the zombie cinema and talk about how this meets those pillars. I think, as a pretty premier example of modern zombie film, this one is going to hit most of those pillars. That at the beginning of our podcast, we establish as our understanding of the kind of boundaries of the zombie genre, right?

Yes, I think there is, but I think given that it's a, yes, let's do that and then I have thoughts that I will not share now.

And so, I think what you're thinking about the ending of season one is, we're going to talk about it when we ask if there were tough moral choices in this world. So, John, was there an apocalypse in The Last of Us?

Absolutely, and actually, of the season one stuff, there is some really good, even though it's largely concerned with the survivors, there is some really good apocalypse stuff in season one. I think it starts in Malaysia, I want to say, or Indonesia, and there is, in Malaysia, and there's a, the fungus grows there, and there's somebody who sort of realizes what's happening, and is like, you need to destroy this entire scene. Like, it's epic apocalypse-level choices.

That was a fantastic scene where, so.

Yep.

Yes, so we have, in our viewing so far, we have watched a lot of films from the 30s and 40s, and relatively few of those have we been able to answer that, yes, there was an apocalypse. Because in those movies, the world just hasn't ended yet in any of those films.

And I don't know that.

A few have danced towards it, you know, like with GQ is set in World War I, and there are a few of these movies that hint that some kind of worldwide existential problem might happen if the zombie threat isn't stopped. But none of them have started out with the world wiped out.

And I'm curious, and I don't know if we'll run into it in our run through Zombie Center, or if it's another piece of genre fiction, but what's the first movie where there's an apocalypse, where humanity loses, right? I just don't think we're up for that attitude wise in an American film in the 1940s. I just don't think that can happen.

So it feels like it feels like something that we're going to get in the 50s during the early scary parts of the Cold War, doesn't it?

Yes, I feel like that's true. Yeah, but we'll see. So what's next?

We will see, yes. So does this world feature a contagion?

For sure, and it's very clear. Well, two things can happen. You can just get infected by the fungus in the wild, but more relevant is if you're bitten by a zombie, you get infected by it and you will become a zombie. Now they don't call them zombies. They compare them to zombies, but they're people who've been infected by a fungus who have lost their will.

Yes.

And I don't know. Some of them are dead and some of them aren't. Also, these zombies are easier to kill, but that's a different story.

So let's pause on this one and ask a question we ask of all of our movies. So we have a contagion here that spreads zombiness. What is the nature of this zombie strain? And are we dealing with something new?

Yeah, that's a great question. If we hadn't seen The Girl with All the Gifts, we would say yes. But I think it is new in the sense that it is contagious. It is new because the fungal zombies are new and behave differently, and they're not necessarily reanimated corpses. So we get that in The Girl with All the Gifts as well. They could be people who are still alive but infected, if that makes sense.

Yeah, this is definitely a zombie world in which it's legit to ask the question of like, is the person still in there? Because you can get zombified by this fungus zombie virus while you are alive. In fact, most people, that's what has happened to them. And the characters in the show, when the show, the bulk of the show takes place 20 years after the zombies rose and the world ended. So most of the characters are kind of beyond these sorts of like, oh, I wonder types of questions.

Nobody's trying to figure this out anymore.

They've settled into the rhythm of survival. So the show doesn't really ask these questions, but it invites us, the viewers, I think, to ask these questions, especially as we see a couple of people that we kind of like get zombified. All right, John, this is the biggie. Are there tough moral choices in The Last of Us universe?

Absolutely, and I think this is the key difference in the most modern of zombie media given the influence of The Walking Dead, is that the tough choices become the bulk of what the story is about, right?

I completely agree, yes.

I think that's The Walking Dead, and this shows too is that the tough moral choices, or as somebody once said to me, John, it's not about zombies, it's about people, right? I think that it's people in extreme situations trying to survive making choices, and the choices are hard in every episode, and it is so hard to make a good choice in many of these scenarios. I think that those tough moral choices permeate the show in a way that it doesn't in any of the movies we've watched so far, and I think in any movie we're going to watch for a long time.

Yes, I think the best modern zombie movies are the ones that realized it's really about the thing that's interesting is watching an interesting cast of characters put into an excruciating situation and forced to work their way out of it by making tough calls and difficult moral decisions, and a show like The Walking Dead, you can go many episodes where the zombies are not really meaningfully part of the story.

They almost aren't here in this. There's very few until the end.

Exactly. And in this show, there are some splashy zombie fight scenes, but the stuff you remember is not, remember that fight scene against the zombies. The stuff you remember is, remember when Joel had to make that decision at the end of the show about what to do about Ellie, and there's lesser moral decisions scattered throughout the series as well. That's the biggie. It's just hard to, that one sort of dwarfs everything else in the show, but it's certainly, yes.

Yeah, absolutely.

So tough moral choices all over the place. And I don't, again, at our point in the regular podcast, John, we're really only up through the mid 1940s. And I don't really think that we have seen tough, I don't really think this has occurred to our storytellers of zombie stories, that it's the choices and the people. I don't, I don't, I don't know. As I think about it, we've watched plenty of movies where the zombies had a pretty minor presence. So I guess it was about the people, but they haven't been really making interesting decisions or choices yet.

No, they've all been acting to type. So like if we talk about Bowery at midnight, that has cannibalistic zombies in it, but that whole movie is about criminals behaving like criminals. You know what I mean? It's not like they're in a position to choose not to be criminals. You know what I mean?

Exactly. The stories we've been watching in the 30s and 40s, there's always a bad guy to be defeated.

Yes.

And the bad guy usually has zombies affiliated with him in some way, but the story is really about how will the heroes stop the bad guy, who, by the way, has some plan involving zombies. So I think one feature of the modern zombie movies we love, John, is that there usually isn't a clear moral struggle between the good guys and the bad guys. They kind of removed that framing of the stories, and you're left just with characters in a hostile environment, being a world full of zombies. Right. And they encounter good and bad people, but there is not that sense of, like, the story will be resolved when we defeat this evil guy, right?

Exactly. And I think what we've settled into in this sort of more survival mode of zombies, right? Like a lot of early cannibalistic apocalypse zombie movies end with, will they survive? Well, we just don't know. And here we're settled into, well, they survived. And really, I mean, the mundane conversation Joel and the leader of the town have, his brother's wife, at the beginning is, we got to get that school re-roofed, and we got to figure out, like, it's the mundane facts of survival that are occupying these people. Yes.

And they managed to wring tough moral choices out of those mundanities. Yes. So that is kind of a tense scene, an interesting scene, because they can't build buildings fast enough to house the refugees who are coming to their town. So now it's a moral choice, right? Yes. Can we work faster to build more housing? Do we need to start turning people away at the gates? Right. Yeah. And so last question, do we see loved ones turning against you in the world of The Last of Us? Okay.

So I think this is interesting. I think the answer is going to be yes, and I don't have enough recollection. I'm sure that happens in this show, but I was very nervous it was going to happen. And so this will be a spoiler, but Ellie is, as we know from season one, immune to the fungus. She has it and is immune to it. She gets bitten, and we all think, actually her friend makes a joke. Did you get bitten? Do I need to shoot you in the face? Like, you know, as a lark, but I don't think anybody knows Ellie is immune. So when she gets bitten, she hides it. But then she, at a dance, she kisses this same woman because she's romantically interested in her. And I'm like, did Ellie just infect the woman she's in love with? You know, like, so I'm curious to see what comes out of that. Or I got to imagine somebody here is going to get turned, because we also know the zombies are about to infiltrate the city too, right? So, yeah.

Yes. Yeah, this movie has the, this show has the feel of Loved Ones turning against you. We have not had that, like, very blatant Night of the Living Dead scene where, you know, the daughter, the zombie daughter advances on the mother to kill her. Right. But we do have people, you know, it's part of the Tough Moral Choices. We do have people, like, making, I think, choi, they're not turning against each other because they're zombies yet. Not really. Right. But they are, you know, kind of, they are making choices that set themselves against each other in some ways. And there's a little bit of that feeling of that, so. Yeah. Yeah. So, John, I want to wrap up in a minute because, again, we just wanted to touch on Last of Us because we both like it and because we want to connect, we want to see its connections to what we've been doing. I wanted to ask one last question, though. So one thing this show has that you see in some modern zombie movies, but that I frankly think you see most of in zombie video games, is you have subtypes of zombie.

Yes.

So in seasons one and two, we see a couple of different types of zombie. We see your regular infected people. We see these clickers, which are these more advanced ones that have radar sonar. I don't know what that is.

Yeah, they've got a giant fungus thing on their head and they can't see, so they make clicking sounds.

They look great, by the way. Yeah. They look awesome. Later in the show, there is a thing called a bloater, which is just an ogre sized super zombie.

Nice.

And then in episode one of season two here, we saw a thing that the video games call them stockers, but they are more clever versions of zombies. They don't just run at you, they try to sneak up on you and ambush you.

Yes.

And so...

Which created a lot of tension for me, by the way. Can I just as a quick aside say, this was actually tense and scary, and I'm just so worried when we get out of the 50s that I'm just going to be a mess, but we'll see how that goes.

Yes. So obviously in the 30s and 40s, we haven't seen... We have seen different types...

There are no clickers or stockers or bloaters in the 1940s.

We've seen different types of zombies in different movies, but we've never seen this idea that the zombies are evolving like substrains.

That's a very video game idea, because in a video game, you need much of different enemies to keep it interesting.

Exactly.

Because you're going to play for longer than an hour and a half. And in Night of the Living Dead, you can wring a lot of tension out of just a horde of zombies that are all the same, because their mass makes a difference. But in a video game, if there's no variety, it's not a very good game.

Yeah. You need a boss fight with a giant size zombie every now and then.

Right. Exactly.

I did wonder how that was going to feel, because it feels fine in the video games for the reason you just described. Right? You get to the end of this section of the game and there has to be a boss fight with something really creepy. Right. I wondered if that would feel really artificial, but the show has emphasized the hive-mindedness of the zombies in a way that the game doesn't. And I think if we allow that there is this planet covering fungus that is sort of has some kind of feral intelligence.

Yes.

I think you could make a case that it might start modifying zombies to do different types of tasks, if that makes sense.

It does. And I think, you know, the stalker that shows up in this episode is interesting, but the way they weave it in is not just to have a different kind of enemy, but to create tension. Oh, no, there's something we didn't know about. What does that mean for humanity?

And that scene, minutes before that stalker appears, they kind of play this up because Ellie and Dina are hunting some regular kinds of zombies, and they're almost making a joke out of it because they've done it so many times. There's nothing, they've seen it all in their years of survival. They've seen it all, and then here we have this new type that they have not seen, and we, the viewer, have not seen them either.

Well, I think we leave it there. Folks, we'll come back in, well, approximately six weeks, and with another one of these little 20-minute addendums to talk about how this whole thing came out for us.