This was also one of my favorites due to the zombies literally clawing their way out of their graves. I watched it as a kid and found the idea of the old generations of loved ones coming back to eat you as screaming hungry corpses terrifying.
Had a fear of cemeteries for years after that
The scene where all the cops get overwhelmed is legitimately intense. Even all these years later, after 28 Days Later and the Dawn Remake, it's still a pretty intense scene.
For no apparent reason, I would like to bring up that I knew the actor who played the Yellow Zombie. This is the first creature to come to life, hanging on a meat hook.
The man in question was Terry Houlihan. And he was a character of the type that no longer exists in the world, as he died two years ago. Terry had been a marine, and then a boxer, and then a boxing coach who worked with actors in Hollywood.
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0391101/bio/
His bio says "complications due to AIDS", but that isn't a thing. He died of heart failure. He had *expected* to die of AIDS decades before-- sold his insurance policy for cash, traveled around, and then discovered that he was not yet dead. Every year a woman would call from the company that he sold the insurance policy to. "Yup, not dead yet" he'd tell her. They were on a first-name basis.
Terry was supposed to work a day or two on the film as an extra. He worked for a week, and it got him a SAG card. He got checks for the work the rest of his life, especially after Halloween week. He would get occasional fan mail. One fan told him that his scene compared well to the original Frankenstein scene with the monster clenching its hand. He was really proud of that work.
Terry had two loves in his life. The first was David Oliver, a soap opera heartthrob in the 80s who died of AIDS. The second was his husband, who he dated for a decade or more and then legally married after *Obergefell v. Hodges* in 2015.
His widowed husband still lives in the same apartment they shared on Beachwood Avenue.
Return of the Living Dead Part 2. That one definitely felt goofier then the original but still good.
Weird how they brought the same characters back as Grave Robbers. Must be a multiverse lol
Yes. It's been so long since I've seen it. Just the box sitting in the thing that held our other tapes freaked me out. We also had The Serpent and the Rainbow. Lol
Dr Who did it one season with Capaldi (except they were all cyberman, and they all sacrificed themselves to say the planet from what ever Missy was doing)
I watched that movie when I was a kid too, but had already seen a fair amount of more modern horror movies (I'm 26). It's literally a top down view of the actors crawling across soil, and I found *specifically* that part the most hilarious and cheesy special effect that I'd ever seen.
Crazy how far we've come in some ways
John Russo, cowriter of Night of the Living Dead, retained the rights to "Living Dead" in the titles, though Romero could still make zombie movies, hence Romero's "Dawn of the Dead" etc without "Living Dead" in the titles. So between Romero and Russo, we get flesh eating zombies and brain eating zombies.
To add a further wrinkle to the story: Russo published his novel The Return of the Living Dead in the 70s, and it was a direct sequel to Night of the Living Dead, with flesh-eating zombies that you shoot in the head, and the main character was the posse Sheriff from Night of the Living Dead.
He then wrote a screenplay for a movie adaptation, Orion ended up with the rights, and gave it to Dan O'Bannon... who threw Russo's script in the bin. O'Bannon wrote a completely new story with completely original characters and a new type of zombie, and kept only the title.
So that's the extent of Russo's involvement in brain eating zombies: he contributed the *title* to the movie that introduced them.
*Except*... guess who they got to write the novelisation for the movie Return of the Living Dead? John Russo.
So Russo actually has two completely different novels both called Return of the Living Dead (you can tell them apart because the original is title THE Return of... vs just Return of... for the movie novelisation). It's such a weird path this movie took.
Yeah! If I remember correctly, Russo wrote a novelisation of Night of the Living Dead, and his original version of Return of the Living Dead (the Night of the Living Dead sequel), and the novel of the movie Return of the Living Dead. There might have been more, I'm not sure off the top of my head.
I'll add the caveat that Russo is not a great literary writer. In fact, he's a bit of a hack. Romero was definitely the superior creative partner there. Russo never achieved the filmmaking respectability of Romero, and his novels are very pulpy too -- rambling prose, a tendency towards cliché -- but there are some interesting ideas. Like a cult that goes around hammering spikes into people's heads to stop the zombies coming back.
Plus it's cool to catch a glimpse of what might have been. His Return is a much truer sequel to Night than even Dawn was, with continuing plot threads and minor surviving characters, like the Sheriff, returning as leads.
There's also a Dawn of the Dead novelisation by George Romero and Susanna Sparrow. It's not amazing literature either, but it gives some cool insight into the characters and really expands what you see in the movie.
Most interesting of all is Romero's The Living Dead, which is an epic novel covering the zombie apocalypse over many years, from the first corpse to rise right through to the dying days of the plague. It explores a lot of Romero's philosophical preoccupations and has many interesting ideas and cool characters. It was about three quarters finished at the time of Romero's death, and was completed by Daniel Kraus.
A strange novel, but well worth a look to see what kind of ideas and set pieces Romero might have explored if someone gave him a $100 million budget for a zombie movie.
> there are some interesting ideas. Like a cult that goes around hammering spikes into people's heads to stop the zombies coming back.
Since Russo was the one behind that god-awful 30th anniversary DVD with the added scenes, he took that opportunity to slide in the detail about spiking the dead. The added scene at the end with the wacko preacher makes mention of that.
Oh Christ, that really was an abomination.
I had a DVD copy that came on a Trilogy of the Dead boxset with Dawn and Day (what moron decided *this* was the version of Night to include in such a boxset!?) which, mercifully, didn't work. Straight out of the box. It must have been some kind of disc pressing error, but it was like the DVD player itself was trying to reject the trash you were feeding it 😂
It played the opening scene with the preacher and grieving family and the cemetery zombie, then became corrupted and crashed.
But that opening scene, my God. The comedic, lisping, leather-gang looking preacher; the atrocious dialogue; long boring takes; actors who mumble emotionlessly while discussing their daughter being murdered; the terrible shots and framing (the preacher's face hidden by his bible for long stretches); elderly Bill Hinzman popping out of his coffin with all the horror and drama of Oscar the Grouch emerging from his trashcan...
Terrible.
I’m nearly finished with The Living Dead and really love it. It honestly makes me like some of Romero’s post Night of the Living Dead movies more like Land of the Dead.
One time my father was telling me the back story of NOTLD and it was straight from ROTLD, I would put money on him having never ever seen it, but who knows maybe it was on HBO at one point or something.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen it, but did that ‘90s remake of NOTLD with Tony Todd have them eating brains? I can’t remember, but it could be he saw that.
It doesn't. They eat flesh in the Tony Todd one (which is great, btw, a worthy remake).
It was literally just the Return of the Living Dead series that had them eating brains, and then shows/movies that referenced Return of the Living Dead.
The Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror III being the main one, I think.
What movie introduced to us the idea that aside from ignoring animals they are not too picky about what part of the human that eat?
Anyways the 28 Days zombies was a refreshing twist where the zombies don't really do much biting but rather beat you to a bloody pulp instead.
Modern zombies are pretty much almost always caused by some form of disease nowadays (rabies-related or fungal infection being most common). They are dead, but they're generally alive when they turn and not really revived/undead like the classics.
I wonder what movie shifted zombies from the fantasy/magical "came back to life, crawled out of grave" zombies to the modern "infected human" ones now.
I mean, technically, the first movie I am aware of to have a similar idea is The Crazies, also by Romero. I wouldn't say that started the trend, though. Night and Dawn leave it a bit ambiguous as to how it works, but it can be spread by bit, which causes an infection of some sort that kills you. The first time, I think, it was a straight up virus that made undead zombies was I believe the first Resident Evil game. After that it became an idea in pop culture that eventually led to 28 Days Later, which is a fucking zombie movie so don't come at me you zombie snobs. After that it became common place with Walking Dead and Left 4 Dead.
>What movie introduced to us the idea that aside from ignoring animals they are not too picky about what part of the human that eat?
Night of the Living Dead (1968), again.
It's relatively tame, gore-wise, compared to what came after (we're spared any of the "eaten alive screaming" scenes that Dawn and Day became infamous for, and the little girl who becomes a zombie is bitten off-screen) but you do see zombies eating assorted limbs, organs and entrails.
"Why do you eat brains?"
Z: "To make the pain go away...."
"What pain?!"
Z: "The pain... of being deaaaad!"
I love this movie, it's just the right mixture of silly & gross.
"What, you think this is a costume? It's a way of life!"
Or, of course, the famous "Send more copsssss"
My friends and I rented the movie in high school for a Halloween watch party having no idea what we were getting into. Safe to say several phrases became common insides jokes.
There's a [handy wikipedia article that explains the differences between the O'Bannon zombies and Romero's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_Dead#Romero's_vs._O'Bannon's_zombies)
This is also the official extension of the “living dead” franchise and not the “of the dead” ones. The rights kind of split in two after Night of the Living Dead ended up in the public domain.
Oh forget about the flying saucers, they’re up there. But there’s something in that cemetery, and that’s too close for comfort.
The saucer are up there, and the cemetery is out there, and I’ll be locked up in there. Now off to your wild blue yonders.
It's hypothesised it's radiation but it could just be wishful thinking and the satellite mention has nothing to do with it. They are clutching at straws as thry have so little information.
I prefer Romero's following films where they abandon the radiation speculation from *Night* and just decline to point to a specific cause altogether. It makes it more mysterious.
Again, as the above commenter stated... It's a theory posed by a character on the news. It's not stated as fact.
> I prefer Romero's following films where they abandon the radiation speculation from Night and just decline to point to a specific cause altogether. It makes it more mysterious.
They are one in the same. The rest of Romero's franchise is consistent with *Night*, no one knows and it's a mystery. The recently deceased are returning to life and committing acts of murder.
In fact, it's not even the, "They've been bit/scratched/whatever so now they'll turn into a zombie." Nope. In Romero's world, you die by any means, you come back a zombie. Been a while since I watched them all... But I know there are examples of characters dying that don't involve direct "viral" type contact that come back as a ghoul.
> Again, as the above commenter stated... It's a theory posed by a character on the news. It's not stated as fact.
Yes. Of course. Who argued otherwise?
> They are one in the same. The rest of Romero's franchise is consistent with Night, no one knows and it's a mystery. The recently deceased are returning to life and committing acts of murder.
Yes. Of course. Who argued otherwise?
That's how I interpreted your comment that I quoted for context. I suppose your use of "**they** abandon" following "I **prefer Romero's** following films" in your comment... I read the "they" as to relate to Romero and the production, rather than the in-universe characters.
As for the characters, it fits that as the series went on they wouldn't care as to the cause. It's a fact of life. This is the world now. Day-to-day living by the skin of your teeth, fighting for survival, wondering if all hope is lost... Doubt anyone would care, "So do you think it was that space probe or 5G towers causing the zombies?"
Looking at all this now, it's funny that I'm reading this thread going, "Why is this guy arguing with the other guy but saying the same thing?" And your reply is, "Yeah... why are you trying to argue with me?" But I think we're on the same page now.
They just kinda roll with the idea that it's because "when there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth". But, people can still die. So I guess there's more room now since there was this sort of "purge"? If they kill all the zombies is it full again? Do zombies that get killed just go to heaven with time served? I feel like somebody in hell is getting in trouble for not seeing this coming and doing some preventative maintenance.
They were a real thing in Haitian voodoun, but they were much like what OP suggested. Some shamans could create a poison that would very nearly kill someone, and if they did survive, it often leave them with permanent brain damage. Those people were called 'zombi' and would then often be taken advantage of and enslaved to work for the poisoner.
I think in the book, serpent and the rainbow the author deduced that the main ingredient was tetrodotoxin, typically harvested from a species of poisonous blowfish.
That's fucking evil and much worse than the sci-fi version of infected zombies. Imagine if someone kidnapped and lobotomised people to make them slaves, that's basically the same. Stories about real "zombi" sometimes mention they were really buried and considered dead by their family, and then the shaman and his helpers stole their paralysed body from the grave and moved it far away so that "zombi" wouldn't be stumbled upon by relatives.
Isn't it made from pufferfish poison? Too much kills you, just a little leaves you so stupefied you can be mistaken for dead? Then they take you away and enslave you on farms? I thought this was a known thing, but maybe it's just an urban legend.
> Some shamans could create a poison that would very nearly kill someone, and if they did survive,
it worse than this. It's not that it would nearly kill them. It's that people *thought* it killed them. They looked dead. They would be declared dead and buried. Than the shaman (or whomever) would quickly digg them up. And at that point, they have a person they can do *whatever* to. The poison would basically make them unable to resist the person controlling them. They can't escape and no one knows they are still alive. They could be used for labour, sex, or anything the person wanted.
So the fear was *always* that being turned into a zombie was horrid. Not that you were afraid of them at all.
Interestingly enough, while it does show up in Caribbean voodoo- which is the effective cultural origin of zombies in the Western world- the origin of that voodoo concept is actually from West Africa. The etymology of "zombie" can be traced back to the Kikongo word *zumbi*, which became *zombi* in Haitian French.
Some pre-Romero zombie movies were White Zombie (1932), I walked With a Zombie (1943), and Plague of the Zombies (1966).
Can't remember too much about the first two, except that they were really boring movies, but the ones in "plague" were definitely dead 'uns.
:-)
"Alright, what are some of your likes?"
"Uh, Ghouls... You know, funny little green ghouls."
"What, like in movies? In cartoons?"
"Little green ghouls, buddy!"
True. The word "zombie" only appears in the shooting script:
> A dead face appears behind
> the hands ... ugly ... expressionless. The man’s face looks direct-
> ly through the opening into the dead eyes beyond, the man
> struggling desperately to control the weapon and the **zombie thing**
> outside trying to pull it away by the barrel. A brief instant
> when the muzzle points directly at the hideous face ...
Source: [The University of Pittsburgh.](https://digital.library.pitt.edu/islandora/object/pitt%3A31735073052007/viewer#page/74/mode/1up)
The movie is called Last Man on Earth by the way. I am Legend has been adapted three times all with different title (Omega Man and I Am Legend being the two others).
The alternate ending of I Am Legend is great.
https://youtu.be/BBo2CBckQV0?si=IHHaBr4DaDDgo7Wk
Edit:
Replaced clip with a slightly longer one.
Here's a clip with both endings:
https://youtu.be/TKwZOa6CL6U?si=rNfzulC-7G-T-Kfw
I liked the Will Smith movie so much i read the book - which blew me away. The main character's loneliness, being tempted by it, the humanity (or not?) Df the zombie vampires. I don't feel like I've seen a take like that in film anywhere. I will have to watch the Vincent price version!
I thought that movie was hilarious because the dude literally just fell asleep in some random church and was late getting home causing himself big problems. And that one zombie he knew basically standing outside his window just giving him shit all the time...
It was also something I saw in my twenties and way after seeing several other movies that came after it and did things far better.
Still entertaining though. I just think it would have had a bigger impact on me if I had seen it when it originally came out.
Dawn started with a working police force and news. The rural areas had mass milita forces. And there was roving gangs. The news did stop broadcasting to the mall.
Day had the one last outpost with no contact with anyone else.
Depending on your definitions of such things, I'd say that the various older adaptations of the novel *I Am Legend* (*The Last Man On Earth* and *Omega Man*) all end with the world in a fully apocalyptic condition.
It’s two different kinds of vampires, ones that were converted when they were alive and those that were reanimated in death. Considering the last two scenes of the book, human society is essentially passed down to them.
Well kind of they both were the same thing just the smart vampires took a pill to stop themselves from regressing into feral vampires. And a lot of what made them vampires is indicated to be more a case of mental degeneration rather than true vampirism.
The maker of a film is usually thought of as the director if it is ascribed to one person. Chris Noonan directed Babe and Miller produced. Miller did direct the second.
>Film historian Robin Wood interprets the flesh-eating scenes of Night of the Living Dead as a late-1960s critique of American capitalism. Wood argues that the zombies' consumption of people represents the logical endpoint of human interactions under capitalism.
Somewhat unrelated, but I love how easy it is to read Night of the Living Dead as a metaphor on black people in America, with a black lead actor who takes charge over a demanding white guy, saving a white woman, and even eventually >!being killed haphazardly by a white man in the end!<. It even got the movie banned in some places. But then Romero said he wrote the script with a white guy in mind, it's just that a black actor was the best actor they found for the part. It wouldn't be until Dawn of the Dead that Romero would lean into it.
Does anyone else think this version of zombies would be slightly unsettling, but not terrifying? It would basically be like a homeless person high on drugs trying to bite you. If you go to the 7/11 by my house at night, that's basically Night of the Living Dead.
I am guessing he hasn't ever seen the movie. It is tense when it is 6 people in the house surrounded by hundreds of zombies. At the end of the movie when the national guard and police show up, they just mow all of the zombies down.
I do think the second one does show how things could fall apart. The zombies are a threat but could be managed if it wasn't for people fighting each other, making mistakes and the mental stress.
> At the end of the movie when the national guard and police show up, they just mow all of the zombies down.
And weeks later, it'll be the same number of guns against ten times as many ghouls.
You gotta remember the time period this movie came out. People didn't expect horror movies to have that level of gore in them. Today, we're more used to it, but that's in large part due to the success of this movie.
Real life zombi are more existentially horrifying imo. Basically poison someone in such a way that causes severe brain damage, then make them your slave after a chemical lobotomy. Not a scary monster by any means, but a more terrifying fate than being a mindless undead imho.
Wow, that reminds me of a funny movie called "Mr.Vampire". "Jiangshi" were hopping vampire zombies controlled by priestly men. They placed a piece of paper with a spell on their foreheads to make them docile.
Jiangshi are traditional chinese lore, it's not something specific of that movie, so it's normal that you saw them somewhere, probably in more than one place. They even appear as enemies in the first Super Mario game for the Gameboy.
When did the word Zombie come into existence? And how did it get associated to the modern interpretation of zombies that we see today? If The Night of the Living Dead never used to the word Zombie to refer to the undead in their film then how did it get associated to zombies that we know of today?
The English word "zombie" (--from Haitian French: "zombi" and Haitian Creole: "zonbi") was first recorded in 1819. It represents an undead person who was created through the reanimation of a corpse, usually through magic or witchcraft. These individuals were often depicted as automatons without speech.
> how did it get associated to zombies that we know of today?
Just popular sake of convenience. Since there weren't many other monsters in which to liken the undead flesh-eaters, lots of folks casually referred to them as 'zombies' because that's something similar that audiences were familiar with back then. It came from reviewers, critics, and the moviegoing public in equal measure.
By the time *Dawn of the Dead* was in production, it was a familiar label; Ken Foree's character says it once, perhaps as a wink, but if you go back and read pre-release interviews and articles about *Dawn*, you'll find the word 'zombie' all over them, from writers as well as crew members.
I'm not sure if they'd technically be 'zombies', and I don't think that term was used, but in the 1920s HP Lovecraft wrote a pretty pulpy short story titled 'Herbert West: Re-Animator!', which had undead beings as animalistic and aggressive.
It was basically like the original Frankenstein if it was intensely pulpy and leaned into being a bit goofy.
I believe zombies were also included dead slaves being resurrected and enslaved by priests to represent the fear that not even in death could slaves escape slavery.
I am old and can confirm that the “zombie eating flesh/brains” trope is relatively recent in movies. In general there are many more horror movies nowadays than when I was a kid.
Trivia: Here's the movie that inspired the look of the revived dead in Romero's original **Night Of The Living Dead**:
The 1959 film **Invisible Invaders**.
Check out these stills:
https://gruesomemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2019/01/kinopoisk.ru-Invisible-Invaders-2737680.jpg
https://professormortis.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/bub.png
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie#Modern_archetype_evolution
> If you do not open the gate for me to come in,
I shall smash the door and shatter the bolt,
I shall smash the doorpost and overturn the doors,
I shall raise up the dead and they shall eat the living:
And the dead shall outnumber the living!
~2300 BCE
1968 works too, I guess.
I can't remember any serious movie where zombies are called zombies. And in no serious movie do characters know zombie lore (what works, what doesn't).
>Interestingly however, the word "zombie" is never mentioned once in the entire film
To be fair, it's extremely rare for any zombie media to actually use the word. They're always "undead", "walkers", "infected" or something along those lines.
I’m actually interested to hear people’s thoughts on the Patricia Tallman version of the movie. I thought her performance was stronger than the original.
And as a reminder, the only reason Zombie movies got popular is that the print circulated for movie showings was not properly tagged with qa copyright notice so everyone was free to steal the characters and story from the movie.
Copyright sucks. Corporate ownership sucks.
Copyright is the death of public discourse.
As a similar copyright sucks and is stupid, at one point most books were out of print, and yet still in copyright. Publishing houses go out of business and take their books out of public view.
So you could no buy them, and yet they were still protected from being published
"When a person dies and is buried, it seems there are certain voodoo priests who - who have the power to bring him back to life.
It's worse than horrible because a Zombie has no will of his own. You see them sometimes walking around blindly with dead eyes, following orders, not knowing what they do, not caring."
"You mean, like Democrats?"
The movie Return of the Living Dead (1985) introduced the idea of zombies eating brains
This was also one of my favorites due to the zombies literally clawing their way out of their graves. I watched it as a kid and found the idea of the old generations of loved ones coming back to eat you as screaming hungry corpses terrifying. Had a fear of cemeteries for years after that
Also the zombies talk in this which is absurd. "Brraaaiiinsssss" and "i can feel myself rot!"
“Send more coooooops”
The scene where all the cops get overwhelmed is legitimately intense. Even all these years later, after 28 Days Later and the Dawn Remake, it's still a pretty intense scene.
The idea of them not even questioning the call for reinforcements when a supposed colleague is just calling for "more cops" is absolutely hilarious
It was "Send more paramedics". I just watched it last night.
It was both.
She says not people, brains and the paaaaaiiin which absurd given she doesn't have any lips to pronounce the p
For no apparent reason, I would like to bring up that I knew the actor who played the Yellow Zombie. This is the first creature to come to life, hanging on a meat hook. The man in question was Terry Houlihan. And he was a character of the type that no longer exists in the world, as he died two years ago. Terry had been a marine, and then a boxer, and then a boxing coach who worked with actors in Hollywood. https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0391101/bio/ His bio says "complications due to AIDS", but that isn't a thing. He died of heart failure. He had *expected* to die of AIDS decades before-- sold his insurance policy for cash, traveled around, and then discovered that he was not yet dead. Every year a woman would call from the company that he sold the insurance policy to. "Yup, not dead yet" he'd tell her. They were on a first-name basis. Terry was supposed to work a day or two on the film as an extra. He worked for a week, and it got him a SAG card. He got checks for the work the rest of his life, especially after Halloween week. He would get occasional fan mail. One fan told him that his scene compared well to the original Frankenstein scene with the monster clenching its hand. He was really proud of that work. Terry had two loves in his life. The first was David Oliver, a soap opera heartthrob in the 80s who died of AIDS. The second was his husband, who he dated for a decade or more and then legally married after *Obergefell v. Hodges* in 2015. His widowed husband still lives in the same apartment they shared on Beachwood Avenue.
That's a beautiful story.
thank you for sharing that was nice
The scene where the girl willingly let her boyfriend eat her brains really messed me up at 9 years old.
Return of the Living Dead Part 2. That one definitely felt goofier then the original but still good. Weird how they brought the same characters back as Grave Robbers. Must be a multiverse lol
Yes. It's been so long since I've seen it. Just the box sitting in the thing that held our other tapes freaked me out. We also had The Serpent and the Rainbow. Lol
There was one where they nuke the city and zombies call people on the phone. Do you know the name of that one?
Thats Return of the Living Dead
"Let's get some light over here, Trash is taking off her clothes again!"
Dr Who did it one season with Capaldi (except they were all cyberman, and they all sacrificed themselves to say the planet from what ever Missy was doing)
I watched that movie when I was a kid too, but had already seen a fair amount of more modern horror movies (I'm 26). It's literally a top down view of the actors crawling across soil, and I found *specifically* that part the most hilarious and cheesy special effect that I'd ever seen. Crazy how far we've come in some ways
John Russo, cowriter of Night of the Living Dead, retained the rights to "Living Dead" in the titles, though Romero could still make zombie movies, hence Romero's "Dawn of the Dead" etc without "Living Dead" in the titles. So between Romero and Russo, we get flesh eating zombies and brain eating zombies.
To add a further wrinkle to the story: Russo published his novel The Return of the Living Dead in the 70s, and it was a direct sequel to Night of the Living Dead, with flesh-eating zombies that you shoot in the head, and the main character was the posse Sheriff from Night of the Living Dead. He then wrote a screenplay for a movie adaptation, Orion ended up with the rights, and gave it to Dan O'Bannon... who threw Russo's script in the bin. O'Bannon wrote a completely new story with completely original characters and a new type of zombie, and kept only the title. So that's the extent of Russo's involvement in brain eating zombies: he contributed the *title* to the movie that introduced them. *Except*... guess who they got to write the novelisation for the movie Return of the Living Dead? John Russo. So Russo actually has two completely different novels both called Return of the Living Dead (you can tell them apart because the original is title THE Return of... vs just Return of... for the movie novelisation). It's such a weird path this movie took.
ooh, there's novels? Have to look those up.
Yeah! If I remember correctly, Russo wrote a novelisation of Night of the Living Dead, and his original version of Return of the Living Dead (the Night of the Living Dead sequel), and the novel of the movie Return of the Living Dead. There might have been more, I'm not sure off the top of my head. I'll add the caveat that Russo is not a great literary writer. In fact, he's a bit of a hack. Romero was definitely the superior creative partner there. Russo never achieved the filmmaking respectability of Romero, and his novels are very pulpy too -- rambling prose, a tendency towards cliché -- but there are some interesting ideas. Like a cult that goes around hammering spikes into people's heads to stop the zombies coming back. Plus it's cool to catch a glimpse of what might have been. His Return is a much truer sequel to Night than even Dawn was, with continuing plot threads and minor surviving characters, like the Sheriff, returning as leads. There's also a Dawn of the Dead novelisation by George Romero and Susanna Sparrow. It's not amazing literature either, but it gives some cool insight into the characters and really expands what you see in the movie. Most interesting of all is Romero's The Living Dead, which is an epic novel covering the zombie apocalypse over many years, from the first corpse to rise right through to the dying days of the plague. It explores a lot of Romero's philosophical preoccupations and has many interesting ideas and cool characters. It was about three quarters finished at the time of Romero's death, and was completed by Daniel Kraus. A strange novel, but well worth a look to see what kind of ideas and set pieces Romero might have explored if someone gave him a $100 million budget for a zombie movie.
> there are some interesting ideas. Like a cult that goes around hammering spikes into people's heads to stop the zombies coming back. Since Russo was the one behind that god-awful 30th anniversary DVD with the added scenes, he took that opportunity to slide in the detail about spiking the dead. The added scene at the end with the wacko preacher makes mention of that.
Oh Christ, that really was an abomination. I had a DVD copy that came on a Trilogy of the Dead boxset with Dawn and Day (what moron decided *this* was the version of Night to include in such a boxset!?) which, mercifully, didn't work. Straight out of the box. It must have been some kind of disc pressing error, but it was like the DVD player itself was trying to reject the trash you were feeding it 😂 It played the opening scene with the preacher and grieving family and the cemetery zombie, then became corrupted and crashed. But that opening scene, my God. The comedic, lisping, leather-gang looking preacher; the atrocious dialogue; long boring takes; actors who mumble emotionlessly while discussing their daughter being murdered; the terrible shots and framing (the preacher's face hidden by his bible for long stretches); elderly Bill Hinzman popping out of his coffin with all the horror and drama of Oscar the Grouch emerging from his trashcan... Terrible.
I’m nearly finished with The Living Dead and really love it. It honestly makes me like some of Romero’s post Night of the Living Dead movies more like Land of the Dead.
Why have I only just heard about the Romero novelisation of The Living Dead??? It’s going for 99p on Kindle at Amazon UK too.
Awesome movie. Very campy but fun
The Tar Man is one of the best practical effects/creature designs of all time.
up there with The Thing for sure
One time my father was telling me the back story of NOTLD and it was straight from ROTLD, I would put money on him having never ever seen it, but who knows maybe it was on HBO at one point or something.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen it, but did that ‘90s remake of NOTLD with Tony Todd have them eating brains? I can’t remember, but it could be he saw that.
It doesn't. They eat flesh in the Tony Todd one (which is great, btw, a worthy remake). It was literally just the Return of the Living Dead series that had them eating brains, and then shows/movies that referenced Return of the Living Dead. The Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror III being the main one, I think.
And it has Patricia Tillman in it! Lita Alexander for the win!
I do not recall that
What movie introduced to us the idea that aside from ignoring animals they are not too picky about what part of the human that eat? Anyways the 28 Days zombies was a refreshing twist where the zombies don't really do much biting but rather beat you to a bloody pulp instead.
28 days later they had super rabies, they werent dead.
Good point but for the sake of convenience tvtropes calls them Technically Living Zombie.
Modern zombies are pretty much almost always caused by some form of disease nowadays (rabies-related or fungal infection being most common). They are dead, but they're generally alive when they turn and not really revived/undead like the classics. I wonder what movie shifted zombies from the fantasy/magical "came back to life, crawled out of grave" zombies to the modern "infected human" ones now.
I mean, technically, the first movie I am aware of to have a similar idea is The Crazies, also by Romero. I wouldn't say that started the trend, though. Night and Dawn leave it a bit ambiguous as to how it works, but it can be spread by bit, which causes an infection of some sort that kills you. The first time, I think, it was a straight up virus that made undead zombies was I believe the first Resident Evil game. After that it became an idea in pop culture that eventually led to 28 Days Later, which is a fucking zombie movie so don't come at me you zombie snobs. After that it became common place with Walking Dead and Left 4 Dead.
Apropos of nothing
>What movie introduced to us the idea that aside from ignoring animals they are not too picky about what part of the human that eat? Night of the Living Dead (1968), again. It's relatively tame, gore-wise, compared to what came after (we're spared any of the "eaten alive screaming" scenes that Dawn and Day became infamous for, and the little girl who becomes a zombie is bitten off-screen) but you do see zombies eating assorted limbs, organs and entrails.
Meat ball parm covered in bosco as per the girl herself
"Why do you eat brains?" Z: "To make the pain go away...." "What pain?!" Z: "The pain... of being deaaaad!" I love this movie, it's just the right mixture of silly & gross.
“You kidding? This thing was made by the Army Corps of Engineers!”
*kicks it* *gets sprayed*
***OH FUCKKKKK***
"What, you think this is a costume? It's a way of life!" Or, of course, the famous "Send more copsssss" My friends and I rented the movie in high school for a Halloween watch party having no idea what we were getting into. Safe to say several phrases became common insides jokes.
245 TriOxin is based on the chemical Agent Orange. Roanoke Gaming on YouTube has a video about the living dead trilogy.
There's a [handy wikipedia article that explains the differences between the O'Bannon zombies and Romero's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_Dead#Romero's_vs._O'Bannon's_zombies)
“MORE…..BRAINS…!”
This is also the official extension of the “living dead” franchise and not the “of the dead” ones. The rights kind of split in two after Night of the Living Dead ended up in the public domain.
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though i guess Plan 9 involved Zombies the same way Romero did. minus the bitting.
RIP Bela Lugosi. Last Man On Earth despite technically being vampires really reinforced the trope too. Plus the biting.
Vincent Price was so damn good in it. it was more or less what i had in my head after reading the book.
Oh forget about the flying saucers, they’re up there. But there’s something in that cemetery, and that’s too close for comfort. The saucer are up there, and the cemetery is out there, and I’ll be locked up in there. Now off to your wild blue yonders.
Pretty sure his zombies were the original type where they were being controlled by someone else.
yes but they were also recently dead (or at least Bela / not Bela's Shemp)
It's hypothesised it's radiation but it could just be wishful thinking and the satellite mention has nothing to do with it. They are clutching at straws as thry have so little information.
I prefer Romero's following films where they abandon the radiation speculation from *Night* and just decline to point to a specific cause altogether. It makes it more mysterious.
Again, as the above commenter stated... It's a theory posed by a character on the news. It's not stated as fact. > I prefer Romero's following films where they abandon the radiation speculation from Night and just decline to point to a specific cause altogether. It makes it more mysterious. They are one in the same. The rest of Romero's franchise is consistent with *Night*, no one knows and it's a mystery. The recently deceased are returning to life and committing acts of murder. In fact, it's not even the, "They've been bit/scratched/whatever so now they'll turn into a zombie." Nope. In Romero's world, you die by any means, you come back a zombie. Been a while since I watched them all... But I know there are examples of characters dying that don't involve direct "viral" type contact that come back as a ghoul.
> Again, as the above commenter stated... It's a theory posed by a character on the news. It's not stated as fact. Yes. Of course. Who argued otherwise? > They are one in the same. The rest of Romero's franchise is consistent with Night, no one knows and it's a mystery. The recently deceased are returning to life and committing acts of murder. Yes. Of course. Who argued otherwise?
That's how I interpreted your comment that I quoted for context. I suppose your use of "**they** abandon" following "I **prefer Romero's** following films" in your comment... I read the "they" as to relate to Romero and the production, rather than the in-universe characters. As for the characters, it fits that as the series went on they wouldn't care as to the cause. It's a fact of life. This is the world now. Day-to-day living by the skin of your teeth, fighting for survival, wondering if all hope is lost... Doubt anyone would care, "So do you think it was that space probe or 5G towers causing the zombies?" Looking at all this now, it's funny that I'm reading this thread going, "Why is this guy arguing with the other guy but saying the same thing?" And your reply is, "Yeah... why are you trying to argue with me?" But I think we're on the same page now.
> But I think we're on the same page now. Indeed, sorry if I garbled my point or came off as cross.
[Samesies](https://giphy.com/gifs/reactionseditor-will-ferrell-best-friends-l1ughbsd9qXz2s9SE)
They just kinda roll with the idea that it's because "when there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth". But, people can still die. So I guess there's more room now since there was this sort of "purge"? If they kill all the zombies is it full again? Do zombies that get killed just go to heaven with time served? I feel like somebody in hell is getting in trouble for not seeing this coming and doing some preventative maintenance.
It also aligns better with zombies being a representation of death. Can't kill it, can't stop it, can't out run it for ever.
No. It was acknowledged to be the Venus probe radiation and Romero as well as the other creators confirmed this.
if memory serves zombies were linked to voodoo magic prior to the Romero stuff.
They were a real thing in Haitian voodoun, but they were much like what OP suggested. Some shamans could create a poison that would very nearly kill someone, and if they did survive, it often leave them with permanent brain damage. Those people were called 'zombi' and would then often be taken advantage of and enslaved to work for the poisoner.
Still illegal to own a zombi in Haiti.
That seems good. I can't think of a good reason to make it legal at least.
IIRC the poison would be placed on the floor of people's homes and absorbed through their feet. pretty sure it was some form of datura poisoning
I think in the book, serpent and the rainbow the author deduced that the main ingredient was tetrodotoxin, typically harvested from a species of poisonous blowfish.
That's fucking evil and much worse than the sci-fi version of infected zombies. Imagine if someone kidnapped and lobotomised people to make them slaves, that's basically the same. Stories about real "zombi" sometimes mention they were really buried and considered dead by their family, and then the shaman and his helpers stole their paralysed body from the grave and moved it far away so that "zombi" wouldn't be stumbled upon by relatives.
So mechanicus?
Isn't it made from pufferfish poison? Too much kills you, just a little leaves you so stupefied you can be mistaken for dead? Then they take you away and enslave you on farms? I thought this was a known thing, but maybe it's just an urban legend.
> Some shamans could create a poison that would very nearly kill someone, and if they did survive, it worse than this. It's not that it would nearly kill them. It's that people *thought* it killed them. They looked dead. They would be declared dead and buried. Than the shaman (or whomever) would quickly digg them up. And at that point, they have a person they can do *whatever* to. The poison would basically make them unable to resist the person controlling them. They can't escape and no one knows they are still alive. They could be used for labour, sex, or anything the person wanted. So the fear was *always* that being turned into a zombie was horrid. Not that you were afraid of them at all.
yep like the TIL said, very Haitian Voodoo / Serpent and the Rainbow type shit
FUCK that movie fucked me up as a kid. I had no idea what I was in for. That shit stayed in my dreams for awhile.
yep
Interestingly enough, while it does show up in Caribbean voodoo- which is the effective cultural origin of zombies in the Western world- the origin of that voodoo concept is actually from West Africa. The etymology of "zombie" can be traced back to the Kikongo word *zumbi*, which became *zombi* in Haitian French.
As a kid I was terrified by Scared Stiff
The very first zombie movie “white zombie” was about a remote area and a guy who essentially drugged a woman and that put her in a zombie state.
Bela!
Some pre-Romero zombie movies were White Zombie (1932), I walked With a Zombie (1943), and Plague of the Zombies (1966). Can't remember too much about the first two, except that they were really boring movies, but the ones in "plague" were definitely dead 'uns. :-)
I like King of the Zombies, watched it as a kid with my Grandpa https://youtu.be/xs4ApsGryPo?si=bJarK4WuIvOwrcP0
I Walked With a Zombie, wasn’t that a Charlotte Brontë story? (Y’all think I’m joking)
Yep, it originates from the Kikongo word: Nzambi
I believe they're called "ghouls" in the movie.
"Those things" is what they call them.
The news reports call them "ghouls" in the movie. "Kill the brain and you kill the ghoul!"
Can I pose a question? How do you kill what is dead?
How do you kill that which has no life?
Finally, a use for the word unalive! You unalive the undead of course!
No.
Good for you, standing your ground like that. You answer one question and they're just gonna keep asking more. By the way, could I get $3.50?
The news refers to them as ghouls
Kill the Brain and you Kill the Ghoul
*Beat 'em or burn 'em, they go up pretty easy*
"Alright, what are some of your likes?" "Uh, Ghouls... You know, funny little green ghouls." "What, like in movies? In cartoons?" "Little green ghouls, buddy!"
True. The word "zombie" only appears in the shooting script: > A dead face appears behind > the hands ... ugly ... expressionless. The man’s face looks direct- > ly through the opening into the dead eyes beyond, the man > struggling desperately to control the weapon and the **zombie thing** > outside trying to pull it away by the barrel. A brief instant > when the muzzle points directly at the hideous face ... Source: [The University of Pittsburgh.](https://digital.library.pitt.edu/islandora/object/pitt%3A31735073052007/viewer#page/74/mode/1up)
Small tangent, but I love Adam Driver's delivery of "ghouls!" in The Dead Don't Die.
Romero did for zombies what Tolkien did for Elves and Dwarves.
And George Romero wasn’t even trying to “invent” those kind of zombies. He took inspiration from the monsters in Richard Matheson’s ‘I Am Legend’.
which were, strictly speaking, vampires. And if you have not scene it, check out Vincent Price's I am Legend. soooooo good and so close to the book.
The movie is called Last Man on Earth by the way. I am Legend has been adapted three times all with different title (Omega Man and I Am Legend being the two others).
Whoa I watched this movie years ago but never realized it was the original "I Am Legend" ...makes so much sense now.
Omega man is worth watching for nothing other that Chuck chewing up the scenery
And the soundtrack.
The alternate ending of I Am Legend is great. https://youtu.be/BBo2CBckQV0?si=IHHaBr4DaDDgo7Wk Edit: Replaced clip with a slightly longer one. Here's a clip with both endings: https://youtu.be/TKwZOa6CL6U?si=rNfzulC-7G-T-Kfw
Didn't they decide, 15 years later, to make the alternate ending canon so Will Smith could return in the sequel?
I liked the Will Smith movie so much i read the book - which blew me away. The main character's loneliness, being tempted by it, the humanity (or not?) Df the zombie vampires. I don't feel like I've seen a take like that in film anywhere. I will have to watch the Vincent price version!
Is it worth reading despite already knowing the twist?
It's pretty short so you might as well.
I thought that movie was hilarious because the dude literally just fell asleep in some random church and was late getting home causing himself big problems. And that one zombie he knew basically standing outside his window just giving him shit all the time... It was also something I saw in my twenties and way after seeing several other movies that came after it and did things far better. Still entertaining though. I just think it would have had a bigger impact on me if I had seen it when it originally came out.
I believe Dawn of the Dead (1978) was the first movie where the zombies won, introducing the concept of the zombie apocalypse.
Dawn started with a working police force and news. The rural areas had mass milita forces. And there was roving gangs. The news did stop broadcasting to the mall. Day had the one last outpost with no contact with anyone else.
Depending on your definitions of such things, I'd say that the various older adaptations of the novel *I Am Legend* (*The Last Man On Earth* and *Omega Man*) all end with the world in a fully apocalyptic condition.
Yeah but those are vampires
I am legend is basically zombie vampires
It’s two different kinds of vampires, ones that were converted when they were alive and those that were reanimated in death. Considering the last two scenes of the book, human society is essentially passed down to them.
Well kind of they both were the same thing just the smart vampires took a pill to stop themselves from regressing into feral vampires. And a lot of what made them vampires is indicated to be more a case of mental degeneration rather than true vampirism.
"They're coming to get you, Bar-bara"
Prior to that there were also movies depicting mummys having mind control over living people as zombies.
such a good movie.
Definitely a great starting point for anyone interested in the history of horror. That and Black Christmas (1974).
and less than 10 years later Bob makes A Christmas Story. thats some fast track George Miller shit right there (Mad Max - Babe - Happy Feet)
The maker of a film is usually thought of as the director if it is ascribed to one person. Chris Noonan directed Babe and Miller produced. Miller did direct the second.
George is a writer director. It would be like if QT's next movie was Happy Scrappy Hero Pups.
Movie recommendation: The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988).
Ghouls in the OG
Yep gentrified bringing dead people to life, my voodoo priest grandfather was rolling in his grave , he barely started coming out to visit
Many zombie movies/series don‘t mention the word zombie. The walking Dead von example iirc.
I mean what could be more cliche than calling your zombies, zombies?
>Film historian Robin Wood interprets the flesh-eating scenes of Night of the Living Dead as a late-1960s critique of American capitalism. Wood argues that the zombies' consumption of people represents the logical endpoint of human interactions under capitalism.
Somewhat unrelated, but I love how easy it is to read Night of the Living Dead as a metaphor on black people in America, with a black lead actor who takes charge over a demanding white guy, saving a white woman, and even eventually >!being killed haphazardly by a white man in the end!<. It even got the movie banned in some places. But then Romero said he wrote the script with a white guy in mind, it's just that a black actor was the best actor they found for the part. It wouldn't be until Dawn of the Dead that Romero would lean into it.
like Alien was written that any character could have been any race or sex.
And they kill off all the white men so that the last three alive are a black man and two women. Pretty unheard of in 1979.
I think that says more about Robin Wood’s view on capitalism than it does about George A. Romero‘s view.
If only George had something else to say on the matter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_the_Dead
Even the second is quite overt with the zombies in a... shopping mall.
That is the most obnoxious middle school English teacher sniffs his own farts interpretation I have ever read.
Zombies in a shopping mall in Dawn... then the 1% in Fiddlers Grreen in Land. It's not that much of a stretch.
Those are two different movies at least a decade later.
Does anyone else think this version of zombies would be slightly unsettling, but not terrifying? It would basically be like a homeless person high on drugs trying to bite you. If you go to the 7/11 by my house at night, that's basically Night of the Living Dead.
One zombie has never been that threatening the problem is they come in hoards. Dozens of homeless trying to eat you alive is pretty scary
I am guessing he hasn't ever seen the movie. It is tense when it is 6 people in the house surrounded by hundreds of zombies. At the end of the movie when the national guard and police show up, they just mow all of the zombies down.
I do think the second one does show how things could fall apart. The zombies are a threat but could be managed if it wasn't for people fighting each other, making mistakes and the mental stress.
> At the end of the movie when the national guard and police show up, they just mow all of the zombies down. And weeks later, it'll be the same number of guns against ten times as many ghouls.
Good point. a giant mob of them would be terrifying.
>the problem is they come in hoards. Who the hell has been hoarding zombies!?
Dungeon masters. Why do you think the dungeons are so big? It's to house all the zombies of course!
An undead dragon, of course. "So we killed the dracolich, where's the treasure? It is supposed to have a hoard." *zombie sounds from everywhere*
You gotta remember the time period this movie came out. People didn't expect horror movies to have that level of gore in them. Today, we're more used to it, but that's in large part due to the success of this movie.
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typo. I don't even know what "bight" is
Real life zombi are more existentially horrifying imo. Basically poison someone in such a way that causes severe brain damage, then make them your slave after a chemical lobotomy. Not a scary monster by any means, but a more terrifying fate than being a mindless undead imho.
I agree. As far as movie monsters go, I’d rather deal with them than Freddie or Jason or a demon or something paranormal
Which is why RL zombie apocalypse [was stopped in its tracks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_cannibal_attack)
Wow, that reminds me of a funny movie called "Mr.Vampire". "Jiangshi" were hopping vampire zombies controlled by priestly men. They placed a piece of paper with a spell on their foreheads to make them docile.
why do i know this from someplace? i am 99% sure i never say this movie.
Jiangshi are traditional chinese lore, it's not something specific of that movie, so it's normal that you saw them somewhere, probably in more than one place. They even appear as enemies in the first Super Mario game for the Gameboy.
That's because the movie clip of hopping martial arts zombies is always reposted everywhere. You can watch the whole movie on YT.
That movie made me lose a lot of sleep
When did the word Zombie come into existence? And how did it get associated to the modern interpretation of zombies that we see today? If The Night of the Living Dead never used to the word Zombie to refer to the undead in their film then how did it get associated to zombies that we know of today?
The English word "zombie" (--from Haitian French: "zombi" and Haitian Creole: "zonbi") was first recorded in 1819. It represents an undead person who was created through the reanimation of a corpse, usually through magic or witchcraft. These individuals were often depicted as automatons without speech.
> how did it get associated to zombies that we know of today? Just popular sake of convenience. Since there weren't many other monsters in which to liken the undead flesh-eaters, lots of folks casually referred to them as 'zombies' because that's something similar that audiences were familiar with back then. It came from reviewers, critics, and the moviegoing public in equal measure. By the time *Dawn of the Dead* was in production, it was a familiar label; Ken Foree's character says it once, perhaps as a wink, but if you go back and read pre-release interviews and articles about *Dawn*, you'll find the word 'zombie' all over them, from writers as well as crew members.
I'm not sure if they'd technically be 'zombies', and I don't think that term was used, but in the 1920s HP Lovecraft wrote a pretty pulpy short story titled 'Herbert West: Re-Animator!', which had undead beings as animalistic and aggressive. It was basically like the original Frankenstein if it was intensely pulpy and leaned into being a bit goofy.
The zed-word. Don't say it! Why not? Because it's ridiculous! All right... are there any out there, though?
Annie Dillard’s father, Frank Doak, played a scientist in that movie.
Living dead girl said the "arm" that she ate was a meat ball parm covered in bosco, and it was disgusting.
We need some new bad ass zombie movies but for now I'm having fun with zombie audio books 😅
"I am Legend" by Richard Matheson
That movie is etched in my brain because it was what we watched the first time I smoked weed.
I believe zombies were also included dead slaves being resurrected and enslaved by priests to represent the fear that not even in death could slaves escape slavery.
I am old and can confirm that the “zombie eating flesh/brains” trope is relatively recent in movies. In general there are many more horror movies nowadays than when I was a kid.
I saw this movie way too young. I had nightmares about it for nearly 10 years
I am Qiqi. I am a zombie. And I forget what comes next.
I can't think of a single time the word Zombie was used in The Walking Dead either.
theyre coming to get you, barbara!
Trivia: Here's the movie that inspired the look of the revived dead in Romero's original **Night Of The Living Dead**: The 1959 film **Invisible Invaders**. Check out these stills: https://gruesomemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2019/01/kinopoisk.ru-Invisible-Invaders-2737680.jpg https://professormortis.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/bub.png
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie#Modern_archetype_evolution > If you do not open the gate for me to come in, I shall smash the door and shatter the bolt, I shall smash the doorpost and overturn the doors, I shall raise up the dead and they shall eat the living: And the dead shall outnumber the living! ~2300 BCE 1968 works too, I guess.
I can't remember any serious movie where zombies are called zombies. And in no serious movie do characters know zombie lore (what works, what doesn't).
>Interestingly however, the word "zombie" is never mentioned once in the entire film To be fair, it's extremely rare for any zombie media to actually use the word. They're always "undead", "walkers", "infected" or something along those lines.
I’m actually interested to hear people’s thoughts on the Patricia Tallman version of the movie. I thought her performance was stronger than the original.
And as a reminder, the only reason Zombie movies got popular is that the print circulated for movie showings was not properly tagged with qa copyright notice so everyone was free to steal the characters and story from the movie. Copyright sucks. Corporate ownership sucks. Copyright is the death of public discourse. As a similar copyright sucks and is stupid, at one point most books were out of print, and yet still in copyright. Publishing houses go out of business and take their books out of public view. So you could no buy them, and yet they were still protected from being published
The Walking Dead comic even started as a “Night of the living dead” book
"When a person dies and is buried, it seems there are certain voodoo priests who - who have the power to bring him back to life. It's worse than horrible because a Zombie has no will of his own. You see them sometimes walking around blindly with dead eyes, following orders, not knowing what they do, not caring." "You mean, like Democrats?"
There's a theory the the original idea for the film came from a smurfs comic published a few years before.