September 24, 2009 • 36 mins
In movies and stories, zombies are undead menaces that lurch around mindlessly, in search of flesh -- and braaaaaains! Where did the idea for zombies originate? Do they exist outside of fiction? Tune in to this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com to find out.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know
from House Stuff Works dot Com? Chief, Chief McLellan, how's
everything going? Things aren't going to bad? Men are taking
them pretty good. Chief. Do you think we'll be able
(00:22):
to defeat these things? Well, we killed nineteen of them
today right in this area. And it was the last
three we caught trying to claw their way into an
abandoned ship. They must have thought somebody was in there.
We heard him making all kinds of noise. We came
over and beat them off, blasted them down. Chief. If
I were surrounded by sixth raight of these things, would
I stand a chance with him? Well, there's no problem.
If you had a gun, shoot him in the head.
That's a sure way to kill him. If you don't
(00:43):
get yourself a club, retorch beat him or burn them,
they go up pretty easy. Well, Chief McLelland how long
do you think it will take you until you get
the situation under control? Well that's pretty hard to say.
We don't know how many of them are. Are we
know when we find them we can kill them. Are
they slow moving? Chief? Yeah? They're dead up and with that,
(01:08):
Mr George A. Romero pretty much set the scene for
all zombie movies to follow. Thanks for tuning in. This
is stuff you should know. I'm Josh Clark. This is
Charles W. Brain Eater, brilliant, Hey, and welcome to the podcast. Yeah, thanks, Chuck.
Somebody had to say it, right, yes, So how are
you doing? Try to get one of the zombies to
(01:28):
say it, that'd be pretty cool. I'm still wet. It's
still raining in Atlanta. Good lord, I feel like we
have remember that picture of the super cell I printed
out for the webcast, I feel like one of those
hovering picture in your wallet with you and show it
to people like kid, did you know that? In I
believe Ecuador, um once a year there's a heavy storm
(01:50):
and after about two hours of storm subsides and everybody
goes out and there's fish, dead fish laying everywhere, well
some still alive. The rain of fishes. The weird thing
is that they aren't found in any surrounding body of water,
nor are they saltwater fish. They are blind, underground dwellers
(02:10):
zombie fish. Well, yeah, let's use that as their segue. Cool, Chuck,
let's talk zombies. Alrighty, let's let's go with the real
stuff first. Did you know that there maybe such a
thing as real zombie? Yeah? I didn't know till I
read this. And where are you gonna go? If you
want to find a real zombie? You go to the source, man,
you go to the horse's mouth, you go to Haiti? Yes?
(02:32):
Is that that was Serpent the Rainbow? Right? Yeah? It
was West Craven Flick mid High School for me, very
scary Bill Pullman. Yeah. And the weird thing is is
you know Wes Craven is not known for making um
movies based on true stories, but that one was. So
it's one of my heroes. The ethnobotanist and anthropologist Dr
Wade Davis, who is Harvard grad. I think he has
(02:56):
a doctorate and two uh bachelor's from Harvard to more
than me. Yeah, and um he went down to Haiti
in the early nineteen eighties for what was called the
Zombie Project. Yes, because of a certain certain man drew
his attention. Right, how do you pronounce that, Claire Clarvius Narcies, Yeah,
(03:18):
that's how I pronounced it. Yeah. He started poking his
head around in nineteen eighty in a Haitian village and said, hey,
I died eighteen years ago. Yep, and uh. Apparently his
the similarity to UM his his original self. Uh, and
the facts that he knew about his former life passed
(03:40):
a battery of test questions. Yeah, that was enough to
make the make his friends family. I guess the estimates
about two people who saw him say that guy's a
zombie and I claimed a bocor brought him back to
life or brought him back to the undead state. Right,
Chuck so Clarvie shows up in night he had been.
(04:02):
The thing that makes him significant is that he had
been pronounced dead by American doctors, who apparently carry more
weight in the field of medicine and science. It was
documented that yeah, they documented his death. Um. So when
he showed up in nineteen eighty, he presented a substantial
case for the existence of zombies UM and a guy
(04:23):
named Dr Lamarck du Wan, who's a Haitian psychiatrist, interviewed him,
started interviewing boucour Um and got his hands on some
zombie powders right, and then entered Dr Wade Davis. Right. Now,
he wasn't the guy the originally said to go get
these powders, right now, That was Nathan Klein, right. He
(04:46):
wanted some of these powders to see if they could
be used as anesthetics and surgery. Yeah, which I don't
get that. Why not just use anesthetic unless I guess
he found some like cheaper, safer maybe anesthetics. Well, I mean,
if you come up with your own anesthetic, can imagine
there's some dollar amount attached to that. So let's talk
about this. He sends Dr Davis down to Haiti, and
(05:08):
Dr Davis kind of takes up where Dr do wan
Um left off, or maybe kind of takes over his research.
And uh, he himself interviews Boucore, which are again those
voodoo priests, and uh, interviews some of the zombies, some
of these undead people, right, so they said yeah, um,
and he uh, he comes to find that he concludes
(05:32):
that there is in fact such a thing as zombies.
They're specific to Haiti though as far as he can tell.
And it's it's a two step process, chuck. Uh. And
how to make someone a zombie, Well, first to have
to die, I would think, no, or is that a
three step process? I thought zombies had to be dead. First,
(05:53):
we're talking Haitian zombies. We'll get to the Hollywood zombie soon. Okay, Well,
the bocar has to capture their their soul with that
tibon age. Is that I suppose it's French? Right, Yeah,
that's apparently part of the soul directly connected to the individual,
and once he steal captures that, they are a zombie. Right.
(06:15):
That's that's Haitian folklore. Dr Davis, being a scientist, tried
to get beyond that. He found that most Haitians, most
educated Haitians, we should say, uh in those who live
in the city don't tend to believe in zombieism, even
those part of law it is. There's interesting what back
to eight thirty five, right yeah, Audicle two full six
(06:37):
of the Haitian Penal Code basically says that you can't
make someone a zombie, right that you'll be charged with
attempted murder or murder if the person actually manages to
get buried, even if they're not dead yet. For all
intents and purposes, it's still considered murder under Haitian law,
thank god. So okay, so Dr Davis gets past this
um this belief that's mainly held by rural, uneducated, poor
(07:02):
Haitians that the Bocore are um capable of sorcery and
can steal your soul. What do they get out of this?
That's what I could never pay because it is there
some money on the back end or something. No, no,
there's precisely no money involved, and it's not for any
personal gain their status. No. What it is is there
(07:22):
is a secret Haitian society called Bizango the Freemasons. No,
they're not the Freemasons, but they might as well be. Basically,
this is the group that de facto runs the country.
Um supposedly, but I mean this is this is a
documented this is from Davis's research. Um so the Bizango, Uh,
there are are not necessarily voodoo priests, but there are
(07:45):
voodoo priests who are part of the Bizango. And zombification
is only used in cases of punishment where a member
of the Bizango, say a family member, has gone against
the will of his or her family or the will
of the Bizango community as a whole. It's just a
severe punishment. So you would have been zombified in our house, stuff,
(08:08):
work works culture over and over and over again. And
actually um uh Clarius. Clarius Narcis said that he was
zombified because he at the behest of his brothers because
he wouldn't go along and selling uh the family land
(08:28):
with them. Another documented zombie named TM she's a woman.
She said that she was zombified by her at the
by the will of her family because she refused to
marry the man they wanted her to marry and she
had a baby by another man. So generally it's retaliation.
It's punishment for transgressions against Bizango Society or a person's
(08:50):
family who is a member that is a member of
Bizango Society. It's gotta be a little money on the
back end for the you would think so, But Davis
was adamant and his research that that's not the case,
right right, So okay, so let's get to how you
make somebody a zombie. Well, you've got the powder, right,
you have the powder and magic powder. What what Davis
found was that this powder he took I think eight
(09:12):
samples and found that seven of them had some ingredients
in common, right chuck, Yeah, I let me go with those. Yeah.
You found the puffer fish, which contains a deadly neurotoxin
called tetro dotoxin found a marine toad, which also has
a bunch of toxins, numerous toxins. You don't want to
lick this, I don't want to look that one. A
(09:33):
highla tree frog, which secretes an irritating but not deadly substance. Uh,
some human remains. We're in all of these. Those are
the common ingredients. And then things like skin irritants. They
figured like spiders and lizards ground up in there would
irritate your skin, same with the highlight tree frog. So
(09:54):
basically the reason you would want to have a skin
irritant is because the zombie powder is traditionally apply on
the skin, right exactly. So, so what happens is it's
applied to the skin and it creates cracks and and
breaks in the skin, and then it seeps in through
there right um, and then it produces this zombified person. Basically,
(10:17):
you you start to have trouble breathing, UM, don't respond
to stimuli. Know, you become paralyzed. You have a glassy
eyed stare, but you're you're you're still maintaining your normal
mental state. You're still aware of what's going on. You
just can't do anything right you start put in the
rainbow exactly. You know, you're getting buried alive and having
the sheet pulled over you. Right, That's actually what Narcis said.
(10:39):
He said that he remembered um and saw the doctors
pulling the sheet over his head after they pronounced him dead.
That's what that felt like. How was that for you? He?
I imagine it probably wasn't very good? Right, right? So yeah,
so you you know what's going on, you just can't
you can't do anything about it. And this struck Davis
um as particular, really interested because what is it? Check
(11:02):
the tetro to toxin. Davis started researching and he found
that in Japan, there's this stuff called fugu, right, which
is a kind of sushi delicacy that's made from the
puffer fish. It's very dangerous, but it apparently tastes like
a twinkie, right yeah, um, a raw twinkie. Um. But
if you if you make the cut wrong and too
(11:24):
much of this tetro to toxin ends up in it,
you get your poison. And the symptoms were virtually the
same as what people who are zombified reported. Right, that's awesome.
Should we trust our sushi chef? And I guess I
imagine that with Fugu you get what you pay for.
You don't want to cheap out with fo you want
to go dollar sushi on the food. So that's step one.
(11:46):
You administer the zombie powder and then the person uh
is pronounced dead to bury them, then you go get them. Well,
that's that's that's the the revelation moment. That's what makes
the bokor look like they done their thing. Nice reference
to our brainwatching podcast, thank you Yeah, and I love
(12:06):
the back door there for the boc or if it
doesn't work, there's a little loophole where he says that, um,
if the procedure doesn't work, that divine intervention can always
prevent this from happening, right, So anytime it doesn't work,
that's his go to. Or if um, if the powder
is prepared to kill too strongly. Right, so you've got
somebody right exactly, it's like, well, hey, it didn't work
(12:29):
this time. Uh. And Plus anyway, if once you've administering
the zombie powder, I guess under a Haitian law, you're
in for a penny, in for a pound anyway, right, Um,
So that's step one, right, Chuck, You've zombified the person.
Step two is to get to their grave within about
eight hours and you exhume them. And when you do,
you feed them something called a zombie cucumber. Was that
(12:51):
the salt, No, you don't want to feed them salt
that restores their senses. Right. The zombie cucumber is a
combination of sweet potato and uma. That sounds nice, jimsum weed,
which is one of the more hallucinogenic plants available to man.
That sounds real nice. Yeah. So when you've got somebody
who's already like half paralyzed and has been buried, that's
(13:13):
a pretty traumatic experience, right, Chuck, I would imagine. Yeah,
So the next step is to feed them a highly
hallucinogenic concoction and watch them go. So that's step two
of creating a zombie. What Davis came up with was
that none of this would work, Chuck, unless you were
in Haiti, because all of it had the social support
(13:38):
for a belief that zombies can exist. So once once
you've gone through this process, you're you're you know, you're
not an American thinking about I'm a zombie. As Tracy
Wilson put it in her how zombies work article that
we're basing this on. She said, Um, you know, in
another culture, if you have tetrated tetra to doxin, tetra
(13:59):
to toxin poisoning, you're just a toxin poisoning victim. But
in Haiti, because of this uh belief among some people
that there is such things as zombies that supports the experience,
and all of a sudden, this person is spending X
number of years is basically a zombie slave like snake handlers.
Most people would think you're just a redneck that got
(14:20):
picked by snake and they think that, you know, it
was all divine, right. Yeah, that's actually very much the same.
Nice one, Chuck, I just pulled that one out of
my Ea. That was great, smells delicious. So a lot
of people. Do you want to get to where people
think Davis wasn't exactly on the level on all levels? Yeah,
because it all sounded good until the article turned a
(14:42):
little bit and said no, not quite. Well, yeah, it
definitely depends on where you're coming from. But there's a
tremendous amount of criticism for somebody like Davis who's saying, yeah,
zombies exist, right, because one thing he did what you
mentioned was dig up bodies or supervised the digging up
what he was there at least there, and um, a
lot of scientists didn't like that. No, I thought that
(15:04):
kind of goes against the code of ethics somewhere across
the boundary, and I think I might agree with that. Um.
They also questioned the initial experiments with the powder and
if they were scientific enough, because he practices on like
monkeys and rats when he got back to the States, right, Yeah,
he made zombie rats. Yeah, that's pretty cool. So they
questioned the initial experiments. Um, they didn't know, like, you know,
(15:26):
if he had added anything else to the powder. I
guess he says he didn't, but they weren't there to
witness that, so they questioned that what else. Um, Oh yeah,
this one I found odd. They found samples contained no tetradotoxin. Yeah,
and he said that you guys, are you putting it
in some sort of solvent to to carry out these
tests or you may have destroyed it? Um if he
(15:49):
though maybe the I think one of the big Um.
The big points about this in Davis's defense is that
his reputation academically still very much attacked years after this. Yeah,
I mean he he published two books on it. Uh.
The Serpent in the Rainbow came out and he survived that.
I can't imagine that made him look you know, really
(16:11):
good among his academic peers. And this guy is still,
you know, um doing more and more research. Is a
National Geographic Explorer and residence, which, as you know, I
think is one of the coolest things ever. Um. So
his reputation still intact, and he's still a respected ethnobotanist
and anthropologist. Um. Another point that people made their chuck
was that a lot of these people, um, who were
(16:33):
supposedly zombies, uh, were chalked up to mistaken identity cases
of mental illness, kind of like Jerusalem syndrome. If you
live in Jerusalem, you're gonna have a much higher tendency
of believing that you're, you know, a reincarnated saint or
profit in Detroit? Exactly, what are you gonna say, Denver? Okay, yeah,
(16:54):
I'm glad you said Detroit. Though, are we moving on
to Denver now? Maybe A yeah? Um Man, So, Chuck,
that's the Haitian zombie, the real quote unquote real zombie.
We should say, as far as I could turn up,
there's no one who um satisfactorily debunked uh Clervius Narces' story.
(17:15):
And also I should also say that, um, at no
point did Davis say that these people were dead in
any way, shape or form, or they were strictly poisoned
by the specific toxin that brought them that lowered their
vital signs. They were pronounced dead and then they were
revived by uter and then believed that they were zombies,
(17:36):
but that they were not dead and brought back to life.
So those are real zombies. Let's do fake zombies. That started,
not started, but very much kick started with George Romero's
classic that we played earlier, Night of the Living Dead.
Oh did you hear that? That was our That was
(17:57):
our colleague Chris Palette. Did you the brains? I was
going to do that, but I didn't. Apparently Jerry said
Christ and nails it. So yeah, he does brains right,
That's that's pretty good too, Chuck. Uh. Yeah, So Romero
starts the whole thing off. Basically, he comes up with
all the rules of the game, like we heard at
(18:17):
the beginning of this podcast, right, Actually, Tracy did say
that movies as early as nineteen nineteen had zombies, So
save your fingers on the keyboard from typing in. No no, no.
He wasn't the first, but he definitely brought it into
the mainstream. Like and zombie movies forever after. We're based on,
like you said, his world and his rules. Like for example,
(18:38):
he was the one that said if you can get
if you can destroy a zombie's brain or detach its
brain from the rest of its body, that's it for
the zombie. Everybody knows if you want to kill the zombie,
you got to cut their head off basically, that's rome
or blow their head off with you know, a gun.
I should tell you that our colleague and sometimes standing
(19:00):
producer Matt Frederick, got really excited when he found out
we were doing a podcast on zomb He thinks that
a Remington pump action shotgun is the best weapon to
have against a zombie. I would say that in one
hand in a Samurai sword and another would be pretty cool.
You'd be doing well for yourself. I'm more a battle
(19:21):
axe man myself. Although that we're gonna talk about the
Canadian mathematician study. Eventually, we don't stand a chance if
there's a real zombie attack. Dude, Well, it depends on
what we do. Let's talk about that someone with Robert Smith. Oh, yeah,
with a question mark name. That's right, Yeah, guy has
a question mark at the end of his name. Robert
(19:41):
Smith and one of his colleagues, both mathematicians at the
University of Ottawa. They used um contagious disease models, yeah,
pandemic models to study out the math of whether or
not we could actually survive a zombie attack. Slow moving Yes.
They specifically picked the classic slow moving zombie and they
still found that unless humans strike fast, strike off, and
(20:06):
and strike increasingly escalatingly. Um, we're in big trouble, right,
so that you can't do the Oh geez, we gotta
learn a humanitarian way to put these zombies down, Like
District nine. You can't do it. You gotta go in.
Don't even bother trying to figure out how to how
to cure it. You just have to kill everybody you find. Um.
(20:26):
And that that was another thing that Romero established with
Nine of the Living Dead was that zombies beget zombies. Right.
In his version, what happened was the zombie was somebody
who was killed by zombie was brought back because of
this radiation UH from a satellite that it returned to
Earth that was causing the dead to rise in the
first place. So if you were killed while that radiation
(20:47):
was still around, you were inevitably going to come back.
And also, did you know that George Romero got his
start shooting segments for Mr. Rogers Neighborhood. I think I
didn't know that. Yeah, he also established some other rules
about their strength. They're very strong, but typically slow moving,
although there have been a movie off shoots with the
(21:09):
fast moving zombie. Of course it depends well for their
faster slow well, it's like twenty eight days later. It's
technically not a zombie movie because no one who is
zombie is a zombie is actually dead. Now they're infected
by that whatever that was, that disease. The infection. Yeah,
I don't remember what it's called. But there were some
other fast moving zombies I've seen in other movies. Resident
(21:32):
Evil the game, they had some herky jerky, fast moving zombies.
Right again, Matt Frederick thinks is the perfect zombie um motion.
What herky jerky herky jerky whatever is in Resident Evil
He's hip with because he said, that's where uh, the
pump shotgun is the slow movers. Yeah, there are a
(21:53):
lot more. They're more comforting. Yeah, but it was always
funny to me to watch those movies and I think
you're all faster than the zombies. How can you ever
get criss but you get surrounded. That's what happened. Surrounded
is the big problem. Are we going to get into that.
How to avoid getting eaten by a zombie? Yeah? Okay,
well we should. We should wrap up the rules first.
(22:14):
They're not they're in pervious to pain. Yeah, Like you
can hit him in the face of the baseball bat
and they'll just keep lumbering forward. Um, so you really
have to um cut their head off. You can cut
their arm off and they'll walk with two one arm.
They'll cut a leg off and they'll hop at you.
Oh yeah, their arm will come at you all. Um.
Return to the living dead, yeah or evil dead? Yes,
(22:38):
to dead by dawn by dawn, will be by dawn,
and they are driven to eat, relentlessly driven to eat.
They're afraid of fire and light, so they'll come out
at night. They want to eat your brain. That actually
came later that largely Return to the Living Dead from
where they actually have a zombie pinned down and it's
(23:00):
just this woman's torso and arms and head and um
this medical examiner, doctor um says, why do you eat humans?
She goes, not humans brains. That's a clip you sent
me today. Let's hear Pullett do it again. Nice? Thank
you Pullette, so good. Um? Yeah, that was that clip
(23:22):
I sent you. That isn't it? Yeah? Um? And what else, Chuck?
Are there anymore? How are zombies created? In uh Romero's version,
it was radiation from a sad over returning satellite and
night of the comment It was a comment uh in
twenty eight days later. If you want to consider that
zombie movie and Resident Evil, it was a virus that
(23:44):
was passed around. I love Night of a comment. By
the way, I just want to go on record, yeah
I love that movie. That was a good movie. Well
it's it's off. It's very dated and kind of very
awful eighties movie. But it was dated the second it
came out. It was It was really for a thirteen
year old, you know, watching be on a Saturday afternoon.
It was pretty perfect. Did you have a crush on
the younger sister too? I had a crush on both.
(24:04):
A couple of hot cheerleader chicks it was nice. I learned.
I learned a lot by watching that thing. But you did, Chuck,
came of age to none of the comment they did. Alright,
so find them, Yeah, I mean, Chuck. Let's say that, Um,
Robert Smith, his prediction comes true. And by the way,
we should say, their paper is called when Zombies Attack
(24:25):
And there was an exclamation point. And Smith, he's big
on punctuation. You now include an exclamation point at the
end of your name and your email signature. I don't
think that. So right, let's say we were getting attacked.
Let's say Robert Smith's uh is right on the money.
What what do we do? Well, first of all, you
(24:46):
want to go to a place. If you're going to retreat,
you want to retreat to a place that has plenty
of supplies. Preferably one of those walmarts I don't know
if they're still around or not that also sells guns
and ammunition and groceries. She the superstore, supercenter, super death center. Um,
you want one of those because you want to hold
(25:06):
up in there. You can last as long as you
need to. There's probably communications equipment in there. And again
you've got guns, hose, machetes, anything, blood your favorite weapon.
I told you a battle acts. Oh that was yours. Yeah,
you don't have changed mind. What crossbow with those uh
(25:26):
rambo exploding arrows. That would be sweet, That would be awesome. Wow.
I would like to kill them before they even get
close to me. Yeah, I think you'd be unsettling to
to be face to face. So where are we were?
We're in the Walmart or Costco or Target or wherever,
and the zombies are attacking. Uh, you want to stay
(25:50):
away from where there's people, So that would be a
good place. Yeah. That was a really good point that
Tracy made. That the the if you're in the minutes
of a zombie epidemic, just like any other epidemic, it's
going to spread more quickly and and have more casualties
in a populated area. If you live in Manhattan, you
probably want to get the heck to Long Island. I
(26:10):
would say, I'm sure too sweet, But as anyone who's
seen twenty days later knows, you still want to be
on your guard, even out in the sticks. Yeah, the
old cottage in the in the marsh, that's not a
good place to go either, because they're gonna be waiting
for you in the movie version. You want to barricade
everything so Michael Jackson and his cohorts can't get in
(26:32):
you like that? Um, you never, Actually, that's that's more
applicable than ever, chuck. Uh. You want to not back
yourself into a corner, because that's what we talked about.
You always end up getting surrounded and just like a thriller,
I believe she backed herself into a corner. Literally, yes,
she did in that house, and then like walls came
(26:53):
or hands came out of the wall. She is in trouble.
I don't know if i'd want to be inside at all,
to come to think of it, I'd want to get
my supplies and like go to the mountains. That's what
i'd do, Like getting a tent. I don't know if
a tent offers that much protection. You want to be
able to barricade, well, I would just want to be
in the open so I could run. I would never
want a wall around me anywhere. That's just how I
(27:15):
do it. That's how I party. Give us some worm,
that's how you party with zombie death. Well, Tracy said,
wait for rescue and make long term preparations for your survival.
I guess so but what if you want to fight
the zombies. I think you can do both at the
same time. Hers just kind of a run and hide mentality.
Yeah yeah, um, I think Tracy would be good to
have on your team. It would be good to have
(27:37):
somebody like us arm with battle axes, crossbows, pump action shotguns.
But then have Tracy, you know, maybe behind the semicircle
thinking about what we need to be doing a year
from now. Maybe mix it all together, because you don't
want just you know, bone headed, you know thick mc
rock skulls, you know you're hie. Yeah. During the making
(28:01):
of Zombie Land when he blamed remember he attacked those photographers,
He got all in trouble because he attacked some photographers
and his excuse was that he was playing a zombie
hunter in this movie that I think it was actually
shot in Atlanta called Zombie Land, And he told the
judge that he was so caught up in that character
and so in characters a zombie hunter, that he reacted
(28:23):
to aggressively to the photographers who followed them around like zombies.
I guess that man is a pro yeah joint and
got off scot free. Probably probably at least he didn't
play Bongo s naked or anything like that. Yeah. Who
was at McConaughey. Yeah, nice, didn't you hang out with him? Yeah?
It's actually speaking of a zombie land. I just saw
(28:47):
today where um, the director of that film was gonna
have Patrick Swayze play a Swazi zombie like as himself
come back from the dead Swayze zombie. Originally it was
written into this script and this was before he got
sick or anything. Okay, so obviously no, no, no, I
mean the movie is just coming out, so this is
a while ago. And then he got sick. He contacted
(29:08):
him and everything, and he had fallen ill and couldn't
do it. And I think he got some other big
star to do it, and they're trying to keep that
a secret or something. Who is it? I don't know this.
I tried to find out. I couldn't. When's it come out?
I don't know. Soon. I saw the preview the other day,
so soon, okay, um, chuck. Basically, there's some pretty common
sense things you want to avoid an a zombie attack,
(29:30):
like don't lock yourself in a car that you don't
have keys to. Um, we'll call these movie things. This
is what always happens movie things. Yeah, and the movie
they get in they don't have the key, and then
you're thinking, why did you get in the car if
you didn't have a key? Right? You don't want to
leave any any implements that a zombie could use as
a weapon out for them to find and pick up. Yeah,
(29:52):
because they can use basic weapons only. Do not give
a weapon to an hysterical person. You have no idea
what they're going to do. At the very least, they're
not going to use it properly, and you'll end up
really regretting that. Um. There's other stuff, you know, like
getting into an elevator and a building infestive with zombies. Um,
(30:12):
you don't want to go on a retreat to like
a seller or something without taking supplies with you. God
knows how long you're gonna be down there. I got one.
How about you fight the sudden urge to make out
with a zombie? Yeah, that's probably a good thing to do.
Sure that happened in a Night of Living Dead, wasn't
it really? Yeah? The girl was like jihnny oh yeah yeah,
and he was like yeah, so that happens sometimes. Um, chuck,
(30:38):
let me talk about one of my favorite zombies re Animator.
Did you see it? You know that was a Lovecraft
story based on clas classic film. Yeah. Um, and you
remember the guy decapitates uh, either as mentor or the
dean of the school, I can't remember, Herbert Weston. He
decapitates him with a shovel and he's like, awesome, I've
(30:58):
got another specimen to work on. And he uses the
serum to reanimate both the head and the body, which
is highly unusual because in most zombie films, once the
heads attached from the body, that's it. But he was
reanimating it after it was detached. So hence that's how
you break the rules. Okay, you know there were sequels
(31:19):
to that too, I think there were. But do you
know what's particularly unsettling about Reanimator that there's actual research
into that very stuff going on right now into human
reanimation Max Plank Institute. I was reading an article, um
that was linked from a crack blog post. You love
that website, I do. It's great, um, and it was
(31:42):
it was I think from two thousand and they're like,
we're getting close. Actually we found out that you know, um,
it's not cardiac arrest your brain doesn't die as a
result of cardiac arrest like we thought. Instead, we destroy
it when we try to reanimate it. So now we're
trying to be a little more anil And actually we've
gotten a brain to kind of function after it's been
(32:03):
dead for an hour. We didn't get the whole organism reanimated,
but we're working on it. And I just went and
that was what kind of makes sense? You know that,
like the was it Futurama that had the different heads
in the jars and they could actually still talking everything. Yeah,
I mean from the neck down, it's really not a
lot going on. Besides, you know, organ function and moving.
(32:26):
If you could find a way to wire the brain
up and keep it from decaying, you keep partying, man, Yeah,
keep on trucking. Well, let's see. If you want to
keep on trucking with zombies, you can go read the
article written by or Steam colleague Tracy Wilson, who knows
a lot about zombies, probably more than you should know.
It's a good one. You can type in zombies in
(32:48):
the handy search bar at how stuff works dot com,
which means it's it's time for listener mail. Yes, the
return of listener mail. Uh, Josh, I gonna all this
listener mail from the dude in the band, okay that
you know about? Hey there, Chuck and Josh and Jerry.
(33:09):
I'm riding on behalf of my band. Were an indie
rock and roll band from Eagle Rock, Glendale, California, which
is where I used to live. We've been lucky enough
on our tour for a good chunk of the year
to be on tour for a good chunk of the
year opening for bigger acts. While on tour, we constantly
fight over who gets control. The CD player in the
van gets nasty sometimes, and we frequently run in opposite
(33:30):
directions to our trusty iPods. It's pathetic, five guys in
a smelly van, each on our own little world, not talking,
tired and cranky. I quickly learned to resent touring and
the forty five minutes on stage wasn't worth the hours
of driving and sleeping in dumpy motels and on couches.
So they were not having a good run of it. Sadly,
I like this Uh. I like this exposition right Uh. Well,
(33:54):
as we were headed back on the road, our old
bassis sent us off with a spindle of stuff you
should know podcasts were into a CD. They were reluctant
at first to throw it into the CD player, but
find ourselves intrigued by how cannibalism works, that our body farms.
That'd saould be a good name in for indie rockers.
It was one of the first episodes we listened to.
(34:15):
We were hooked. After that, the iPods went away, the
band started talking more in the van. Uh. The podcast
ignited debates. We joked about our favorite lucid dreams, cringed
at the image of a dog eating its owner's face,
drooled at the thought of a banana cream twinkie. I
also panic because my girlfriend recently dyed her hair red.
So he just wanted to say thanks for bringing the
(34:36):
spark back in their touring. They listened to twenty hours
of the show driving through Kansas in Montana and uh,
we've been all around the country with them, And they
burned another c D for the next upcoming tour. Did
you just have a stroke a second again? So they're
playing here in Atlanta actually soon. The Henry Clay people, right,
the Henry Clay People's name of the band, and they
(34:58):
are actually awesome. Yeah, and you have their in their music, right. Yeah,
they're great. I like it a lot, and we get
people a bit sending their band stuff sometimes and it's
not very good. Are we gonna go? I'm gonna go.
I wrote him back and he still has not responded,
so maybe he's on tour and can't get to put
me down for a plus one, Jerry, you're going, all right? Yeah,
we're gonna be there at the Variety of Playhouse in
(35:19):
Atlanta October seven, rocking out to the Henry Flay people.
Nice opening up for Airborne Toxic event. Yeah, which is
a big tour for Henry lay people. That's good for them. Yes,
it's good rock and roll, raucous rock and roll. You
know it's funny? Is That's exactly what Chuck said in
the email to me and Jerry when he's like, I
like these guys, raucous rock and roll. It's good. It's
like good drinking music, like Early Stones or something. Right on,
(35:41):
let's go October seven? All right, Well, if you want
to see if you can entice Chuck, Jerry and I
to come out to see whatever, or if we left
out your favorite zombie movie, which we inevitably have, you
can send an email inviting us and or chastising us
to stuff podcast how stuff works dot Com. For more
(36:08):
on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff
works dot com. Want more how stuff works, check out
our blogs on the house stuff works dot Com home page.
M HM brought to you by the reinvented two thousand
twelve camera. It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know
from House Stuff Works dot Com? Chief, Chief McLellan, how's
everything going? Things aren't going to bad? Men are taking
them pretty good. Chief. Do you think we'll be able
(00:22):
to defeat these things? Well, we killed nineteen of them
today right in this area. And it was the last
three we caught trying to claw their way into an
abandoned ship. They must have thought somebody was in there.
We heard him making all kinds of noise. We came
over and beat them off, blasted them down. Chief. If
I were surrounded by sixth raight of these things, would
I stand a chance with him? Well, there's no problem.
If you had a gun, shoot him in the head.
That's a sure way to kill him. If you don't
(00:43):
get yourself a club, retorch beat him or burn them,
they go up pretty easy. Well, Chief McLelland how long
do you think it will take you until you get
the situation under control? Well that's pretty hard to say.
We don't know how many of them are. Are we
know when we find them we can kill them. Are
they slow moving? Chief? Yeah? They're dead up and with that,
(01:08):
Mr George A. Romero pretty much set the scene for
all zombie movies to follow. Thanks for tuning in. This
is stuff you should know. I'm Josh Clark. This is
Charles W. Brain Eater, brilliant, Hey, and welcome to the podcast. Yeah, thanks, Chuck.
Somebody had to say it, right, yes, So how are
you doing? Try to get one of the zombies to
(01:28):
say it, that'd be pretty cool. I'm still wet. It's
still raining in Atlanta. Good lord, I feel like we
have remember that picture of the super cell I printed
out for the webcast, I feel like one of those
hovering picture in your wallet with you and show it
to people like kid, did you know that? In I
believe Ecuador, um once a year there's a heavy storm
(01:50):
and after about two hours of storm subsides and everybody
goes out and there's fish, dead fish laying everywhere, well
some still alive. The rain of fishes. The weird thing
is that they aren't found in any surrounding body of water,
nor are they saltwater fish. They are blind, underground dwellers
(02:10):
zombie fish. Well, yeah, let's use that as their segue. Cool, Chuck,
let's talk zombies. Alrighty, let's let's go with the real
stuff first. Did you know that there maybe such a
thing as real zombie? Yeah? I didn't know till I
read this. And where are you gonna go? If you
want to find a real zombie? You go to the source, man,
you go to the horse's mouth, you go to Haiti? Yes?
(02:32):
Is that that was Serpent the Rainbow? Right? Yeah? It
was West Craven Flick mid High School for me, very
scary Bill Pullman. Yeah. And the weird thing is is
you know Wes Craven is not known for making um
movies based on true stories, but that one was. So
it's one of my heroes. The ethnobotanist and anthropologist Dr
Wade Davis, who is Harvard grad. I think he has
(02:56):
a doctorate and two uh bachelor's from Harvard to more
than me. Yeah, and um he went down to Haiti
in the early nineteen eighties for what was called the
Zombie Project. Yes, because of a certain certain man drew
his attention. Right, how do you pronounce that, Claire Clarvius Narcies, Yeah,
(03:18):
that's how I pronounced it. Yeah. He started poking his
head around in nineteen eighty in a Haitian village and said, hey,
I died eighteen years ago. Yep, and uh. Apparently his
the similarity to UM his his original self. Uh, and
the facts that he knew about his former life passed
(03:40):
a battery of test questions. Yeah, that was enough to
make the make his friends family. I guess the estimates
about two people who saw him say that guy's a
zombie and I claimed a bocor brought him back to
life or brought him back to the undead state. Right,
Chuck so Clarvie shows up in night he had been.
(04:02):
The thing that makes him significant is that he had
been pronounced dead by American doctors, who apparently carry more
weight in the field of medicine and science. It was
documented that yeah, they documented his death. Um. So when
he showed up in nineteen eighty, he presented a substantial
case for the existence of zombies UM and a guy
(04:23):
named Dr Lamarck du Wan, who's a Haitian psychiatrist, interviewed him,
started interviewing boucour Um and got his hands on some
zombie powders right, and then entered Dr Wade Davis. Right. Now,
he wasn't the guy the originally said to go get
these powders, right now, That was Nathan Klein, right. He
(04:46):
wanted some of these powders to see if they could
be used as anesthetics and surgery. Yeah, which I don't
get that. Why not just use anesthetic unless I guess
he found some like cheaper, safer maybe anesthetics. Well, I mean,
if you come up with your own anesthetic, can imagine
there's some dollar amount attached to that. So let's talk
about this. He sends Dr Davis down to Haiti, and
(05:08):
Dr Davis kind of takes up where Dr do wan
Um left off, or maybe kind of takes over his research.
And uh, he himself interviews Boucore, which are again those
voodoo priests, and uh, interviews some of the zombies, some
of these undead people, right, so they said yeah, um,
and he uh, he comes to find that he concludes
(05:32):
that there is in fact such a thing as zombies.
They're specific to Haiti though as far as he can tell.
And it's it's a two step process, chuck. Uh. And
how to make someone a zombie, Well, first to have
to die, I would think, no, or is that a
three step process? I thought zombies had to be dead. First,
(05:53):
we're talking Haitian zombies. We'll get to the Hollywood zombie soon. Okay, Well,
the bocar has to capture their their soul with that
tibon age. Is that I suppose it's French? Right, Yeah,
that's apparently part of the soul directly connected to the individual,
and once he steal captures that, they are a zombie. Right.
(06:15):
That's that's Haitian folklore. Dr Davis, being a scientist, tried
to get beyond that. He found that most Haitians, most
educated Haitians, we should say, uh in those who live
in the city don't tend to believe in zombieism, even
those part of law it is. There's interesting what back
to eight thirty five, right yeah, Audicle two full six
(06:37):
of the Haitian Penal Code basically says that you can't
make someone a zombie, right that you'll be charged with
attempted murder or murder if the person actually manages to
get buried, even if they're not dead yet. For all
intents and purposes, it's still considered murder under Haitian law,
thank god. So okay, so Dr Davis gets past this
um this belief that's mainly held by rural, uneducated, poor
(07:02):
Haitians that the Bocore are um capable of sorcery and
can steal your soul. What do they get out of this?
That's what I could never pay because it is there
some money on the back end or something. No, no,
there's precisely no money involved, and it's not for any
personal gain their status. No. What it is is there
(07:22):
is a secret Haitian society called Bizango the Freemasons. No,
they're not the Freemasons, but they might as well be. Basically,
this is the group that de facto runs the country.
Um supposedly, but I mean this is this is a
documented this is from Davis's research. Um so the Bizango, Uh,
there are are not necessarily voodoo priests, but there are
(07:45):
voodoo priests who are part of the Bizango. And zombification
is only used in cases of punishment where a member
of the Bizango, say a family member, has gone against
the will of his or her family or the will
of the Bizango community as a whole. It's just a
severe punishment. So you would have been zombified in our house, stuff,
(08:08):
work works culture over and over and over again. And
actually um uh Clarius. Clarius Narcis said that he was
zombified because he at the behest of his brothers because
he wouldn't go along and selling uh the family land
(08:28):
with them. Another documented zombie named TM she's a woman.
She said that she was zombified by her at the
by the will of her family because she refused to
marry the man they wanted her to marry and she
had a baby by another man. So generally it's retaliation.
It's punishment for transgressions against Bizango Society or a person's
(08:50):
family who is a member that is a member of
Bizango Society. It's gotta be a little money on the
back end for the you would think so, But Davis
was adamant and his research that that's not the case,
right right, So okay, so let's get to how you
make somebody a zombie. Well, you've got the powder, right,
you have the powder and magic powder. What what Davis
found was that this powder he took I think eight
(09:12):
samples and found that seven of them had some ingredients
in common, right chuck, Yeah, I let me go with those. Yeah.
You found the puffer fish, which contains a deadly neurotoxin
called tetro dotoxin found a marine toad, which also has
a bunch of toxins, numerous toxins. You don't want to
lick this, I don't want to look that one. A
(09:33):
highla tree frog, which secretes an irritating but not deadly substance. Uh,
some human remains. We're in all of these. Those are
the common ingredients. And then things like skin irritants. They
figured like spiders and lizards ground up in there would
irritate your skin, same with the highlight tree frog. So
(09:54):
basically the reason you would want to have a skin
irritant is because the zombie powder is traditionally apply on
the skin, right exactly. So, so what happens is it's
applied to the skin and it creates cracks and and
breaks in the skin, and then it seeps in through
there right um, and then it produces this zombified person. Basically,
(10:17):
you you start to have trouble breathing, UM, don't respond
to stimuli. Know, you become paralyzed. You have a glassy
eyed stare, but you're you're you're still maintaining your normal
mental state. You're still aware of what's going on. You
just can't do anything right you start put in the
rainbow exactly. You know, you're getting buried alive and having
the sheet pulled over you. Right, That's actually what Narcis said.
(10:39):
He said that he remembered um and saw the doctors
pulling the sheet over his head after they pronounced him dead.
That's what that felt like. How was that for you? He?
I imagine it probably wasn't very good? Right, right? So yeah,
so you you know what's going on, you just can't
you can't do anything about it. And this struck Davis
um as particular, really interested because what is it? Check
(11:02):
the tetro to toxin. Davis started researching and he found
that in Japan, there's this stuff called fugu, right, which
is a kind of sushi delicacy that's made from the
puffer fish. It's very dangerous, but it apparently tastes like
a twinkie, right yeah, um, a raw twinkie. Um. But
if you if you make the cut wrong and too
(11:24):
much of this tetro to toxin ends up in it,
you get your poison. And the symptoms were virtually the
same as what people who are zombified reported. Right, that's awesome.
Should we trust our sushi chef? And I guess I
imagine that with Fugu you get what you pay for.
You don't want to cheap out with fo you want
to go dollar sushi on the food. So that's step one.
(11:46):
You administer the zombie powder and then the person uh
is pronounced dead to bury them, then you go get them. Well,
that's that's that's the the revelation moment. That's what makes
the bokor look like they done their thing. Nice reference
to our brainwatching podcast, thank you Yeah, and I love
(12:06):
the back door there for the boc or if it
doesn't work, there's a little loophole where he says that, um,
if the procedure doesn't work, that divine intervention can always
prevent this from happening, right, So anytime it doesn't work,
that's his go to. Or if um, if the powder
is prepared to kill too strongly. Right, so you've got
somebody right exactly, it's like, well, hey, it didn't work
(12:29):
this time. Uh. And Plus anyway, if once you've administering
the zombie powder, I guess under a Haitian law, you're
in for a penny, in for a pound anyway, right, Um,
So that's step one, right, Chuck, You've zombified the person.
Step two is to get to their grave within about
eight hours and you exhume them. And when you do,
you feed them something called a zombie cucumber. Was that
(12:51):
the salt, No, you don't want to feed them salt
that restores their senses. Right. The zombie cucumber is a
combination of sweet potato and uma. That sounds nice, jimsum weed,
which is one of the more hallucinogenic plants available to man.
That sounds real nice. Yeah. So when you've got somebody
who's already like half paralyzed and has been buried, that's
(13:13):
a pretty traumatic experience, right, Chuck, I would imagine. Yeah,
So the next step is to feed them a highly
hallucinogenic concoction and watch them go. So that's step two
of creating a zombie. What Davis came up with was
that none of this would work, Chuck, unless you were
in Haiti, because all of it had the social support
(13:38):
for a belief that zombies can exist. So once once
you've gone through this process, you're you're you know, you're
not an American thinking about I'm a zombie. As Tracy
Wilson put it in her how zombies work article that
we're basing this on. She said, Um, you know, in
another culture, if you have tetrated tetra to doxin, tetra
(13:59):
to toxin poisoning, you're just a toxin poisoning victim. But
in Haiti, because of this uh belief among some people
that there is such things as zombies that supports the experience,
and all of a sudden, this person is spending X
number of years is basically a zombie slave like snake handlers.
Most people would think you're just a redneck that got
(14:20):
picked by snake and they think that, you know, it
was all divine, right. Yeah, that's actually very much the same.
Nice one, Chuck, I just pulled that one out of
my Ea. That was great, smells delicious. So a lot
of people. Do you want to get to where people
think Davis wasn't exactly on the level on all levels? Yeah,
because it all sounded good until the article turned a
(14:42):
little bit and said no, not quite. Well, yeah, it
definitely depends on where you're coming from. But there's a
tremendous amount of criticism for somebody like Davis who's saying, yeah,
zombies exist, right, because one thing he did what you
mentioned was dig up bodies or supervised the digging up
what he was there at least there, and um, a
lot of scientists didn't like that. No, I thought that
(15:04):
kind of goes against the code of ethics somewhere across
the boundary, and I think I might agree with that. Um.
They also questioned the initial experiments with the powder and
if they were scientific enough, because he practices on like
monkeys and rats when he got back to the States, right, Yeah,
he made zombie rats. Yeah, that's pretty cool. So they
questioned the initial experiments. Um, they didn't know, like, you know,
(15:26):
if he had added anything else to the powder. I
guess he says he didn't, but they weren't there to
witness that, so they questioned that what else. Um, Oh yeah,
this one I found odd. They found samples contained no tetradotoxin. Yeah,
and he said that you guys, are you putting it
in some sort of solvent to to carry out these
tests or you may have destroyed it? Um if he
(15:49):
though maybe the I think one of the big Um.
The big points about this in Davis's defense is that
his reputation academically still very much attacked years after this. Yeah,
I mean he he published two books on it. Uh.
The Serpent in the Rainbow came out and he survived that.
I can't imagine that made him look you know, really
(16:11):
good among his academic peers. And this guy is still,
you know, um doing more and more research. Is a
National Geographic Explorer and residence, which, as you know, I
think is one of the coolest things ever. Um. So
his reputation still intact, and he's still a respected ethnobotanist
and anthropologist. Um. Another point that people made their chuck
was that a lot of these people, um, who were
(16:33):
supposedly zombies, uh, were chalked up to mistaken identity cases
of mental illness, kind of like Jerusalem syndrome. If you
live in Jerusalem, you're gonna have a much higher tendency
of believing that you're, you know, a reincarnated saint or
profit in Detroit? Exactly, what are you gonna say, Denver? Okay, yeah,
(16:54):
I'm glad you said Detroit. Though, are we moving on
to Denver now? Maybe A yeah? Um Man, So, Chuck,
that's the Haitian zombie, the real quote unquote real zombie.
We should say, as far as I could turn up,
there's no one who um satisfactorily debunked uh Clervius Narces' story.
(17:15):
And also I should also say that, um, at no
point did Davis say that these people were dead in
any way, shape or form, or they were strictly poisoned
by the specific toxin that brought them that lowered their
vital signs. They were pronounced dead and then they were
revived by uter and then believed that they were zombies,
(17:36):
but that they were not dead and brought back to life.
So those are real zombies. Let's do fake zombies. That started,
not started, but very much kick started with George Romero's
classic that we played earlier, Night of the Living Dead.
Oh did you hear that? That was our That was
(17:57):
our colleague Chris Palette. Did you the brains? I was
going to do that, but I didn't. Apparently Jerry said
Christ and nails it. So yeah, he does brains right,
That's that's pretty good too, Chuck. Uh. Yeah, So Romero
starts the whole thing off. Basically, he comes up with
all the rules of the game, like we heard at
(18:17):
the beginning of this podcast, right, Actually, Tracy did say
that movies as early as nineteen nineteen had zombies, So
save your fingers on the keyboard from typing in. No no, no.
He wasn't the first, but he definitely brought it into
the mainstream. Like and zombie movies forever after. We're based on,
like you said, his world and his rules. Like for example,
(18:38):
he was the one that said if you can get
if you can destroy a zombie's brain or detach its
brain from the rest of its body, that's it for
the zombie. Everybody knows if you want to kill the zombie,
you got to cut their head off basically, that's rome
or blow their head off with you know, a gun.
I should tell you that our colleague and sometimes standing
(19:00):
producer Matt Frederick, got really excited when he found out
we were doing a podcast on zomb He thinks that
a Remington pump action shotgun is the best weapon to
have against a zombie. I would say that in one
hand in a Samurai sword and another would be pretty cool.
You'd be doing well for yourself. I'm more a battle
(19:21):
axe man myself. Although that we're gonna talk about the
Canadian mathematician study. Eventually, we don't stand a chance if
there's a real zombie attack. Dude, Well, it depends on
what we do. Let's talk about that someone with Robert Smith. Oh, yeah,
with a question mark name. That's right, Yeah, guy has
a question mark at the end of his name. Robert
(19:41):
Smith and one of his colleagues, both mathematicians at the
University of Ottawa. They used um contagious disease models, yeah,
pandemic models to study out the math of whether or
not we could actually survive a zombie attack. Slow moving Yes.
They specifically picked the classic slow moving zombie and they
still found that unless humans strike fast, strike off, and
(20:06):
and strike increasingly escalatingly. Um, we're in big trouble, right,
so that you can't do the Oh geez, we gotta
learn a humanitarian way to put these zombies down, Like
District nine. You can't do it. You gotta go in.
Don't even bother trying to figure out how to how
to cure it. You just have to kill everybody you find. Um.
(20:26):
And that that was another thing that Romero established with
Nine of the Living Dead was that zombies beget zombies. Right.
In his version, what happened was the zombie was somebody
who was killed by zombie was brought back because of
this radiation UH from a satellite that it returned to
Earth that was causing the dead to rise in the
first place. So if you were killed while that radiation
(20:47):
was still around, you were inevitably going to come back.
And also, did you know that George Romero got his
start shooting segments for Mr. Rogers Neighborhood. I think I
didn't know that. Yeah, he also established some other rules
about their strength. They're very strong, but typically slow moving,
although there have been a movie off shoots with the
(21:09):
fast moving zombie. Of course it depends well for their
faster slow well, it's like twenty eight days later. It's
technically not a zombie movie because no one who is
zombie is a zombie is actually dead. Now they're infected
by that whatever that was, that disease. The infection. Yeah,
I don't remember what it's called. But there were some
other fast moving zombies I've seen in other movies. Resident
(21:32):
Evil the game, they had some herky jerky, fast moving zombies.
Right again, Matt Frederick thinks is the perfect zombie um motion.
What herky jerky herky jerky whatever is in Resident Evil
He's hip with because he said, that's where uh, the
pump shotgun is the slow movers. Yeah, there are a
(21:53):
lot more. They're more comforting. Yeah, but it was always
funny to me to watch those movies and I think
you're all faster than the zombies. How can you ever
get criss but you get surrounded. That's what happened. Surrounded
is the big problem. Are we going to get into that.
How to avoid getting eaten by a zombie? Yeah? Okay,
well we should. We should wrap up the rules first.
(22:14):
They're not they're in pervious to pain. Yeah, Like you
can hit him in the face of the baseball bat
and they'll just keep lumbering forward. Um, so you really
have to um cut their head off. You can cut
their arm off and they'll walk with two one arm.
They'll cut a leg off and they'll hop at you.
Oh yeah, their arm will come at you all. Um.
Return to the living dead, yeah or evil dead? Yes,
(22:38):
to dead by dawn by dawn, will be by dawn,
and they are driven to eat, relentlessly driven to eat.
They're afraid of fire and light, so they'll come out
at night. They want to eat your brain. That actually
came later that largely Return to the Living Dead from
where they actually have a zombie pinned down and it's
(23:00):
just this woman's torso and arms and head and um
this medical examiner, doctor um says, why do you eat humans?
She goes, not humans brains. That's a clip you sent
me today. Let's hear Pullett do it again. Nice? Thank
you Pullette, so good. Um? Yeah, that was that clip
(23:22):
I sent you. That isn't it? Yeah? Um? And what else, Chuck?
Are there anymore? How are zombies created? In uh Romero's version,
it was radiation from a sad over returning satellite and
night of the comment It was a comment uh in
twenty eight days later. If you want to consider that
zombie movie and Resident Evil, it was a virus that
(23:44):
was passed around. I love Night of a comment. By
the way, I just want to go on record, yeah
I love that movie. That was a good movie. Well
it's it's off. It's very dated and kind of very
awful eighties movie. But it was dated the second it
came out. It was It was really for a thirteen
year old, you know, watching be on a Saturday afternoon.
It was pretty perfect. Did you have a crush on
the younger sister too? I had a crush on both.
(24:04):
A couple of hot cheerleader chicks it was nice. I learned.
I learned a lot by watching that thing. But you did, Chuck,
came of age to none of the comment they did. Alright,
so find them, Yeah, I mean, Chuck. Let's say that, Um,
Robert Smith, his prediction comes true. And by the way,
we should say, their paper is called when Zombies Attack
(24:25):
And there was an exclamation point. And Smith, he's big
on punctuation. You now include an exclamation point at the
end of your name and your email signature. I don't
think that. So right, let's say we were getting attacked.
Let's say Robert Smith's uh is right on the money.
What what do we do? Well, first of all, you
(24:46):
want to go to a place. If you're going to retreat,
you want to retreat to a place that has plenty
of supplies. Preferably one of those walmarts I don't know
if they're still around or not that also sells guns
and ammunition and groceries. She the superstore, supercenter, super death center. Um,
you want one of those because you want to hold
(25:06):
up in there. You can last as long as you
need to. There's probably communications equipment in there. And again
you've got guns, hose, machetes, anything, blood your favorite weapon.
I told you a battle acts. Oh that was yours. Yeah,
you don't have changed mind. What crossbow with those uh
(25:26):
rambo exploding arrows. That would be sweet, That would be awesome. Wow.
I would like to kill them before they even get
close to me. Yeah, I think you'd be unsettling to
to be face to face. So where are we were?
We're in the Walmart or Costco or Target or wherever,
and the zombies are attacking. Uh, you want to stay
(25:50):
away from where there's people, So that would be a
good place. Yeah. That was a really good point that
Tracy made. That the the if you're in the minutes
of a zombie epidemic, just like any other epidemic, it's
going to spread more quickly and and have more casualties
in a populated area. If you live in Manhattan, you
probably want to get the heck to Long Island. I
(26:10):
would say, I'm sure too sweet, But as anyone who's
seen twenty days later knows, you still want to be
on your guard, even out in the sticks. Yeah, the
old cottage in the in the marsh, that's not a
good place to go either, because they're gonna be waiting
for you in the movie version. You want to barricade
everything so Michael Jackson and his cohorts can't get in
(26:32):
you like that? Um, you never, Actually, that's that's more
applicable than ever, chuck. Uh. You want to not back
yourself into a corner, because that's what we talked about.
You always end up getting surrounded and just like a thriller,
I believe she backed herself into a corner. Literally, yes,
she did in that house, and then like walls came
(26:53):
or hands came out of the wall. She is in trouble.
I don't know if i'd want to be inside at all,
to come to think of it, I'd want to get
my supplies and like go to the mountains. That's what
i'd do, Like getting a tent. I don't know if
a tent offers that much protection. You want to be
able to barricade, well, I would just want to be
in the open so I could run. I would never
want a wall around me anywhere. That's just how I
(27:15):
do it. That's how I party. Give us some worm,
that's how you party with zombie death. Well, Tracy said,
wait for rescue and make long term preparations for your survival.
I guess so but what if you want to fight
the zombies. I think you can do both at the
same time. Hers just kind of a run and hide mentality.
Yeah yeah, um, I think Tracy would be good to
have on your team. It would be good to have
(27:37):
somebody like us arm with battle axes, crossbows, pump action shotguns.
But then have Tracy, you know, maybe behind the semicircle
thinking about what we need to be doing a year
from now. Maybe mix it all together, because you don't
want just you know, bone headed, you know thick mc
rock skulls, you know you're hie. Yeah. During the making
(28:01):
of Zombie Land when he blamed remember he attacked those photographers,
He got all in trouble because he attacked some photographers
and his excuse was that he was playing a zombie
hunter in this movie that I think it was actually
shot in Atlanta called Zombie Land, And he told the
judge that he was so caught up in that character
and so in characters a zombie hunter, that he reacted
(28:23):
to aggressively to the photographers who followed them around like zombies.
I guess that man is a pro yeah joint and
got off scot free. Probably probably at least he didn't
play Bongo s naked or anything like that. Yeah. Who
was at McConaughey. Yeah, nice, didn't you hang out with him? Yeah?
It's actually speaking of a zombie land. I just saw
(28:47):
today where um, the director of that film was gonna
have Patrick Swayze play a Swazi zombie like as himself
come back from the dead Swayze zombie. Originally it was
written into this script and this was before he got
sick or anything. Okay, so obviously no, no, no, I
mean the movie is just coming out, so this is
a while ago. And then he got sick. He contacted
(29:08):
him and everything, and he had fallen ill and couldn't
do it. And I think he got some other big
star to do it, and they're trying to keep that
a secret or something. Who is it? I don't know this.
I tried to find out. I couldn't. When's it come out?
I don't know. Soon. I saw the preview the other day,
so soon, okay, um, chuck. Basically, there's some pretty common
sense things you want to avoid an a zombie attack,
(29:30):
like don't lock yourself in a car that you don't
have keys to. Um, we'll call these movie things. This
is what always happens movie things. Yeah, and the movie
they get in they don't have the key, and then
you're thinking, why did you get in the car if
you didn't have a key? Right? You don't want to
leave any any implements that a zombie could use as
a weapon out for them to find and pick up. Yeah,
(29:52):
because they can use basic weapons only. Do not give
a weapon to an hysterical person. You have no idea
what they're going to do. At the very least, they're
not going to use it properly, and you'll end up
really regretting that. Um. There's other stuff, you know, like
getting into an elevator and a building infestive with zombies. Um,
(30:12):
you don't want to go on a retreat to like
a seller or something without taking supplies with you. God
knows how long you're gonna be down there. I got one.
How about you fight the sudden urge to make out
with a zombie? Yeah, that's probably a good thing to do.
Sure that happened in a Night of Living Dead, wasn't
it really? Yeah? The girl was like jihnny oh yeah yeah,
and he was like yeah, so that happens sometimes. Um, chuck,
(30:38):
let me talk about one of my favorite zombies re Animator.
Did you see it? You know that was a Lovecraft
story based on clas classic film. Yeah. Um, and you
remember the guy decapitates uh, either as mentor or the
dean of the school, I can't remember, Herbert Weston. He
decapitates him with a shovel and he's like, awesome, I've
(30:58):
got another specimen to work on. And he uses the
serum to reanimate both the head and the body, which
is highly unusual because in most zombie films, once the
heads attached from the body, that's it. But he was
reanimating it after it was detached. So hence that's how
you break the rules. Okay, you know there were sequels
(31:19):
to that too, I think there were. But do you
know what's particularly unsettling about Reanimator that there's actual research
into that very stuff going on right now into human
reanimation Max Plank Institute. I was reading an article, um
that was linked from a crack blog post. You love
that website, I do. It's great, um, and it was
(31:42):
it was I think from two thousand and they're like,
we're getting close. Actually we found out that you know, um,
it's not cardiac arrest your brain doesn't die as a
result of cardiac arrest like we thought. Instead, we destroy
it when we try to reanimate it. So now we're
trying to be a little more anil And actually we've
gotten a brain to kind of function after it's been
(32:03):
dead for an hour. We didn't get the whole organism reanimated,
but we're working on it. And I just went and
that was what kind of makes sense? You know that,
like the was it Futurama that had the different heads
in the jars and they could actually still talking everything. Yeah,
I mean from the neck down, it's really not a
lot going on. Besides, you know, organ function and moving.
(32:26):
If you could find a way to wire the brain
up and keep it from decaying, you keep partying, man, Yeah,
keep on trucking. Well, let's see. If you want to
keep on trucking with zombies, you can go read the
article written by or Steam colleague Tracy Wilson, who knows
a lot about zombies, probably more than you should know.
It's a good one. You can type in zombies in
(32:48):
the handy search bar at how stuff works dot com,
which means it's it's time for listener mail. Yes, the
return of listener mail. Uh, Josh, I gonna all this
listener mail from the dude in the band, okay that
you know about? Hey there, Chuck and Josh and Jerry.
(33:09):
I'm riding on behalf of my band. Were an indie
rock and roll band from Eagle Rock, Glendale, California, which
is where I used to live. We've been lucky enough
on our tour for a good chunk of the year
to be on tour for a good chunk of the
year opening for bigger acts. While on tour, we constantly
fight over who gets control. The CD player in the
van gets nasty sometimes, and we frequently run in opposite
(33:30):
directions to our trusty iPods. It's pathetic, five guys in
a smelly van, each on our own little world, not talking,
tired and cranky. I quickly learned to resent touring and
the forty five minutes on stage wasn't worth the hours
of driving and sleeping in dumpy motels and on couches.
So they were not having a good run of it. Sadly,
I like this Uh. I like this exposition right Uh. Well,
(33:54):
as we were headed back on the road, our old
bassis sent us off with a spindle of stuff you
should know podcasts were into a CD. They were reluctant
at first to throw it into the CD player, but
find ourselves intrigued by how cannibalism works, that our body farms.
That'd saould be a good name in for indie rockers.
It was one of the first episodes we listened to.
(34:15):
We were hooked. After that, the iPods went away, the
band started talking more in the van. Uh. The podcast
ignited debates. We joked about our favorite lucid dreams, cringed
at the image of a dog eating its owner's face,
drooled at the thought of a banana cream twinkie. I
also panic because my girlfriend recently dyed her hair red.
So he just wanted to say thanks for bringing the
(34:36):
spark back in their touring. They listened to twenty hours
of the show driving through Kansas in Montana and uh,
we've been all around the country with them, And they
burned another c D for the next upcoming tour. Did
you just have a stroke a second again? So they're
playing here in Atlanta actually soon. The Henry Clay people, right,
the Henry Clay People's name of the band, and they
(34:58):
are actually awesome. Yeah, and you have their in their music, right. Yeah,
they're great. I like it a lot, and we get
people a bit sending their band stuff sometimes and it's
not very good. Are we gonna go? I'm gonna go.
I wrote him back and he still has not responded,
so maybe he's on tour and can't get to put
me down for a plus one, Jerry, you're going, all right? Yeah,
we're gonna be there at the Variety of Playhouse in
(35:19):
Atlanta October seven, rocking out to the Henry Flay people.
Nice opening up for Airborne Toxic event. Yeah, which is
a big tour for Henry lay people. That's good for them. Yes,
it's good rock and roll, raucous rock and roll. You
know it's funny? Is That's exactly what Chuck said in
the email to me and Jerry when he's like, I
like these guys, raucous rock and roll. It's good. It's
like good drinking music, like Early Stones or something. Right on,
(35:41):
let's go October seven? All right, Well, if you want
to see if you can entice Chuck, Jerry and I
to come out to see whatever, or if we left
out your favorite zombie movie, which we inevitably have, you
can send an email inviting us and or chastising us
to stuff podcast how stuff works dot Com. For more
(36:08):
on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff
works dot com. Want more how stuff works, check out
our blogs on the house stuff works dot Com home page.
M HM brought to you by the reinvented two thousand
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Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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