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

I'm Andy. Also excited.

I'm Brad, unmuted.

All right. Producer Brad unmuted. That sounds like a one-man show. But anyway.

If you did not specify he was excited about this film.

Well, let's just make sure we all watch the same cut. So I watched The Walking Dead, Daryl Dixon, seasons one and two. What did you guys watch? No, that's not it? You didn't watch that?

No.

No, I'm kidding.

This is like football when people say, I watched the Miami game. They said, University of Miami? No, not that Miami. I watched Miami of Ohio.

Yes, exactly.

So what did we watch, John?

We watched a film from 1936 called The Walking Dead starring Boris Karloff, which was super exciting. I will editorialize that trying to find an obscure film from the 30s in the morass of all the Walking Dead TV shows was like a needle in a haystack at some point. I couldn't figure out what to search for. I was like, 1936, Boris Karloff. I kept getting everything but that.

But it's the travails of running a zombie podcast. You have no idea what we suffer.

Yeah. The only reason just for fans who are listening, the only reason we're not talking about the TV show is that that is probably the most covered TV show in the last 15, 20 years and I don't know that we have anything to add so that's why we are just doing movies. Just wanted to clarify that for people listening at home.

Yeah. John, Brad, before we start, we'd like to toss out some notices of any troublesome or possibly upsetting content we'll be discussing in this episode. This movie did not have a lot of upsetting content except that it is centered around the topic of capital punishment and the electric chair. That's an upsetting topic for you. I guess listen with caution, but the movie handles it with a fair amount of what I would say, grace, and we will try to do the same in our discussion.

It's fascinating to me. What are we going to do in the 80s for like Return of the Living Dead, where there's people getting smashed with axes and chainsaws? I think we're getting weak.

I think what are we going to do in the 80s when we're watching movies that people made in their backyard?

I know. Yes. We have on our list someday, Redneck Zombies, which is a film that you and I have seen, Brad.

We did.

I don't know what we're going to do. That was a long time ago.

We're going to relive it.

I guess.

We've got some time before we get there.

That's right.

Maybe years.

All right, Brad, what's the rundown on this bad boy?

Well, The Walking Dead was released on March 14th, 1936 by Warner Brothers. Classic movies from this year include Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, The Great Ziegfeld, Mr. Deeds Goes to Washington, My Man Godfrey and After the Thin Man. Horror movies from 1936 were Dracula's Daughter, Wanga, which was episode five of our podcast.

Yay.

Another Boris Karloff film called The Man Who Lived, which kind of sounds like it could have been a title for this film. But that one's about a mad scientist who transfers minds between bodies.

Wow, that feels like that might have been more zombie-esque than this movie, but carry on.

I don't think we need to watch that one.

Okay, good.

Michael Curtis directed The Walking Dead. He had directed dozens of films before, but it wasn't until 1935 and the release of Captain Blood, starring Errol Flynn, that he found a claim. That movie was nominated for Best Picture, and Curtis received the second most votes for Best Director, even though he wasn't officially nominated. All were write-in votes, which I guess was a possibility back then. But he did receive five total Best Director nominations over his career, and he won for Casablanca in 1944. And five of his films are on the National Film Registry. These films are The Adventures of Robin Hood, Angels with Dirty Faces, Yankee Doodle Dandy, Casablanca, and Mildred Pierce.

I have heard and maybe seen all of those films except for the last one, which is our first director who directed a bunch of stuff I heard of, which actually I think shows through in the quality of the film. I don't know how you felt about it, Andy, but it looks pretty good. We'll be talking about it.

Well, Mildred Pierce has Joan Crawford as a star, so it's a high caliber film.

It's a big one, yeah.

The Walking Dead was written by Eward Adamson, Peter Milne, Robert Hardy News and Lily Hayward. She also wrote My Friend Flicka and Black Beauty, and later she worked at Disney writing The Shaggy Dog and on the TV show The Mickey Mouse Club. Now, the film stars Boris Karloff. He was born William Henry Pratt in England in 1887, but changed his name once he started acting. His breakout role was Frankenstein in 1931, and he followed it with The Mummy in 1932. He was in two Abbot and Costello films, Abbot and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll, and Butt Abbot and Lou Costello Meet the Killer Boris Karloff. Which brings us back to our discussion from episode 18, where Andy asked about actors having their names in the title of films. And so I looked it up and clearly this only works if the star has big name recognition, which Boris Karloff does. But here's a short list of other films featuring actors names in the title. Abbot and Costello had nine films, and I won't run through all of them. There's the Gracie Allen murder case starring Gracie Allen. General Spanky starring Spanky McFarlane of the R Gang shorts. Tex rides with the Boy Scouts starring Tex Ritter, who's the father of John Ritter from Three's Company.

Oh, wow.

Buck Benny rides again starring Jack Benny. Are you guys sitting down for the next one?

Yes.

Mantan runs for mayor and Mantan messes up starring Zombie Strains favorite Mantan Moreland.

What? Oh my gosh.

We can watch those.

Yeah.

Okay.

Maybe that'll be a fun bonus content if we ever have time.

Yeah.

Bela Lugosi meets a Brooklyn guerrilla. Cheech and Chong had three movies with their names in the title.

Oh, yeah.

Cheech and Chong's Next Movie, Cheech and Chong's The Corsican Brothers, and Cheech and Chong's Animated Movie. Pee Wee Herman starred in Pee Wee's Big Adventure and Big Top Pee Wee. And finally, the most meta of all, Being John Malkovich with John Malkovich.

There you go.

Oh, yeah. That just, it's such a, it just is hard to imagine, being John Malkovich aside, although I suppose that film is what? 20, 25 years old now. It's just hard to imagine that happening. You know, like Tom Cruise would never have his name in the title of a movie, right?

Yeah, it's not Tom Cruise's Maverick.

Well, I think the difference is for being John Malkovich, he's sort of the focus of the film too. It's about someone getting into his mind, and it has to be someone famous. So that's a-

Yeah, and that's such a meta film. Yeah, that it makes sense.

One thing I did not know, and then I found fascinating about Boris Karloff, and we'll talk about this, is that Frankenstein was his 82nd role. He made 80 movies before Frankenstein, which I had no idea.

Wow.

He did. It takes a long time to find success, and if you look at the credits of some of these secondary players, they do 400 films and you don't know their names.

Yeah, crazy.

I had two Boris Karloff revelations while prepping for this episode. One is, I just learned that he narrates how the Grinch Christmas Special. I mean, I've seen that a million times. I had no idea that was Boris Karloff. Yeah. Also, he's not the tallest person in the world. He's small. But he looks big on the screen. He looks lanky. Yeah, he's 5'11-ish according to my internet search, which may not be reliable. And that's, I mean, that's a little tall, but that's not huge. But he seems very big on the screen.

He does. He's got a very large head, which I think is a sort of template for a Hollywood actor, but that's another discussion.

Well, as you mentioned, he was in How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and he won an Emmy for that role. He was also nominated for Tony for the 1955 play The Lark. He's a really good actor. He just...

He is a really good actor.

He just ended up in a genre that he had trouble getting out of.

I was fascinated to read his credits. He did a... He did Arsenic and Old Lace on Broadway. Like, you know, we throw him together with Bela Lugosi, and God bless Bela, but he is a much more accomplished and, I think, dynamic actor than Bela was, which is not a slap.

No, but I think a lot of it is the accent. He has an English accent, which can be used in a lot of ways, and Bela's accent is Eastern European, which makes it difficult.

Yes.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Well, just before Karloff died, he did four films for the Mexican film producer Luis Enrique Vergara. All four were posthumously released, and we'll be watching one of them, Isle of the Snake People, if, when we make it to the 1970s.

We'll make it.

I'll make it for Snake People.

Ricardo Cortez plays Nolan, the lawyer who sets up Elman. He played Sam Spade in the original 1931, The Maltese Falcon, which was 10 years before Humphrey Bogart's film.

Oh, wow.

He has good noir presence.

You know who he reminded me of? When I saw him, I was like, he is like a cross between Sheldon Leonard and Andy Garcia. Like he has that sort of gravity. He feels like a mobster, but he's a little smoother than Leonard was. So yeah.

Edmund Gwynn plays Dr. Beaumont, and he is most famous for playing Chris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street.

I didn't realize that.

This is a Christmas themed movie, if you didn't notice.

I love this.

And he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for Mr. 880. Marguerite Churchill played Nancy. She had a lead role in Dracula's Daughter, which came out in 1936. She also co-starred with John Wayne in The Big Trail, which was his first leading role.

Oh, wow.

Barton MacLean played Loader, and he was in 35 episodes of I Dream of Jeannie as General Peterson.

Oh, my God.

And then tying this movie back to Jacuz, Henry O'Neill played Colonel Picard in The Life of Emile Zola.

Oh, wow.

So the movie was a success. It made money. The film rights were sold for TV shows running creature features for decades later. But many people saw this film.

Brad, I had a question. In the opening credits, we get the Warner Brothers logo swoops in at us. And I was wondering, what was the state of Warner Brothers in 1936? Do you know?

I know that we did The Frozen Dead, and that's when Warner Brothers, the last brother who had control sold it to an outside company. So at this time, they were successful and family owned.

Okay.

All right.

All right. Well, John, do you want to walk us through what was going on in the world at this time, that we might kind of strain and try to pick out some themes that appear in the film?

Sure. I think one thing I want to make clear to everybody. So we have jumped back in time, right? We had gone sequentially from 32 through about 46 or 48. Now we're doing some pickups. So this is back to 1936. So it's back to pre-World War II. But Hitler has come to power. First televised Olympics ever. It's still the Great Depression. FDR is president and gets re-elected. I think this film to me has a vibe of sort of desperation and class struggle in a way that I think is influenced by the Great Depression to some extent. It's about, I'll do a summary in a second, but it's about a bunch of wealthy racketeers who are used to getting their own way, imposing on a poor down and out man repeatedly. I don't think that's really heavy handed, but it has that Great Depression vibe to me. What do you think?

Yeah. When we first meet him, he's desperate for a job. He's got these skills, but they're not things that are employable in the 30s economy.

Well, should I just swoop right into summarizing this bad boy?

Yeah. Before we go more slowly through the plot points of this film, John, why don't you give us the 60-second overview so that our listeners can track what's going on?

Sure. The film opens as a courtroom drama, and there's some speculation. There's a man on trial who isn't relevant to the rest of the film. His name is Martin, but he's being tried by a Judge Shaw. Martin is a gangster, and everybody thinks Shaw is going to let him go, but he doesn't, and he's sentenced to him to 10 years. So the mobsters who were behind this defendant, all get together and decide to kill the judge. They hire a man named Trigger to kill the judge, but frame another man for it, and the man they frame is a man named John Elman, who had spent time in prison, but perhaps incorrectly, he was unjust, and he's desperate for a job. So they offer him a job to put him in a position where he gets framed for it. They frame him for it. There's a doctor, Dr. Beaumont, and his assistants, Jimmy and Nancy, well, Jimmy and Nancy see that he didn't actually do it, but don't speak up because they're afraid of these mobsters. So after he's framed, he goes to the electric chair, is killed, but he's brought back to life by Dr. Beaumont. And the rest of the film is John Elman seeking vengeance in a sort of interesting mystical way on the people who framed him and ruined his life. And that's what the film is about. And then ultimately he dies. So he's brought back to life using a mechanical heart. Now we'll have a discussion about the zombiness of this whole thing, but I think we can say, aside from zombiness, it's actually a fairly compelling drama. Like I don't know what you felt about it, but maybe that's a place to start.

I felt the same way.

Yeah.

And it was a film I didn't really ever know exactly where it was going next.

Yes.

At least for the first 40 or so minutes, and that was a pleasant surprise. It's a good film.

Yeah. So I didn't look up the director, Brad, because I'm lazy, but when you told me all the films he made, while I was watching this one, I was like, this looks pretty good. Like this is artfully shot. There's a scene in the prison which is very sort of stark black and white that was really compelling, like I was impressed by the whole thing. So anyway, sorry, I'm getting ahead of myself, Andy.

Yeah.

Okay.

So having said that, let's kind of walk through this movie in a little bit more detail. I'll do my best here to kind of keep us focused on the important zombie stuff except where we need to dip into something else or some context. So here's what I propose that this movie, the first 25 percent of this movie or so is the courtroom drama part. So I propose that we not go through all of the details even though the movie considers it fairly important of the legal shenanigans that wind up with Elman getting sent to the electric chair. I just have a couple things I want to pull out of that and then we'll kind of get on to what I would call the more zombie parts of the film. Does that sound good?

Yeah.

All right. So as John summarized, the first 15, 20 minutes of this movie are we are learning how John Ellman played by Boris Karloff ends up getting framed for the murder of a judge, sentenced to death and then executed. We do learn a number of important things that lay the groundwork for the divine vengeance that is going to occur in the second half of the film. So the villain is Nolan, this mobster. He's sort of a well-connected guy. Like if you had a dinner for like the top citizens of the city, he would appear even though he's a criminal racketeer, right?

Right, because his day job is that he is a high-profile defense attorney.

Yeah, and so let's talk a minute when we first meet Elman. What sort of a person is John Elman? John, do you want to describe like your impressions of John when we first meet him and when we first see him? He is approaching Nolan. He is fresh out of jail. He's been in jail for 10 years. He was put in there because he accidentally killed a man who was, I think, like sleeping with his wife. Is that who he...

Yeah, he says he struck a man, but he didn't mean to kill him.

Yeah, this is one of those cinematic crimes that's meant to make you more sympathetic for the person rather than less. I mean, it's a little gross that he attacked a person who was sleeping with his wife, I guess. But I think at the time, this would have read as very noble and almost virtuous sort of crime. And so he just got out a couple of weeks ago and he's approaching Nolan for a job. And what are your first impressions of him, John?

I mean, I want to start by telling him about Boris Karloff because I mean, I've seen Frankenstein. I'm sure I've seen him in other stuff. But like to me, mentally, he has a lower profile than Bela Lugosi. I was struck by how humble and soft spoken he starts this film out. And somebody said to me like, there's something just incredibly empathetic and moving about Boris Karloff's eyes. And I was like, really? And then I watched this movie. And when you first see him, he has this pleading sort of aspect to him that I just immediately grabbed me and was like, I really sympathize with this down and out guy. Just look at his face, you know what I mean? Which was not a feeling I expected to have about this horror movie icon.

Yeah, I felt this character reminded me of a stock character that you see later in film of the sort of gentle giant. I mean, he's not physically huge, although he seems to take up a lot of the screen anytime he's on it. But he reminded me of some Stephen King pulls out the stock character in like The Green Mile and a few other stories of it. Someone who is maybe a little too innocent for the world that he's living in.

Yes. He's trusting, he's soft spoken. Like, you immediately like this guy. Or I did anyway.

Yeah, that's really well put. And we learned from this that he's a musician. He's an accomplished pianist. But he doesn't get the job he wants because this is all part of Nolan's plan to frame him for the murder of the judge. So various complicated plot things happen, but the way it works out is they basically manipulate Elman into showing up at the scene of the crime while they plant the body of the murdered judge in his car. And I do want to pause here because who is, what is the mobster name of the guy who kills the judge, John?

His name is Trigger.

Yeah. So I wonder if we need to start a separate list of punchy mobster nicknames.

Yeah, Trigger, Fingers.

Trigger. So I am curious, John, what would your punchy, Brad and John both, what would you be if you were in the mob and you had a one word name?

This is a visual joke, but it would be The Dome because I have no hair and a shiny head.

I guess what they're doing is they're taking one word to boil down your whole essence.

Yeah.

And I think it would have to be assigned to me by someone else. I don't think Trigger or Fingers came up with their name.

You're the plan, that's who you are.

I think you would just be the producer.

Yeah, actually.

Hey, call the producer. I think this would be a good opportunity to really establish your own legend by giving yourself the name of Bitey or something.

But then I have to answer how I got that.

All right. Well, moving along. While the crime is taking place, importantly, two of our main characters, a young, engaged couple, this is Nancy and Jimmy, although Nancy ends up being the more important character in this film. They witness basically the setup. They see that the body was planted in Elman's car. They know something was amiss. They're going to be haunted by this knowledge. Yeah, and they're threatened.

Somebody actually stops and says, you didn't see anything.

Yeah, exactly. A couple notes here. First, I just wanted to mention, this is not the first movie where, so I feel like we've seen a trend in the 30s here of love interest starting the movie out engaged. How can I say? We call these people the romantic leads, but they're not really pursuing each other as part of the plot of the movie in the way that I would expect, like two attractive leads to do in a movie. These characters, we've seen this in, we saw it in Valley of the Zombies, we saw it in Voodoo Man, I think, and some others where we have a lot of people who are engaged to be married, which I just find kind of interesting setup. Engaged is like a little less intense of a commitment than marriage, so maybe they're allowing for the possibility that, I don't know. Do you have any thoughts about that?

Well, in a modern film, if it's a married couple, you'd be immediately shown how they don't get along in some way. The struggles in the movie might be about how they struggle, or they haven't met and the movie is about how they meet. But I cannot think, and I'm sure there is, but I cannot think of a movie, a recent one where two people who are engaged are together, and they just solve the problem together. Usually it exists so one of them can fall into jeopardy, but that doesn't happen here. It is a little old-fashioned.

I think engage is shorthand for youth. If they were married, they could be in their 30s or 40s, but engage, you assume they're in their 20s. It just makes them young.

Oh, that's a good point. There might have been a little bit of a nod to the Great Depression here, because I think the reason they're not married is that Jimmy can't afford the wedding. Is that right?

Yeah, he can't afford the ring. We're introduced to them by Nancy saying, how many more payments you got on that ring, Jimmy?

Yeah. So things proceed, and Elman is basically railroaded into the death sentence. Nolan, the guy who set him up, volunteers to be his attorney, and in a pretty cool scene, he just absolutely sabotages Elman's case in court. I thought this was a well-written scene.

Yeah. When you told me Nolan had starred in stuff, the actor, that didn't surprise me. He's got a lot of presence.

I do want to pull one audio clip out of this before we move on, and it just tells us a little bit of something about Nancy and Jimmy, who remember they witnessed the setup, but they have kept their mouths shut because they were threatened by the mob. So let's hear them in the courtroom scene where Elman is about to be found guilty and sentenced to death. Let's hear what they are saying to each other.

They're saying this in the hallway, just between themselves.

Jim, you can't get mixed up in a thing like this. It'll ruin your whole career, but they won't stop with threats. They'll kill you. Jim, I love you too much.

At this point in the movie, this is going to change as it goes on, but Nancy is the person insisting that they not go to the police and tell them what they saw, whereas Jim seems to want to come out with the truth. That's going to change as the movie goes on. We've gotten a pretty good picture of the main characters of this film. We're about a third of the way through at this point. We have Elman, that gentle giant sent unjustly to his death. We have Nolan, the villainous racketeer, and we have this young couple who know the truth, but are struggling with the moral choice of whether to step forward. John, do you have any thoughts before we move on? The next thing I'm going to move on to is sort of the execution and its follow-up. Is there anything else you want to pull out of the first act of this movie?

No, I think it's good. And I think, again, what is impressing me about this movie compared to a lot of the other ones we watched is the performances are... I'm picking out Nolan and Karloff, but the performances are good across the board in a lot of ways. And I was surprised by the quality this far into the movie. I'm engaged. What I should say is, we joke about a lot of old movies and stupid stuff that happens in them. I didn't feel the urge to do that as watching the first 20 minutes of this movie. I actually found it compelling.

Yeah, totally agreed. All right, so what happens, though, is Elman is, in fact, executed. And there's a really effective sequence that goes on for a while that kind of counts down the minutes to Elman's execution because at the last minute, Jimmy and Nancy have had a change of heart and they're like, we just can't stand by while this innocent man is sent to death. So they try to come out with their story. But in a really effective sequence, Nolan kind of slow, who remember is Elman's lawyer and ostensibly is on his side. Nolan sort of slow walks this until, and he drags it out so that the reprieve doesn't come through until like minutes after the execution has taken place.

Actually, it's better than that. Can I describe this scene?

Please.

So they finally get the governor on the phone, they get the district attorney who has realized that Elman wasn't guilty even though he convicted him. And there's a series of events, they get the governor on the phone, so they call the warden's office. Now, the warden is downstairs with Elman, who's literally walking to the chair. By the way, we never see the chair, we never see him strapped in, we never see any of that. He walks into a room and then you cut to these two cops just chatting, these two guards. The phone is ringing, they slowly walk over to pick up the phone. One of them answers it and he says, Elman? And then in the background, the lights dim as if the power, there's been a power surge, and these lights behind him go on. And he looks at the lights and he turns to the phone, he says, you're just too late. And I don't know, this got me. I thought this was really tense.

It's a great, this is a fantastic opening act for a movie, honestly. Yeah. I want to call out, so this movie is not gratuitous or sensational with the electric chair. There's no terrible special effects of someone being zapped by electricity or anything dumb like that. They don't show you the execution. It's all just suggested. So at this point, this feels like a relatively classy movie compared to a lot of the other ones we've watched. Maniac, I'm looking at you, I guess.

Yeah. I'm thinking of, I was kind of hoping we get a little more of Wes Craven's Shocker starring Mitch Pillagi, but no, we get none of that.

Hopefully, we'll get to that in a few years. Yeah. So, we haven't introduced the character of Dr. Beaumont yet. So, Nancy and Jimmy work in the lab of Dr. Beaumont, a famous scientist. I forget the details, but I think he's famous for preserving human organs or something. It's something that when you hear it, you're like, you think, oh, zombie.

Well, again, what is on the counter?

He's got a mechanical heart or something.

He's got a heart beating in a jar of fluid. Yes.

We love the heart beating in the jar of fluid in this.

Again, goes back to Maniac and what other films had that?

Well, I think we thought it was inspired by, wasn't there one in The Frozen Dead?

Frozen Dead.

I cannot recall. I think so. Now I want to check. But also, it was a throwback to Frankenstein. This movie actually feels a lot like Frankenstein from this point on.

At least, yeah, at least at this point, yeah. So I do want to get a quick clip, because Dr. Beaumont has been helping Nancy and Jimmy try to get the news that Elman is innocent. So he's on the team of the good guys at this point. And when the execution happens, he has an unusual response. So let's hear Dr. Beaumont's proposal upon learning the Elman has just been electrocuted.

Werner, get the governor back. Tell him to call off the autopsy. Why? Never mind why. Don't ask questions. There's no time to lose. Call him.

So this is a little short clip, but I think it transitions us to the more familiar territory here. As a zombie movie fan, I think you know where this is probably going. Yep. But we next move to what I thought was a really fun mad science lab scene. So in the next scene, they have Elman's body. They have him strapped into this lab. Will you just describe for us this lab? Because it's a very big set.

It's a huge set and there's all these lab tables and he's on this huge gurney that can actually tilt and pivot.

Yes, I wondered about the usefulness of letting your gurney seesaw up and down.

It was the seesawing critical to the operation. But they put this giant glass thing over his head. It's like a giant mad scientist lab, but none of the scientists are really mad. I think it's like a mad scientist lab by people who know how to run a lab almost, if that makes sense.

Exactly. Dr. Beaumont doesn't seem like a crazy person, and his assistants all seem like competent workers here.

Their motivations are morally clear. They're like, I let this man die because I was too afraid to speak, so we have the moral duty to bring him back. There's no craziness in their plan here.

They do really turn up the Mad Scientist lab stuff to 11, though.

There's lightning bolts and Tesla coils, and yeah, it's over the top.

It's the full deal, yes. The end result of all of that is it's drawn out for a while, it's quite so sensible, and on an X-ray machine, we see that Elman's heart has started to beat again. And I think a really visually interesting moment, Boris Karloff's face kind of twitches and contorts a bit as he returns to life. He is awake.

Yeah, I just, can I praise him again really quick here? Like in an era where people are still kind of doing big broad acting, you know, in a lot of ways, first of all, the entire cast of this is more subtle, or more, feels more real. But I was just surprised by how much he does with looks, like those same eyes that just engender empathy, can be changed to induce terror. His subtlety and use of expression, again, is not something I expected from the Frankenstein monster, so.

If you think about it, think about the Grinch. He starts off devious and evil, stealing from children and you don't like him, but at the end, you have sympathy for him. And he does it all with his voice.

Yeah, and I'm just saying, like, my admiration for him now, he's another one of our guys who was married six times, so, you know, this is not me endorsing him as a person. But his acting ability is really top-notch, and I was surprised by that.

Agreed on all counts. So, Elman has been brought back to life. And this is not a situation where this is an isolated lab in the swamps of Haiti or something. This is all over the world news, and we get a little montage of news broadcasters saying, basically, this famous Dr. Beaumont has done the medically impossible, he's brought a man back to life.

That was awesome.

But of course, whose plans have had a monkey wrench just tossed into them now the Elman is back?

Yeah, because remember, the whole problem was that they were trying to get this guy off by killing the judge and making it look like somebody else did it. But if he's alive, he might be able to say, I don't know, I didn't do it, and then finger the people who did.

Back in the lab, Dr. Beaumont is trying to get through to Elman. This was interesting. Elman is our zombie here, right? At least maybe with some quotes around it, but he's our zombie. At this point, all of the films we watched in this podcast to date have led me to expect that Elman would be a groaning, mostly comatose zombie with no volition. And that is how he starts. So I thought that's where we were going. As we first see him after his resurrection, he is just talking in single syllable words, and he looks dazed and out of it. But as the movie goes on, he starts to return to a full semblance of life. And if he doesn't ever quite get there, he gets pretty close as the movie goes on.

Yes.

But right now, Beaumont is trying to get through to him. He still can only utter a few isolated words. And importantly, he doesn't really seem to have any memories of his life. And this is where we first get our glimpse that Dr. Beaumont is interested in something beyond just doing the right thing for Elman, an unjustly executed man. So let's hear Dr. Beaumont talking with, I think this is like the prosecuting attorney.

Yeah, this is the district attorney.

The district attorney.

Yeah. Who's now an ally. This is the man who convicted Elman and realizes he may have made a mistake. And now he's an ally of Dr. Beaumont.

DA. Werner. Not Dean Werner, but DA.

Werner. All right, let's hear him talk.

You see, except for this blood clot, Elman is apparently sound. Is that why he doesn't remember? I believe so. Well, why don't you operate? Too great a risk. Elman isn't normal. You know, Werner, there are times when I feel that man knows everything. You know, Doctor, when he looked at me and denied me as an enemy, I felt that too. Did you? It's uncanny. How do you account for it? I can't yet. All I know is that for a short time, the spirit of life left his body. Now what happened during that transition?

So this is very interesting to me because I think this is our first movie with one minor exception that has really asked this question. What happened to you in between the time when you died and when we brought you back as a zombie? So John, what other recent movie was maybe the first to suggest that there's something going on with the returned dead, that they might have some knowledge?

Oh, the Frozen Dead, right? Is that what you're thinking of where they have the one memory they're stuck on?

Oh, that's good. I was actually thinking of Jacque's where we get that tantalizing bit where they say that the dead revealed these mysteries to the living. I forget the wording.

But they had some special knowledge.

Yeah, they had some special knowledge. But this movie, Beaumont's main motivation is, can I get Ellman to tell me what he experienced? I thought that was an interesting shift from what we've seen before. What do you think about that?

Well, I'm fascinated by it. I remember a conversation I had with a friend about, trust me, this is relevant, but about the Dungeons and Dragons movie, the most recent one starring Chris Pine. There's this hilarious scene where they go to a graveyard and they're resuscitating the dead to ask them questions. My friend, Kyle, just looks at me and says, I think we're skipping some important questions here. Like shouldn't you be asking, what was it like? How did you come back? I feel that that seems to be the obvious question you should be asking any of these movies. Though with zombies normally, they can't respond. Though here we're in a position where he could. But I think that's fascinating and actually, I think there's sort of a bit here where he becomes, it's not too explicit, but where he becomes like two people, right? He sort of has these episodes where he doesn't remember what he's doing. Is that your understanding too?

I think so, yes. So let's move along here. I'm gonna fast forward a little bit through this sort of sequence where Elman returns to a state of near normalcy. He is sort of first jolted out of his zombie state by the sound of music, and we discover he remembers how to play the piano. And there's sort of suggestion that with time, he's going to maybe be able to return to being a normal person.

Right.

But as we said before, Nolan, the gangster and the corrupt lawyer, has caught wind of this, and the mobsters are sort of freaking out about what they're gonna do about this. So, what happens is Nolan gains legal custody over Elman's, I guess, finances or estate, something that gives him sort of, like, medical... I don't know what the term is for it.

I think it just gets assigned to be his guardian. Like, it's a feeling that Nolan can't take... or that Elman can't take care of himself. So as his defense attorney, he gets him a big payout from the state over the false conviction, and then says, and I'm the guardian who will control his estate.

And this is where we first learn that Elman may have acquired some knowledge while he was dead that he has brought back with him. Because when he encounters Nolan for the first time, he knows that Nolan is his enemy. This is not something he knew in life. So he has acquired some sort of knowledge that suggested while he was dead, some knowledge about what really happened with the case that was not available to him when he was alive. So this all leads to a really remarkable scene where, I think this is part of a set up by Dr. Beaumont, where they invite all the city's top citizens, and that includes Nolan and his gangster buddies, to attend a concert basically put on by Zombie Elman. John, why don't you describe this scene? So Elman comes in, he starts playing the piano, everyone's watching him, including the gangsters. So describe how the scene plays out. It was really striking to me.

It is really striking. The lighting is very stark. So first thing, the scene reminded me of something from like Frankenstein or the scene that was the brilliant spoof in young Frankenstein where he's trying to get the monster to tap dance. But I had this vibe of Elman performing for this mad scientist to show he is a special case. You know what I mean? It had that aspect to it. But as he plays, his eyes land on, I think it's first Hildebrandt, I can't remember which one it is, but one of the conspirators, one of the lesser conspirators, the name doesn't matter. He plays, but he starts glaring at them, and that soft empathetic face goes rock hard and the eyes narrow. Then you cut to this gangster and he just starts sweating. Eventually, he just has to get up and leave the room because Karloff's stare is so intense.

The music he's playing on the piano takes a really dramatic time.

Yeah. I thought it was brilliantly done.

Yeah. Elman is staring with this gaze of supernatural seeming judgment at the conspirators in the room. It's accompanied by this subtle lighting effect that illuminates Elman's face and then the faces of the conspirators in turn as he stares at them.

Yeah. Everyone's wearing black jackets and black ties, so it's easier to single out their faces, their panicked faces as this is going on. It's great.

Most of the mobsters are freaked out into leaving the concert, and they gather in the foyer and they're discussing, we got to do something about this. What are we going to do about this? Nolan comes in and he's like, take it easy, guys, don't do anything stupid, we can write this out. They don't got anything on us, that sort of thing. But the other gangsters aren't convinced, and they decide they're going to need to kill Elman, despite Nolan saying, don't do it, it's going to be too obvious. At this point, Dr. Beaumont goes out there and kind of confronts these mobsters in the foyer, and he's like, he's basically, I know what you've done, and Dr. Beaumont is now more convinced than ever that Elman has learned something while dead, has some special knowledge now that he got while he was dead. So that leads us to the final act of the movie. And this, I really didn't know where this movie was gonna go. And so the rest of the movie is basically Elman judging and killing each of the mobsters in turn. He's not like a violent murderer.

He's not Jason Statham in The Beekeeper, right?

Right.

Does he kill them though?

But that's the interesting part.

Well, he appears to each of them in turn, or at least to several of them in turn, starting with Trigger, the assassin.

Yes.

He appears to these mobsters, and he just confronts them with this judging gaze. And it causes them to, I don't know if they are, one of them seems to fall and maybe shoot himself. One of them kind of stumbles in the path of a train. Another one, I think, maybe has a heart attack.

And falls out the window.

But they all end up dead.

But Karloff never touches them. Elman never touches them. And I feel like after each of these events, like this is where I was talking about where he's like two people. Like he's entering a fugue state and he says, he's got this limp and this like curled left hand. And he's like, why did you frame me? And then as soon as the person dies, it's almost like he wakes up like, where am I and what happened? They don't hit it hard, but that's how I felt it was happening.

I've got audio here for his first kind of quote murder. This is when he's confronting trigger the assassin. So let's hear how that exchange goes.

That night, I thought you were my friend. You took my life. I'm going to take it again. Unless you got cat blood in you, no one's going to bring you back this time. Come on!

You can't kill me again.

So, yeah.

The music there is great, by the way, and also this is a great tense scene in a great way.

It really is. The third mobster death is this great horror movie sequence where it's a dark and stormy night. This mobster is his guards. His bodyguards are abandoning him because they've heard about these, that mobsters are dying and they want to get out of there. And it's a really well done sequence of events. And so after three of them are dead, you know, by the way, you know what, what movie I kept thinking of once this sequence started, John. You're a child of the 80s and 90s. Yeah. What, what movie am I thinking of here?

Oh shoot, I don't know. It's not to.

If you just put the cure on in the background or maybe a little nine inch nails, you would have the crow. And that is what.

Oh my gosh. You're right. Yes.

So the mobsters are all panicking. The rats are starting to flee this sinking ship. And Nolan is still trying to keep things together. There's a funny line where three of them, their fellow conspirators have died in like the last 24 hours. And Nolan says the phrase, I'm beginning to think these three deaths aren't a coincidence. Like, really? Wow, Sherlock, but.

Yeah.

So a couple of minor things I want to note before we kind of move on to the end game here. Elman has been found wandering around a cemetery in a daze. Yeah.

What was this about? I thought he might be visiting somebody's grave. I never quite understood it, so.

The only thing I could figure, I couldn't make any connection to like a grave he was visiting or anything. I think at one point, he just says that he feels like he belongs there, and I think this is just like death calling him back home, if that makes sense.

That does make sense.

The movie is kind of moving rapidly to a close here. Dr. Beaumont has become all the more eager to figure out the secrets of the afterlife. I want to hear one more audio clip. This is Dr. Beaumont, who's getting a little frantic here to figure out what Elman knows.

I'm positive that Elman has some knowledge not given to him by man. He seems to know that these men were responsible for sending him to the chair.

So, in a last-ditch attempt to kind of get control of the situation, Nolan the gangster, remember, he is kind of the guardian of Elman. He arrives at the court order to take Elman basically into custody, and they managed to stall that court order for a day, but it's clear that they're time to get, Dr. Beaumont's time to get answers out of Elman is going to come to a close really quickly. Dr. Beaumont's even thinking about performing like a surgery on Elman to try and unlock that knowledge, but before that can happen, Elman sneaks out to the cemetery again. Nancy, who earlier in the movie had found Elman in the cemetery, has guessed where he's going, so she drives out to Elman to try to talk to him at the cemetery, but she's followed by Nolan and a couple of other gangsters.

And it's a rainy night. I actually thought that, I don't know if they sped up the film or whatever, but I thought, this is the first time in a movie that I've seen like driving stunts, that I was like, whoa, guys, like it actually looked like they were driving really fast and dangerously.

I thought the same thing. I think they sped it up because it has had a slight sped up look, but they are trying to make it look like a really dangerous car kind of pseudo chase. At the cemetery, Nancy, this is where Elmond says he wants to stay at the cemetery because he feels like he belongs there. Nancy is kind of freaking out. When she leaves to call Dr. Beaumont to come and help, Elmond senses that the gangsters have arrived at the cemetery and he goes out to meet them. They shoot at him and at first, it seems to have little effect, but when they keep pumping bullets into him, they finally bring him down. It's maybe more bullets than a person should be able to take. So it's suggested that there is something.

Six times.

Yeah. I think it's suggested that he has some sort of supernatural resilience here. But nonetheless, he has been fatally wounded. So they bring him into this building in the cemetery. Dr. Beaumont arrives, everyone gathers as Elmond dies. And Beaumont is hoping that with his last words, Elmond will reveal the secrets that he learned in the afterlife. And Elmond actually is starting to tell him those secrets when he dies, his eyes close. And we are all cheated of our chance to learn the secrets of life and death that he gained.

Yes.

While this happens, the gangsters who had shot him, including Nolan, get into a car crash and presumably die. So as he died, the last of his conspirators have also been killed.

Yes.

And that's a wrap. I mean, the movie pretty much closes instantly on this scene. And-

On this tragedy. It ends up being a tragedy. Yeah.

It is. So do you, before we move into our sort of post-movie discussion, did I miss anything either in this final scene or earlier in the movie that you wanted to call out John or Brad?

No. I think it's interesting that Beaumont is not a mad scientist with an evil agenda, but sort of evolves into somebody who, well, now that we're here, I have an opportunity to get some forbidden information. You know what I mean? Which is interesting, which I found very interesting.

Yeah. Beaumont, despite having one foot in the role of mad scientist, never steps over fully into that line. Like he's still kind of a good guy.

I think he puts Elman's well-being first.

Yeah, I think so too.

So anyway, I just thought that was interesting.

I want to expand on something that John's talked about, which was how Elman the zombie walks. He's disfigured, like his left arm is sort of clenched and his left side looks somewhat paralyzed. All the zombies we have seen, they just move slowly.

Yes.

But this is the first one that seems to be disfigured and because of that physical appearance, less human, which is something I think that becomes prominent later in zombies.

I think you're right.

Yeah, that's a really good point.

Yeah.

So I have a lot to say about the strain of zombie we're dealing with here and what this movie is bringing to the genre. But why don't we start with our kind of traditional wrap up questions, John?

Let's do it.

So here we go. In The Walking Dead 1936, is there a hero party?

I think so. I mean, Jimmy, Nancy and Dr. Beaumont and the DA. Werner, not Dean Werner, DA. Werner, feel like a hero party. And I think Elman's actually not part of it. I think he's his own thing. He's a part of the whole thing in this. So yeah.

He is. He's like a third, he's a party unto himself. You feel sympathetic for him throughout this movie. He's a good guy in life and in death, but he also is not part of kind of the, the quote, survivor party you expect. So how does everyone do in this movie, John? What's the zombie fatality count? Are any of them are heroes?

No. In fact, Elman dies at the end and all the gangsters die, but none of our heroes die.

Yeah. Is there a zombie horde in this movie?

No, just John Elman.

In this movie, how are zombies destroyed, killed, or laid to rest?

Well, they're killed through violence like they would be in a modern zombie movie and it's really hard to do like it would be in a zombie movie. But it's not specified that it's like the head or something. But yeah, he's like a super tough zombie.

Yeah. I think it's suggested that he can be killed by the same stuff that kills regular living humans, even if it takes a couple extra shots to bring him down. Right. Is the world threatened in this movie?

No, it's a very personal story. You asked Andy, actually, I would love to see a zombie movie that isn't just about sort of white people going to Haiti and having their rich white people problem. And here is one. We've got a down and out poor man who's sucked into the machinations of the wealthy and fights back. So yeah, it's a personal story, but it seems a little more universal than the ones we've watched.

This is one of those movies that it ends before it has to face the consequences of the revelations it's introduced into the world. So I mean, I wonder, I mean, there's nothing technically stopping them from trying to bring Elman back to life again. Right. And presumably, now the world has returned from the dead medical technology.

I know, right?

This is going to have some societal consequences, but we aren't going to stick around long enough to see what those might be. Okay. And this is a big one. I think I want to land on this one for a bit. What kind of zombie strain are we dealing with, John? Is this a new strain? And basically, what are we dealing with zombie-wise here?

So I'm interested in this because when I watched it, my first impression was I feel like Karloff is here because his arc is not unlike Frankenstein's arc, right? Like, he's dead, he gets reanimated through science. He's not really a zombie because he has agency and can speak. But as I thought about it, there is this fugue state he goes into where he sort of can't help himself but to threaten and intimidate these people. It's not how he is all the time, but it is part of his character that he seeks vengeance and stalks these people. It's not mindless because he can talk, but I don't feel like he has control of his actions here. Unlike the monster in Frankenstein who does have control of their actions, they're just misunderstood. Is that too fine a distinction? That's where I ended up.

I don't think it is too fine at all. This is the zombie as a divine agent, a divine agent of justice or an avenging angel, I think.

So let's go back. We talked in Jekus about the dead, the zombie horde making moral judgments on society, like in Dawn of the Dead or Jekus, and now we don't have a horde doing it, but we do have a zombie doing it.

Yeah. Although people were the mechanism by which Elman was brought back, this movie has a real sense, I think, that he was sent back to right or wrong.

Yeah, I think so.

I wasn't just being facetious with my crow comparison. That's the plot of the crow, basically. As we saw in at least one previous movie, this is what I would call like a revenant. The dead returned to fix something or to right or wrong.

A vengeful spirit. But he's angry, but he's not, I don't know, his vengeance is very quiet. There's something about it that's really compelling.

Yeah. And maybe my crow comparison is a little bit much because that is a movie where he's like a bloodthirsty revenger. In this one, Elman may be only marginally aware that he is the instrument through which, I don't know, God, the cosmos or something, is bringing about justice.

But he is compelled to do it. And I think that's part of why, when he wakes up after these things happen, he's like, what happened? Like, I feel he's having an in-body or an out-of-body experience. I don't quite know how to say it.

But so when we talked about Jacuz, you said, as you mentioned earlier, that you wanted to start watching out for examples of zombies representing sort of judgment on human society. And I think that we, in our very next movie, By a Weird Coincidence, we have hit exactly that.

Yes.

And this feels very new.

And there's some religious overtones at the end. Isn't there a voiceover by Karloff where he's talking about a jealous god and...

Yes, I think it's Beaumont.

It's Beaumont.

Who is, yeah, it's a god is a jealous god. There's a sort of sense that like people are starting to butt in on the domain of the supernatural and that they really ought to back off.

Yes.

And this did not, quote, feel like a zombie movie to me. This felt like a supernatural revenge or justice story.

Right.

I think this is better than this, but it would have, this is the sort of story you would get in a really good Twilight Zone episode, I think.

Yeah, yeah, that's a great, that's a great way to put it. And I, and again, I'm leaning towards he is somewhat zombie-esque and not a golem like Frankenstein's monster now that we've had this conversation.

And the last thing I want to note about this is just that this is the rarer movie to treat the, you know, the Walking Dead as some, has something that we might learn from rather than something that is like an abomination to be destroyed.

Because that's a, that's the other difference. Even though the arc is similar, the difference between the monster and John Almond is that he is treated with nothing but kindness and offered nothing but support by the people who are caring for him.

Yes.

You know what I mean? Yeah.

And maybe for all these reasons, I mean, maybe that's why it didn't feel like most of the zombie movies we've watched. And I don't think that this is the direction that zombie movies are really going to take for the most part.

Right.

You know, this is a really, really different version of The Returned Dead from like, you know, Night of the Living Dead and its many followers. But I thought this was really interesting. So, John, our last thing we do in this show is we walk through your four zombie pillars, which I think we'll have some good answers to these. The first one is Apocalypse. Is that a trope in this movie?

No, I don't think so. It's a personal story. Like, the world has run down, but Apocalypse is not imminent.

How about Contagion?

No, because you have to be turned into the zombie by the scientist.

And then this one I think is where we'll have some discussion. Tough moral choices. Do those exist in this movie?

I think so, because at no point do... Like, once Dr. Beaumont, Nancy and Jimmy have figured out that it could be Karloff, it could be John Elman who's involved with these deaths, at no point, I mean, they have a discussion like, should we lock him up? Should Nolan take him? Like, what should happen to him? If he's doing these murders, these are bad people. So, there is this moral quandary about Elman's behavior that they never really settle.

Yeah, I agree. The movie is moving very quickly by the time we get to that part, and I wonder maybe if they had devoted a little less time to, like, the courtroom set up and a little more time to let the characters react to the situation at the end. We might have gotten more kind of juicy moral choices of the sort that you and I are looking for in these films, but...

The only explicit one is when Jimmy and Nancy are questioning whether they should come forward and speak, and they choose to save themselves, protect themselves, and not him.

And that is a moral choice that, like, resounds, that affects the whole rest of the movie, so I think that's a really important one.

I think so, too.

And that feels more in the realm of the kind of moral choices that we are talking about when we look for moral choices in zombie movies.

Agreed.

Lastly, does this movie have loved ones turning against you?

Not really, because the people he's turning on, he doesn't love. They're his enemies. Yep.

Exactly.

Again, I go back to Nancy and Jimmy, where as the movie goes on, Jimmy disappears and Nancy's spending all her time with Elman. Not that there's any love there, but it's kind of strange.

Yes.

Yeah. Jimmy being dropped out of this film as a speaking character was really interesting. But Nancy really steps up to represent that couple, I guess. So two questions left. First, we're going to take a look back at the poster and ask ourselves, did this poster represent the film well or did it properly set you up for the experience of watching this film? What do you think?

I'd say not at all, right? It features Boris Karloff's giant head shaved pasty white.

Which is not in the movie. In the movie, he has hair.

Yeah. And then a slinky woman in a long red dress and blonde hair, who I do not believe is Nancy. Like that person isn't in the movie. So I think it's trying to be trading on his little scary face and perhaps an attractive woman, and that's not really what this movie is about.

I mean, I totally understand why they would try to sex up this poster, this movie concept to sell it to people. That said, I mean, I just wonder if you go into this movie expecting the sort of salacious experience that the poster promises, and then you get a fairly somber tragedy. What do you feel about that?

Oh, man, that could cost me a nickel. Yeah, exactly.

I ought to pop that. Okay, and last question, John, would you and I survive in this zombie world?

I'm worried that I don't think I'd be killed by a zombie. I'm a little scared of these racketeers though. They're fairly ruthless.

Yes. They're ruthless and they're very effective. They have their fingers in all of the functioning of the city government.

Yeah, there's no question that they run the show. You know what I mean? At no point do you think, oh, if only I could find an honest policeman. Nope, they know they're up against an unstoppable force in these criminals.

I'm glad you said unstoppable force because these gangsters, it's interesting to me that the final gangster deaths come about as divine. They're just like purely divine supernatural events. Elman is not even present for them. So you can't escape. If you and I were the, if maybe we were mobsters, we got pulled into this John, we'd be dead. There's no getting away from this guy, even if he doesn't appear in our living room and judge us with his gaze until we have a heart attack.

If you had witnessed the gangsters putting the dead judge in the car, would you have then gone to the police?

Oh, I'd like to think I would, but I think that denies the premise that real risks exist to this kind of thing.

Yeah, I didn't sign up for this podcast to be judged in front of the world, guys. But yeah, I mean-

Let's go back to the other moral choice we miss, which is the judge in the opening scene. His wife says, don't do it. Let him go because they've threatened us. And he says, I have to do what's right. And he can fix that criminal. And that's what puts the whole movie into motion.

Yeah. So this movie is full of moral choice.

It is. It's a very complex, nuanced movie. This is a weird movie for us.

Yes. By the way, I feel like we're just being set up for a heel turn when Brad reveals whatever's coming next.

We watched two really amazing, artful, compelling films in a row. What are the chances next episode isn't a complete schlockfest?

Well, let's just grit our teeth and find out.

Well, we didn't answer the last question, which is, do we recommend this movie?

Right.

I mean, if you still need to ask the question at this point.

Yeah. Obviously, yes. I recommend this movie. It's a great film.

It's well-paced also. One problem with a lot of these movies is they have long, slow periods or they're visual storytelling, they haven't figured it out yet. No, this is a good, compelling, well-paced story that I would recommend.

Yeah. A lot of these movies have a boring stretch of 25 minutes where you could probably just skip it and that would be fine. Not this film. Everything that's in it feels pretty important, and it's mostly pretty suspenseful. Generally speaking, yeah, this is a good movie.

It's only 60 minutes or so.

Yeah, it's an hour and five minutes. So, you know.

To Zombie fans, specifically listeners of this podcast, I mean, that's a little bit of a, I'm not sure what to say there. This is not really, I don't think, a strain of Zombie that goes anywhere.

I don't think so.

To the extent that it does go somewhere, I think it diverges from the genre we call Zombie and becomes its own thing.

Yeah, that's brought back to life. Yeah.

If you consider a movie like, whatever, The Crow where revenge from beyond the grave, if that feels Zombie to you, then yes, I think this has a lot of meat for you. Otherwise, I would say my recommendation is mostly just on the general merits of it as a film, not as a Zombie film.

I agree. I think what's fun about all of this is where I think once we got Zombie Defined, which will happen in a few dozen movies here, our pleasure will become a different thing because right now what we're doing is the pleasure of storytellers figuring out how to tell this kind of story. And they don't even have the modern Zombie movie as a target, but it's all these pieces that are going to come together to make that modern Zombie movie. So, I'm just excited to see the experimentation and the lack of categories. Is he a Renvent? Is he a Golem? Is he a Zombie? Like, it's kind of fun that he's a little bit of all of those things, you know?

I'll be totally honest, John. I worry a little that we'll have like less to talk about when we get to movies that just use that cookie cutter modern Zombie template.

I think we'll be talking about different things. I think, you know, I thought at the beginning of this, we would be spending a lot of time talking about like, kill counts and types of kills or cool Zombie scenes, or do they use this Zombie trope really well? We haven't really had a chance to talk about those things, like My Four Pillars. But when we get to those movies, I think we'll have pleasure in like, how did they execute the tough moral choices in a way that was interesting? Like we talked about with Zombieland, about how they turn the tough moral choice on its head to create comedy kind of stuff. So I think the pleasures will be different. I think we're still defining the genre now.

So Brad, I turn to you with pleading eyes.

Yeah, I've avoided this as long as I can.

Please make this a trilogy of great works of art by telling us what the next movie will be.

Well, Andy, I think you need to check your contract with Zombie Strains. You signed up for Zombie Strains, not for the history of auteur cinema in the 20th century.

Here it comes.

So, having said that, we are going to 1939. And here's your poster.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, this is we're back in familiar territory here.

Yeah, this feels like a much older movie. Would you like me to describe it or would you like it? How about you describe it, Andy, and I'll get to read it. How about that?

Start with the title.

The title is The Devil's Daughter. The word that popped to my mind when I glanced at this was racism, so not to judge this particular book by its cover, but we have a lot of characters on here. It looks like we are maybe back in the jungles of the Caribbean or something, because this looks like a jungly thing. We have a scantily clad woman with devil horns drawn above her.

Next to a really amateurish drawing of the devil.

Yeah, it looks like, okay.

There's a man holding a pig here?

Yes, there is a black man holding a pig with a goofy expression on his face. Then at the top, we have a pith helmet wearing explorer, and he's looming over a woman who's lying on an altar of some sort. Wow, this is a hard one to describe. Oh, but the best part, I have not read the little tagline. I've missed these, John, so here we go. Sister against sister in a burning drama of love and hate in the tropics.

Yes. See the sensational blood dance. Okay. I think we got it.

This is an attempt to redo Wanga for a black audience. Remember, Wanga was made and because of the racial content mixing of white and black relationships, they couldn't release it for years. So they sort of remade it for the black audience with an all black cast.

Well, maybe I should withdraw my charge of racism. I'll confess by the aesthetic of this poster, I still feel a little nervous about this one, guys, but I am now noticing that there is, and I quote, quote, all star colored cast, unquote. So maybe we have had one or two films that surprised us with a more delicate and nuanced engagement with the topic of race than we expected. And I guess I need this to be a good film, guys. So I'm going to be optimistic.

We live in hope, Andy.

Well, and don't forget, this will be our last film for our first season.

Woohoo! I'm excited.

I'm excited. And I'm excited to share with listeners, you know, how we're going to sort of wrap up and celebrate the first season.

Yeah, absolutely. So everyone, join us next time for The Devil's Daughter. 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.