Brain Dead Redemption: What Zombies Have to Say About Us

Braaaaaaaiiiins. The answer is brains.

In this episode, Mike and Jacob slowly, and ominously, creep towards their point, discussing the depth of the zombie and the death they represent. George Romero, eat your heart out!

Resources

• Voyage Blog Entry – Dracula Doesn’t Suck!
• Voyage Blog Entry – WHETHER IT’S IN A WORD OR IN A LOOK, YOU CAN’T GET RID OF THE BABADOOK’S POSSESSION HOOK!
• Read the latest entry of the Voyage Blog!

Listen to the latest Voyage Podcast

Related Episodes

• Save the Whole World and Losing Your Soul – the Last of Us season finale
• Be Willing to Wait a “Long Long Time” – the Last of Us

Transcript

mike (00:00.595)
No, I didn’t get that s-

Jacob (00:02.811)
When’s the last time you heard someone called a goober?

mike (00:05.866)
Unironically, there, how was that for a delivery?

Jacob (00:08.948)
That’s really good. You goober. Hey, we’re talking.

mike (00:15.106)
Oh, thank goodness I didn’t plan any banter for the opening. Good thing we, yeah, that came so natural. Yeah.

Jacob (00:19.198)
Who needs who needs plans? I just I just like the fact that we’re getting back into taking those deep dives You know at the beginning of this podcast we promised that we’d be covering the stuff that no one’s willing to touch And so today we’re doing zombies, you know the type of thing that no one has any I Mean what’s no one talks about zombies. That’s why that’s why that’s why we got to come in and you know

mike (00:33.726)
Yeah, yeah, okay, you know what?

mike (00:38.798)
Yeah, everyone’s, they’re too cowardly, yeah. They’re too scared. You know what, you wanted a Monster Month and you’re getting a Monster Month, Jacob. I don’t know why you’re, now you’re gonna turn around and bite the hand or the brains that feed you, so to speak. Ah, like the…

Jacob (00:53.097)
Oh bite the brain yeah really bite the brain that feeds you oh wait dang it that’s a play on me because you’re the brain that feeds me i guess in that euphemism

mike (01:02.322)
Yeah.

mike (01:07.683)
Oh, I wasn’t even trying to go within that route, but sure, yeah. That’s, so anyway.

Jacob (01:11.934)
Mm-hmm. Who’s biting whose brains now, Mike?

mike (01:16.958)
So, exactly. You’ve deconstructed us to the point of destruction, I think, to quote another .. isn’t it? Hey, you know what? You can talk about that because at the point that this actually airs, we’ll have aired the Cabin in the Woods episode. So welcome everybody to this episode of the Voyage Podcast, where if you haven’t picked up by now, we’ve been slowly inching towards you.

Jacob (01:18.742)
Who even knows what any of this means anymore? Alright.

Yeah, that’s some cabin in the woods level deconstruction.

Jacob (01:36.441)
I know, yeah.

mike (01:45.734)
that we’re going to be talking about zombies. Another zombie reference, you like that? Yeah.

Jacob (01:49.474)
Wait, well, I mean this was the running zombie because I just threw it out there.

mike (01:54.386)
Oh, yours was the World War Z zombie and not the or the Game of Thrones, Game of Thrones zombie. Not a

Jacob (01:56.49)
post yeah post that world yeah way to reference World War Z yeah okay I can do Game of Thrones that’s better you know Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake or how about 28 Days Later yeah 28 Days Later zombie

mike (02:09.661)
28 days later, zombie. No, honestly, we could fill up a 60 minute podcast. You know, I was complaining about how every other sci-fi has time travel, but if you wanna talk about a trope that’s been done to death, it’s probably the zombie one too, right? Oh my gosh, it’s been done to undeath, you could say. If we’re gonna keep, yeah, I know. I just keep knocking them out of the park, don’t I?

Jacob (02:25.678)
Yeah, no, that’s for sure. Even when zombies are so pervasive and overdone that even when a successful TV show happens, it overstates its welcome by like seven seasons. So that’s the reference. Yeah, thanks. Thanks for catching it.

mike (02:46.99)
Like walking dead, is that what you’re referring to now? Yeah, exactly. It was right on the nose that fell off. So.

Jacob (02:56.444)
Just every…

mike (02:58.178)
Now that we’ve quickly run through our, I don’t know, did we even?

Jacob (03:01.02)
These these puns. I think your puns are rotten Mike

mike (03:07.327)
So we’ve run through a couple of, you know, whether it’s more recent and even some classic examples, but I did want to kind of talk through. So what are I guess just some of your, you know, you could say your favorite or maybe classically considered some of the best or the most innovative zombie movies and TV shows. And then we can kind of get into, you know, the real meat of the conversation.

Jacob (03:29.206)
the real brains of the conversation. So I’m gonna go with… Oh, dang, what’s it called now? Oh no! Wait, no, give me this. Nope, I’m gonna go with the serpent in the rainbow. See, that’s a joke that you wouldn’t get because you’re not up on your horror movies the way I am because that’s like voodoo zombies. That’s a whole movie about like the voodoo…

mike (03:31.443)
Oh yeah, something like that.

mike (03:40.386)
Night of the Living Dead, 28 days later.

Okay?

mike (03:55.622)
Alright, so why don’t you…

Illuminate me then, please.

Jacob (03:59.286)
What zombies really are. Yeah. Okay. All right. Fine. Um, so, you know, the thing about zombies is that they weren’t called zombies until George Romero made Night of the Living Dead, right? Like they were this idea of like corpses coming back to life. They would have been up until like 60 years ago, they would have just been referred to as like ghouls or like revenants. This idea that we use this language zombie to describe them that is taken from. Like voodoo magic.

mike (04:15.634)
Uh-huh.

mike (04:22.503)
Okay.

Jacob (04:29.086)
like Haitian voodoo magic stuff, you know, and so there are a few horror movies out there that are actually about voodoo magic, like White Zombie starring Bela Lugosi. It’s an old black and white one that’s really actually pretty creepy. But then this one was a Wes Craven flick, The Serpent and the Rainbow. And it’s got Bill Pullman. I love that guy. Mr. President. Yeah, that’s right. Best president in movie history.

mike (04:37.092)
Yeah.

mike (04:52.134)
from Independence Day. Yep.

mike (04:57.562)
Wow. That’s a bold statement.

Jacob (04:59.25)
He gets in the fighter jet. He gets in the fighter jet at the end. He leads from the front, Mike. But yeah, anyway, it’s about zombies, like Haitian voodoo zombies. It’s good. It’s interesting. Wes Craven’s a good horror movie director. That was really just a joke, though. It’s not my favorite zombie movie. I was just trying to be clever. Yeah, I was just trying to put you in your place, you know.

mike (05:02.823)
Yeah.

mike (05:17.51)
you were just trying to, yeah, be like, make a reference that Mike hasn’t heard of. Is that what you’re, yeah. Exactly. So, and well, in one of the, I mean, and one of the things that we’re, you know, going to talk about is how, of course, just like any iteration of a vampire movie is going to highlight something different about Dracula or a different iteration of, in this case, a zombie movie or zombie TV show is going to highlight something different,

Jacob (05:28.731)
Yeah.

mike (05:47.11)
you know, the director or the writer is going to have something specific or unique, hopefully, at least, that he or she is going to want to say. And so, you know…

Jacob (05:57.283)
Cool. What’s your favorite zombie movie?

mike (06:00.366)
I mean, I was trying to go for maybe the ones that I guess you could say are a little bit more relevant. I mean, I put Night of the Living Dead thinking that you’d wanna talk about that one a little bit because that connects to our cabin in the woods conversation.

Jacob (06:09.29)
Oh, absolutely. That’s… I mean, that might actually be my favorite zombie movie. And you know, people would accuse that of being a cliché response, except for the fact that like no one chooses that as their favorite zombie movie. Everyone thinks that it’s like important and like revolutionary and like blah, blah. But everyone has like a zombie movie that’s come after the fact that they feel like out does it.

mike (06:15.3)
Okay.

mike (06:23.312)
Mm-hmm.

mike (06:33.082)
But we go for more of the either the gory or the silly or the you know, whatever.

Jacob (06:37.098)
Well, there’s lots of reasons. Honestly, this is seriously, there’s so many zombie movies out there. Like pick your, pick your poison. Um, but the reality is, is that like, I unironically still think Night of Living Dead is a very strong contender for the best zombie movie ever made. Not just because it’s historically important for the genre, but because it’s really, really good, like, I mean, it’s just that black and white that it’s shot in the actual

mike (06:44.879)
Um.

mike (06:59.754)
Mm.

Jacob (07:04.338)
The actual story of it and the characters in it and the way that it ends, it’s got kind of a twist ending that is really poignant. It’s a great flick. It’s like a really, really good flick. And I think everything else after it is, you know, either just remaking it or trying to like overdo it, right? Like trying to up the ante and like, hey, those movies are fun too. I like those movies. But like, yeah, man, I mean, it’s

mike (07:26.469)
Um.

Jacob (07:33.27)
It’s quality stuff.

mike (07:35.29)
So, I mean, the ones that I at least put down that, and it’s also the ones that I’m most familiar with, because, you know, again, you can, as you’ve been very, as you’re very quick to do, you can roll your eyes and say, well, I’m just a noob, or I don’t, you know, I’m not as up on the horror movies or the monster movies as you are. So, I mean, like the ones that I’m most familiar with, I mean, I did watch The Walking Dead, right, when it first came out, and yeah, I sort of have grown less, I actually have not seen the last, maybe one or two seasons, I can’t remember.

Jacob (07:46.953)
Hahaha

Jacob (07:59.318)
All the way through the end, right?

Oh.

mike (08:05.29)
I think it might be something I might go back to. Okay, I don’t know why you’re coming after me like this, but sure. But anyway, I prefer to think of it as loyalty, but anyway, we’ll keep going. Because, and yeah, you’re gonna love my next references. So I think the game of throwing zombies are a good one to mention. And the reason why I included.

Jacob (08:07.499)
They even lost you, Mike, and you’ll watch anything.

Jacob (08:16.572)
Oh

Jacob (08:30.166)
They are good. They’re really good, actually.

mike (08:33.091)
The Walking Dead is an example and the Game of Thrones example is because they play very specific roles. Okay, that’s also part of it. But one of the things that like I was saying, every director, every writer is going to use the zombie trope or the zombie story to say something different. The real story in The Walking Dead is that the zombies aren’t the enemy, people are the enemy. Right? That’s like, if you’re going to take one thing away from The Walking Dead is like,

Jacob (08:37.706)
You’ve seen them.

Jacob (08:51.97)
Mm-hmm.

mike (09:01.938)
the real enemy are the other people. And this is the circumstances in which that sort of brought it out of them, right? So it’s kind of the whole social contract gets ripped up, ripped to shreds. And so then how do, you know, people really survive? Okay, so that’s why, like I said, the walking dead is a good example to bring up because in some ways it tries to kind of turn the zombie idea on its head by saying the zombies aren’t the enemy of the people are. Right?

Jacob (09:08.434)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob (09:15.999)
Yeah, absolutely.

mike (09:29.434)
They’re just like a mechanism that brings this out of other people. And we can get into how nihilistic it is and how like, you know, how, how very cynical it is and all that stuff that we can certainly talk about that. Um, the, the reason why I wanted to bring up the game of Thrones one and game of Thrones is even kind of on the nose about this as they get closer and closer to that final, uh, confrontation with the white walkers, with the zombies, is that these are more than just the, you know,

these people are dying and they’re gonna kill other people, is that this is like the, it’s the undoing of creation. It’s a very like, and again, they’re all sort of apocalyptic stories, but it was the, it was almost like the upending of the cosmos into chaos. It was the cosmos to chaos.

Jacob (10:06.964)
Yeah.

Jacob (10:12.586)
Well, these are these are like, well, they’re like. Exactly, no, there’s what makes the Game of Thrones White Walker zombies kind of unique is their kind of magic based reality. And as such, they’re coming like the, the kind of flavor of that zombie apocalypse is one that is kind of like ontological, right? Like apocalypse as that happened and other, you know,

mike (10:39.472)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob (10:42.242)
fictions and platforms and things like that. They’re always apocalyptic. And it’s always about the undoing of society and the reaction of society to its own undoing. But there’s something that’s kind of like deeper in the Game of Thrones apocalypse version of the scenario because it’s basically this like magic curse reality thing. So it’s not just an accidental disease or

mike (10:51.724)
Mm.

mike (11:09.159)
Yeah.

Jacob (11:09.258)
some kind of mysterious asteroid. It’s not happenstance. It’s not like, it’s not caught, it’s got agency. It’s got agency. It’s like the zombies in Game of Thrones have more to do, or like more in common with like the nothing in the never ending story than they do with like your typical zombie fair in like a more traditional zombie flick. Because those…

mike (11:13.114)
It’s not materialistic. It is actually accepting. Yeah.

mike (11:28.123)
Yeah.

mike (11:33.306)
Well, and it’s-

Jacob (11:34.838)
That’s more like cosmic nihilism. That’s more like, uh, the, the universe doesn’t care about you kind of stuff. Whereas game of Thrones is like, no, there’s actually like this evil force. Yeah. That wants to wipe out.

mike (11:37.18)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

mike (11:44.102)
It’s an intention. Yeah, it’s intentional. Like you said, there’s agency. There’s the big bad, you know, who wants to get rid of any sort of, you know, cosmos. It wants to all be disorder. And so that’s where, and it kind of brings me, it reminds me of another conversation that we’ve had separately. People have sometimes talked about this where they’ll ask the question, how can Indiana Jones still be skeptical after everything he’s seen? And yet the start of the Indiana Jones is like, he’s still like, you know, I’m not so sure, whatever. Because it’s like,

Jacob (12:11.638)
Mm-hmm.

mike (12:12.482)
after Raiders of the Lost Ark, it’s like, you should be willing to accept anything after what you’ve gone through, you’d think. Well, yeah, yeah. But I’ve had a similar thought when it comes to the world of Westeros, where it’s like, you’re living in this world where you are seeing magic pretty much all the time. How is there room for anybody left to be skeptical in that world, and yet you’ll still have characters who are like,

Jacob (12:16.678)
You would think, yeah. Well, he technically didn’t see anything because he was blindfolded, right? Maybe that’s the answer. It’s not.

mike (12:40.582)
Oh, I’m not so sure, you know, I’m blah, this or that. And it’s like, and so it’s just, it’s always funny to me. There’s, there’s always this sort of like, um, this, uh, schizophrenia when it comes to.

Jacob (12:43.694)
Mm-hmm. So almost.

Jacob (12:49.886)
the devil, well, the devil doesn’t exist, right? Like, in the Game of Thrones context, I think it’s really, it’s less of like a materialistic skepticism and more of spiritual skepticism, you know, because like the fantasy world of Game of Thrones is so cynical about fantasy as such, that even though it does have magic, the people who live in it, hey, most of them don’t experience magic. That’s one of the charms of the show is that like, it’s magic is

mike (12:54.044)
Uh-huh.

mike (13:00.943)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob (13:18.506)
Kind of lightly leavened in throughout it, you know, it’s very kind of like gritty and down to earth, which is a good part of its atmosphere. But, um, but even people who do know that magic exists, they don’t think that like evil exists or that there’s like an there’s like an apocalyptic force of evil that’s out to like destroy everything. Right. So it’s like a

mike (13:21.284)
Mm-hmm.

mike (13:39.034)
Yeah, or that evil just resides in people and there’s no sort of like spiritual, like you said, agent behind evil in general too. So you actually touched on too that I did think it was worth having is that just like you kind of fall into two different areas when we were talking about time travel where it’s like it’s either this or it’s this basically. Well, when it comes to zombie stories, you basically have two origins, right? You have the like virus kind of like, you know.

Jacob (13:46.487)
Mm-hmm.

mike (14:07.61)
it’s some sort of sickness, some sort of materialistic cause, or you have the somewhat quasi-spiritual cause. Because I can even remember, and I can’t remember the title of it, maybe it was the Zack Snyder one, where it’s like the people are coming back from hell to inhabit, or demons are coming back from hell to inhabit these people. Something like that.

Jacob (14:10.59)
Yep.

Jacob (14:24.878)
Oh, the tagline? The tagline is, when hell overflows, the dead will walk the earth. Or something like that. Which is a pretty metal tagline for a movie. When there’s no more room, this is how it goes, when there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth. Which is honestly, from a Christian perspective, in like the heroine of hell, that’s a very kind of like weird statement to make.

mike (14:30.466)
Yeah, okay, so you get this sort of quasi-spiritual.

mike (14:50.95)
like the day of the crucifixion too, like the day of the crucifixion where it says even the people left their graves and stuff. But yeah, no, I know you’re-

Jacob (14:56.538)
Oh, well, I’m not trying to like, I’m not trying to like make it and bring I’m not trying to bring it into the mud, Mike. Well, it’s just like, I’m just saying someone anyone who writes the line when there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth. Probably doesn’t have a lot of like deep Christian theological backgrounds, like, you know, or, and I’m not saying they should. Yeah. It’s a pretty metal line, though.

mike (15:02.97)
No, no, but no, but I, yeah.

mike (15:16.846)
No, that’s why I said quasi spiritual, you know, but yeah. But no, like I said, you’ve got this, like those are basically your two options. Now we’ve probably tended a lot more towards the kind of physical material because that’s what makes it quote unquote more realistic. But I think the fact that, like I said, you can kind of fall into one of these two camps and go back to the references that we made. Walking Dead definitely steers more toward the, you know, it’s an illness, it’s…

like the materialism, whereas Game of Thrones, it’s very much the magical kind of route. And that’s why, like I said, those two examples, I think they contrast each other, even though they both are basically zombies, they’re both trying to destroy the earth, in a sense.

Jacob (15:59.474)
You know, I would, I would kind of nuance those categories and actually say that there’s kind of three categories at play here because like the first category is disease, medical malpractice, you know, radiation, right? Human, human science run amok, whether it’s medicinal science or some other type of like weaponized science. Yeah. Right, you know, that’s true.

mike (16:06.045)
Okay.

mike (16:20.662)
Oh, like I am legend too. We didn’t even talk about I am legend, but yeah, that’s another good. There you’ve got some more fast zombies, fast zombies in I am legend.

Jacob (16:27.986)
I actually kind of forgot about I am legend will have to talk about that but like.

mike (16:31.71)
Especially since they’re going to have a sequel, I guess, too. Yeah. Oh, is it? Yeah. What is a book? Yeah.

Jacob (16:33.934)
Are they? Well, you know, the book, it’s based on a book by a really, really great author, Richard Matheson. Can you believe it? And the movie is very different from the book too. Can you believe that one? But that that’s been remade many times. There’s a Charlton Heston version of I Am Legend. There’s a Vincent Price version of I Am Legend. And then there’s a Will Smith version of I Am Legend. So hmm.

mike (16:46.85)
OK. Yeah.

mike (16:55.291)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob (17:04.002)
But I’m just kidding, I like Will Smith. But like, they’re all very different from each other too. All three of those movies take the concept. But I’d say the latest one, Will Smith, is the one that’s like the most removed from the book. Whereas the Charlton Heston and Vincent Price versions are pretty similar to the book, or at least take a lot of cues from it. You know, that one, just to go into like the basic story of that, which I think this is still at least true of the Will Smith one.

mike (17:11.162)
Mm.

mike (17:19.141)
Mm.

Jacob (17:34.198)
But in the it’s different. The Will Smith one’s just so different in flavor from the first two versions and the book, because in that one, he’s in a suburb of a big city. And so it’s like 50 suburbia because the book was written in the 60s, right? Maybe early 70s, pretty sure it was the 60s though. And he is trying to find, he’s a doctor and he is trying to find a cure for zombieism.

and the zombies are intelligent right like the zombies are actually they’re more like they’re more like well actually they’re kind of quasi vampiric right like they are undead but they are intelligent undead which is reasonably rare not very often

mike (18:09.767)
Yeah.

mike (18:16.549)
Mm.

mike (18:23.486)
Well, that’s just it is like because actually one of the things that, you know, I kind of had it was expecting this conversation to go down was, you know, we talk about this, this idea of the uncanny valley when it comes to like different things that scare us as human beings, is that it has to kind of fit in this area of it’s like us, but enough unlike us that it makes us uncomfortable or like I said, scares us. And you definitely get that with, you know, with the zombies where

They’re obviously a lot like us because they were us, but they have lost this essential part of their humanity, right, and we would say is the rational cognitive function part of it, but they’ve kept the more animalistic part, which is why they’re always trying to eat people or eat brains and all that, and that’s where, and that’s obviously where the.

Jacob (19:03.31)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob (19:08.402)
Yeah, or think about the fungus zombies and the cordyceps zombies in Last of Us. You know, that’s very… Dude, there’s so much zombie content. Like, you could have like five episodes of just zombie… referencing zombie content. You suggested zombies and you’ve completely forgotten. We’ve done no less than two episodes on it. Yeah, that’d be pretty cute.

mike (19:13.086)
Oh yeah, we talked to, oh yeah, we didn’t even talk about Last of Us yet. I mean, we have in an old episode. That’s right. I honestly, I had completely left my mind until you mentioned it now. Like, I couldn’t, I didn’t, and we, you know, we’ve done two episodes on The Last of Us. And I forgot about The Last of Us, but we need season two to come out, yeah.

Jacob (19:37.57)
pretty here for it, see where they go with it. But, you know, where it’s this kind of animalistic or kind of almost quasi robotic or hive mind type reality going on with those. There’s actually a lot of different a lot of different flavors of zombies in some ways what makes the I am legend zombies especially it’s been so long since I watched the Will Smith movie I’m trying to remember exactly like how they’re portrayed in it. Are they they’re not intelligent? Really?

mike (19:48.551)
Yeah.

Jacob (20:05.211)
Are they? In the Will Smith movie? I’m pretty sure they’re.

mike (20:06.898)
I mean, you get a sense of that towards the end, but you really don’t get the impression, you don’t get that impression leading up to that final confrontation in the Will Smith one. Yeah, I almost remember, it was almost jarring to me, it was jarring to me when I saw it because I come in expecting, at least from my understanding, the typical zombie of, you know, mindless. And then when you start to see that, and it almost becomes a break in continuity for me because they are portrayed as,

Jacob (20:09.91)
by the very ends. Yeah.

Most of the movie, yeah, they look like regular zombies almost.

Jacob (20:27.874)
Mm-hmm.

mike (20:35.022)
You know, you don’t get that sense of.

Jacob (20:35.306)
Well, because at the end, it’s almost like caveman level intelligence, right? Like, they’re not like hyper intelligent, but they’re like this kind of like, oh, there’s like something there, you know? Like, oh, there’s some kind of intelligence to it, right? And there’s a little bit of a back and forth.

mike (20:41.636)
Yeah.

mike (20:49.798)
Yeah, and you actually get an even stronger sense of that in the alternate ending where you have the one, kind of like, I guess, main bad guy zombie, and he sees his mate. Well, that’s just it. Even the sense of having a leader was like, and you get this in, what’s the new?

Jacob (20:58.366)
Yeah, he’s almost like the leader zombie or something. Yeah.

Jacob (21:04.974)
In and of itself, yeah, is more human than most zombies tend to be.

mike (21:08.05)
having a hierarchy, which yeah, you’re getting closer to what we would call more human, even though yes, of course, there are hierarchies in the animal kingdom. I’m not trying to, I mean, obviously, but so, so you, like I said, it was almost jarring for me because I came in with the expectations of, what you just, it’s the mindless, like figures that just try to eat and stuff. And yeah, there was a little bit more of that there. And like I said,

Jacob (21:17.471)
Yeah, yeah. But I get what you mean.

Jacob (21:30.798)
Mm-hmm.

mike (21:36.422)
they kind of almost take this hard turn towards the end. Maybe if I had been paying closer attention, I would have seen more of it in the earlier parts of the movie. But like I said, definitely in the, you get a sense of, like I said, even relationship in the alternate ending, because like I said, you have the kind of like big main bad guy monster, and then it’s like his mate sort of, that Will Smith was sort of testing on trying to heal, trying to give the cure to.

Jacob (21:44.259)
I don’t know, I should re-watch it at some point.

Jacob (21:57.131)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob (22:00.587)
Well…

Jacob (22:05.078)
So here’s the thing though, in the other versions of I Am Legends, the book and the movies are closer to it. They make, I mean, we’re talking about like truly intelligent zombies, right? And so these are really old movies and it’s a really old book. So I guess I’m not going to really try to hide too many spoilers from this, but they are really good stories. So take with a grain of salt if you guys want to go not know this, but they’re a.

Your first introduction to zombies in these movies is the paint upon. They’re all a little different. All three of these versions of the story, a little different. But I’ll just go with the book in the book. Like they talk those zombies like they actually retain like memories. They’re they’re really kind of like just evil versions. Like evil, kind of like cannibalistic.

dead quote unquote versions of who they were before. And so they’ve it’s like your neighbors have just become like super malicious. Your neighbors have become cannibalistic malicious, you know, like, and so they’ll and they also they don’t like they are zombies in the sense that like they don’t really like they need to stay out of the sun. So it’s there’s like a vampire element. In fact, when Richard Matheson was writing the story,

mike (23:14.852)
Mm.

Yeah.

mike (23:29.969)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob (23:33.558)
Not a Living Dead hadn’t come out yet. So he’s writing a zombie story, but he doesn’t have like the modern idea of what a zombie is directing him. So his zombies are actually much more related to like the kind of like folklore of like European folklore of like the undead, like the kind of ghouls and revenants that I was referencing, but shares a common trajectory with like vampire folklore. And so in that regard, he actually has them.

mike (23:36.219)
Mm.

mike (23:52.912)
Mm.

mike (23:58.482)
Yeah.

Jacob (24:01.906)
only able to come out at night. And so it’s as much a vampire story as a zombie story, but it’s about like hordes of the undead roaming the streets. So it feels more like a zombie story than a vampire story. But it kind of hits both. It kind of hits both points. Anyway, they can talk, they remember him, they try to lure him out, they try to trick him. And then eventually he meets a girl who is another survivor, right? But then

mike (24:04.231)
Mm-hmm.

mike (24:15.314)
Yeah.

Well, in this-

mike (24:23.555)
Yeah.

Jacob (24:30.954)
The twist is that she’s not a survivor. She’s actually just a new ploy by the zombie horde to get him to come out of his house. So they’re so intelligent that they can go and like make up themselves and try to hide the facts. You know, she’s like a high functioning one of these because some people are like, they’re so gone. They’re like depraved, but she’s still like able to like present as a human, so to speak. So

mike (24:43.23)
Mm.

mike (24:47.09)
So.

mike (24:54.466)
So it’s like a zombie Turing test. It passed the, it’s like a, or the anti-zombie Turing test, yeah. The human Turing test.

Jacob (24:57.354)
It is. She passes the zombie Turing test. But eventually, yeah. But here the whole story, the whole arc of that story though, is eventually he’s the only human left. And what he comes to see by the end of the book is that the zombie hordes who have retained this level of like intelligence, things like that, are actually recreating society.

falling back into and so like he spends his days going around killing these people right because they’re evil zombies that’s it yeah that’s the reason why the title is i am legend no the title is i am legend because by the end of the book he’s the mythological creature the evil human that comes out in the day and hunts you it’s like an inversion of the monster trope and

mike (25:33.887)
Who’s the real monster? Yeah, it’s the, oh, gotcha, yeah.

mike (25:46.747)
Yeah.

mike (25:51.524)
Yeah.

Jacob (25:53.438)
And that’s interesting. It’s a really interesting take on because from a when you

mike (25:57.006)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, no, that’s… Especially back in the 50s when it was written, too.

Jacob (26:01.654)
Well, it raises questions of like being made in the image of God and things like that, you know, and what or even fallen humanity or whatever and what our place in that world is. I mean, it’s a kind of cynical take, you know, that book doesn’t have a happy ending. Okay. It doesn’t have an unhappy ending, I guess, but basically he kind of like acknowledges that like he’s not meant for this world, you know.

mike (26:07.414)
Mm-hmm or fall in humanity you can even say right

mike (26:21.051)
Hmm

Jacob (26:29.718)
like this world has like moved past him. There’s something to it. Yeah, there’s something to it. I don’t know. It’s kind of, you can almost talk about it from like an apocalypse, like at the end of days when like everyone’s like an apostate and a reprobate and all you have left is just like your desire for Christ to come back and like, you know leave this world kind of thing. So you could kind of make a parallel with that. And the movies are similar to that trajectory.

mike (26:30.873)
Hey, that’s kind of got a Christian take to it, I guess, right? Yeah. Thanks for watching.

No, it-

mike (26:46.736)
Mm-hmm.

mike (26:52.772)
Yeah.

Jacob (26:59.514)
Um, so these are, it feels very different from the Will Smith’s one. Um, you’ll, that one’s very, that one’s yeah, as such, it kind of loses what makes the, the actual story kind of special in my opinion, but it’s, it has its moments as just like a kind of schlocky zombie action flick. Um, I, before we move on though, that was the longest tangent ever. No, that was the longest tangent ever because I was about to say.

mike (26:59.844)
Okay.

mike (27:04.73)
That one, yeah, it’s more like a monster action movie than it is a like, it’s just more of an action.

mike (27:13.662)
Um.

mike (27:19.922)
So.

Ah, I’m just gonna, yeah, yeah.

Jacob (27:27.522)
There’s three types of categories. And we never, that was the first, yes, we’ve just been going on and on and on about this first category of like medical zombies. I’ll make this super quick because we can just move on to what you want to talk about next. But then you have unknown zombies. So there’s a lot of zombies where it’s like, we don’t know why the dead are coming back to life. They’re just like coming back to life, right? And so that’s kind of like existential, like, you know, you don’t know as much as you think you do.

mike (27:30.262)
Oh, that’s right. Yeah. Oh yeah, I just…

mike (27:41.447)
Yeah.

mike (27:48.795)
Uh huh. Yeah. That’s okay, yeah.

Jacob (27:56.618)
You know, you’re, you are not master of this world, you know, and you’re stuck.

mike (27:57.049)
Uh-huh.

mike (28:01.526)
I mean, not that we’re gonna, we don’t need to quibble, but I would probably fit that in the quasi spiritual. If you’re thinking like material versus, like I would say it sort of fits in. Now, of course, obviously in those types of zombie stories, they could figure it out and it’ll end up just being a germ or end up being a disease. And obviously then it would shift back over into the, it would shift back over into the A story and not the B story, but.

Jacob (28:07.607)
You could.

Jacob (28:18.206)
Yeah, asteroid or something.

Well, there’s probably like a three circle Venn diagram. Are well, but they’re not like overlapping circles. It’s like a ring, three rings where you have the medical human created zombies next to it is we don’t know what happens zombies. And then after on the other side of that, there’s the evil magic zombies. Right.

mike (28:32.871)
Okay.

mike (28:45.21)
I was like, no, you have to have a meat in the middle for the alchemist zombie, like the, you know, cause that’s the one where you get the magic, the physical and the human agent. So you gotta have one meat in the middle for sure. But…

Jacob (28:57.237)
What’s an alchemist zombie? What are we talking about here? Like Frankenstein maybe?

mike (29:01.242)
Oh, I was just trying to combine all three of them. I didn’t have like a example. I was just saying like, yeah, cause then you have the agent, you have the magic, and you have the physical stuff. Hey.

Jacob (29:04.51)
Oh, okay. Is that where they meet? Okay. You could put… I might have stumbled onto something. You could put Frankenstein right in the middle there. Because that’s kind of like… That’s like all three of those combined kind of thing.

mike (29:15.942)
That’s an elk, yeah.

mike (29:19.954)
For sure, yeah, because you’ve definitely got the undead part of it. You’ve got the human agent and it’s a, you know, prideful and nefarious and

Jacob (29:24.85)
And the Frankenstein, how he actually makes it happen is a mixture of science and occult. Of course, in like the 1700s and early 1800s where that book has taken place, there probably wasn’t like a strong distinction between science and occult. But he is very much, he’s as much an alchemist as he is a scientist in Mary Shelley’s book anyway.

mike (29:43.93)
scientist and see now we now we can’t do a Frankenstein episode right because you’ve already you know you’ve already figured

Jacob (29:49.67)
No way, dude. Next year, next Halloween season, because we don’t have it scheduled for this month. But next Halloween season, there’s going to be a Frankenstein episode, and it’s going to be referencing AI, artificial intelligence, and Frankenstein. Yep.

mike (30:02.574)
Oh boy. Maybe throw in some time travel. There’s gotta be a Frankenstein time travel movie in there somewhere. You’ll be able to find it. I’m sure you’ll find it.

Jacob (30:07.933)
Yeah.

Jacob (30:11.828)
I have ideas. I have ideas.

mike (30:14.135)
Oh, are you gonna write the movie? Is that what? No.

Jacob (30:15.726)
No, no, I think I could make those. I don’t have like a explicit time travel Frankenstein movie in mind. Though it makes you wonder if there’s not one. But there is. I could make it happen. I could make connections. You’ll just have to wait till next year, Mike.

mike (30:33.186)
I guess so, yeah, I’m on the edge of my seat over here. So I wanted to, and we’ve alluded to this a little bit already, but I wanted to first kind of just back up and sort of build a little bit of a foundation of why are zombies scary. Now again, of course it’s gonna seem obvious, but we can kind of break it down, and like I said, some of the elements that we’re gonna talk about is gonna, you can see how they fit into, as I’ve already mentioned, the Walking Dead zombies or the Game of Thrones zombies. But.

Jacob (30:35.375)
Ah, ha ha!

mike (31:00.634)
So I feel like this is a natural enough breaking point. Like I can re-say the thing that I just said, but then we can actually pick up from there and do our last like 30 minutes. And then that’ll be our episode. So I, cause I mean, I’m, my bell’s going to ring in like 10 minutes anyway. So I feel like I don’t want to pick up steam on anything. So I’ll just start on the like, why are zombies scary? And then if you look in act two, it’s what can zombies teach us about humanity? And that’s where the whole, you know, powers of the soul, intellect and will.

Jacob (31:05.272)
Hehe.

Jacob (31:15.71)
Yeah, start somewhere, start somewhere. It’s a good break.

mike (31:27.842)
I do like the idea of the tradition coming back to haunt us and consume us, right? Because it’s the idea of like, it’s the debtor coming back. I feel like that’s kind of a, not that it’s the most unique or the most original take, but I feel like that’s something that, you know, when it comes to stories, it’s something worthwhile because that is, in a sense, what we young people are afraid of is, you know, the old people are consuming us.

Jacob (31:32.322)
Okay.

Jacob (31:44.938)
It’ll be interesting.

And here’s…

Well, that’s that is interesting. I think that’s an interesting commentary. I like I like that. Oftentimes I find in our conversations, I think that we have like interesting takes on like tired, tired ideas, which is why I’m just messing around with a zombie thing. I think we have interesting things to say about this stuff. But like.

mike (31:53.662)
I’m gonna-

mike (32:07.998)
Should I stop the recording by the way? Is it easier if I stop the recording since we’re not, or is this all, could you use this as a clip? Okay, then well, whatever, sorry.

Jacob (32:12.394)
Oh, sure. I don’t know, you clapped.

Yeah, just that’s fine. We can we can you can keep it recording as I’ll keep it recording. Who knows? Maybe there will be something interesting said but like

mike (32:21.786)
Okay. I was gonna say, like, even your, anyway, keep going, yeah. We have interesting, you were telling me how interesting I am.

Jacob (32:26.59)
Well, yeah.

mike (32:30.83)
I am gonna like unplug and stuff, but I’ll be able to hear you because I’ll it’ll just switch to computers

Jacob (32:33.702)
Okay. What we haven’t really, you mentioned it when you were talking about the Walking Dead episodes, but like what you said about Walking Dead is how it’s about how humans react when civilization falls apart. That’s like a super universal trope. Like every single zombie. Just the idea that like the zombie genre is about what happens when society falls apart.

mike (32:42.393)
but like what you said.

mike (32:52.384)
Say that again, sorry.

Jacob (32:59.946)
You know, that’s not unique to that’s not unique to Walking Dead by any stretch. That’s literally basically the whole zombie genre exists in order to ask the question of like, are like, are humans the monsters? Who’s the real monsters that the humans kind of thing? I think that we should talk about that a little bit more. And so like when we start, we can talk about it, but that’s a conversation everybody’s had. And like, there’s, there’s nothing unusual about that conversation.

mike (33:00.167)
Yeah.

mike (33:13.766)
Yeah.

Jacob (33:27.638)
So, but we should still, we could still have it because I think that we can say interesting things in the context of it. But then, especially from Christian perspective, I think that’s what we bring to that, that generic conversation is like well, what’s it look like from a Christian perspective, but then get into some more interesting kind of like outside the box concepts like you were suggesting about how like the past comes back to haunt us and things like that I thought that might be neat.

mike (33:27.855)
Yeah.

mike (33:34.658)
Respect.

mike (33:39.569)
Yeah.

mike (33:52.706)
Yeah, I mean, I don’t know, like, we don’t have to spend a ton of time on, like I said, the powers of the soul. But that is, you know, where obviously in our Christian tradition, it can have something a little bit unique to say. But yeah, even if most of it becomes the… because I guess we already are 30 minutes in. And I don’t know, like, have we had enough to hook somebody yet? Where, you know, somebody’s not going to turn it off before we get to the real meat of the conversation?

Jacob (34:14.207)
Yeah, I mean, I think…

Jacob (34:20.066)
Sure, honestly I think like you say zombie episode and so far we’ve talked about Game of Thrones and I am legends But not the Will Smith movie like the actual like old-school stuff. I find that to be actually kind of Not not obvious not obvious things to talk about When people come into a zombie conversation, so that’s cool

mike (34:29.903)
Yeah.

Thanks for watching!

mike (34:41.182)
I think, like I said, I think we’ve laid a good foundation of like, like you said, the types of zombies or the types of zombie stories, and then we’ll get into some of this more like, whether you want to say philosophical or theological stuff.

Jacob (34:52.954)
Yeah, what it says about humanity and things like that. Bring the Christian stuff into it.

mike (00:00.56)
All right, so we’ve kind of gone through it and you’ve touched a little bit on where this conversation, I want it to go eventually. We’ve gone through a bunch of or we’ve got did a little bit of a I guess you’d say a deep dive into some examples from pop culture. You know, we did talk about The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones a little bit. But then I am legend as well. And I did allude to this question that I first want us to talk about, which is why are zombies scary? Now, I mentioned the uncanny valley, which is this whole kind of

idea, you can Google it if you’ve never heard of it before, but it’s basically that something is enough like us, but also enough unlike us where it makes us uncomfortable. And that’s where kind of the fear lives. That’s where so much of the, you know, subject of scary stories sort of is taking place. And zombies are definitely right there because they, of course, they share that they were human or, you know, they still have that human, like, we have that expectation, but

something important has been taken away. There’s enough, there are enough unlike us to kind of scare us to.

Jacob (01:03.25)
I think that’s a fair point that you do get into uncanny valley stuff. But where I would go with that is that another big theme about zombie stories as such is that they are a mirror to us, so to speak. And so basically a famous zombie movie is George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead.

mike (01:25.313)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jacob (01:31.25)
And then obviously, you know, Zach Snyder did that remake in the 2000s. But the first one came out in the 70s. And in that movie, one of the plot points of it is that they the humans go to a mall because the mall has everything you can survive at a mall well. But all the zombies, yeah, and they think they’re cool. I was like, oh, we’re going to go to the mall. But then all of a sudden, all the zombies start coming to the mall, too. And they’re all like, how do they even why are they come to the mall kind of thing? And the idea is, is that like the zombies are just like performing their habits.

mike (01:43.776)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. That’s, of course, the big. Yeah, go ahead.

mike (01:53.67)
Yeah.

Mmm.

Jacob (02:00.554)
And so when the zombies lose their humanity, all they have is their behavior, behaviorism, you know, like their habits. And so it’s a commentary on like consumerism, you know, basically. Yeah. It’s like, you know, and a lot of that, a lot of that movie is, is just, you know, poking fun at zombies doing like mundane things, walking around a mall. Because, you know, and we’re supposed to see ourselves, right?

mike (02:00.836)
Mm-hmm. We’ve all been programmed. We’re all zombies. Yeah.

mike (02:14.392)
It’s pointing the finger back at us. Yeah, exactly.

Jacob (02:29.982)
And so this isn’t uncanny. This is not uncanny valley, but I do think that it is kind of playing in the ballpark, what you’re talking about, because it’s like, it’s a way for us to look at ourselves.

mike (02:30.275)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob (02:42.642)
It cuts through to us because it’s taken away all the facade. It’s taken away all the ego. And all you’re left with is just what it looks like. And we all just look like zombies, you know, and in the 21st century, you know, a zombie movie should just have everyone like with their like face in their phones, just like walking the streets, you know, just like zoned out into a phone kind of thing. Yeah, that’s yeah, you know, that’s what a zombie movie would.

mike (02:49.338)
Mm-hmm.

mike (02:54.502)
Well…

mike (03:03.48)
Mm. Yeah. That’s the Boomer zombie movies. What you’re it’s like the

Jacob (03:11.026)
you know, if we were doing the same type of social commentary.

mike (03:13.552)
Well, well, and but even to that end, because to go off of the social commentary thing, we’ve already talked about how and not that this was unique to The Walking Dead by any means. But one of the big things about the zombie movie motif is that it’s when the social contract is ripped up, when the societal constructs are torn away, what are we left with as human beings? And I mentioned the whole thing about how it’s like, you know, Walking Dead is basically saying humans are the real monster, humans are the real enemy.

And it’s the same idea of they’re enough like us, right? Cause they’re still humans and they still have some sort of like, you know, rudimentary government maybe set up or whatever, but they’re enough unlike us because of the societal like constructs that are stripped away. And that’s where the fear comes in, right? What happens to the human win. And so it, it still lives in that kind of fear uncanny valley area. The uncanny valley thing isn’t like contradictory to.

Oh, it’s giving a social commentary on consumerism or the social construct. It’s more like that’s why they’re the subject of fear. Does that make sense?

Jacob (04:08.092)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob (04:18.354)
No, and there’s also it’s an it’s because there’s kind of two subcategories of zombie movie that’s talking about kind of like this kind of social commentary stuff. One has humans. Oh, humans are the bad guys. Right. So rip up the social contract, like you’re saying, and what you see is humans. To use some Freudian terms like the super ego goes away. Right. The the civilizational facade that keeps us all in check disappears and we all revert back to like barbarism. Right.

mike (04:40.295)
Mm-hmm.

mike (04:47.828)
Mm.

Jacob (04:48.958)
And so that’s what you’re referencing, right? But then there are some zombie movies, like, you ever seen like Return of the Living Dead? That’s a that’s a comedy zombie movie actually from the 80s. Well, it came out in 85. It’s actually it was written by the one of the, I think it was Dan O’Bannon, who I think did Alien, like Ridley Scott’s Alien. That guy, I can’t remember if he wrote Return of the Living Dead or if he

mike (05:00.556)
Is it the more recent one on Netflix? Oh no, this isn’t the… Okay.

mike (05:14.19)
Okay.

Jacob (05:17.038)
directed it. He’s affiliated with in a big way though, I think. But it’s actually, he co-owned or the someone co-owned the rights to Night of the Living Dead with George Romero. And George Romero went on and did his series of films, follow up with Dawn of the Dead and then Day of the Dead, stuff like that goes on a few more but like this guy, he still had rights to it too. So he creates his own sequel to Night of the Living Dead. And it’s called Return of the Living Dead.

And it’s not anything like the Living Dead, but it’s still a zombie classic in its own right. However, you know, warning, it’s pretty salacious. It’s not exactly the most wholesome film you’ll ever watch. But it is another one of those examples of a zombie movie where the zombies retain intelligence to some extent. And so I’ll give you an example like

mike (05:47.673)
Mm.

mike (05:58.863)
Mm.

mike (06:09.126)
Okay.

Jacob (06:11.51)
These kids get trapped in a cemetery and they get trapped at like the morgue attached to the cemetery. And meanwhile, like the zombie apocalypse is happening around them. And they managed to get a phone call out to the police. But when the police and the ambulance show up, all the zombies like jump out and kill the police and the ambulance people immediately. And then like pick up the receiver and they’re like, send more reinforcements kind of thing. And so they actually like are telling the humans to like send more humans to them kind of thing.

mike (06:39.123)
Oh, yeah, sure.

Jacob (06:40.246)
So it’s an example of intelligent zombies doing things. But here’s the thing, those intelligent zombies are barbaric, right? So in other words, what we had just talked about was a lot of zombie stories talk about how like the human characters and those things, the zombies don’t have personalities. They’re just like a phenomenon that brings out the worst in humanity. There are some zombie movies where the zombies are just like the worst of humanity. So it’s like the zombies represents.

mike (06:47.287)
Mm-hmm.

mike (07:08.118)
Mm.

Jacob (07:09.634)
the worst of humanity. And it’s the humans that are also still intelligent trying to fight off these kind of like, dregs of humanity. In which case, those types of stories are more like, the zombies represent our id, the zombies represent our passions, you know. And so you have like the human survivors actually taking on a little bit more of a noble quote unquote, because the people are not noble in return to living dead.

mike (07:16.977)
Yeah.

mike (07:26.745)
Mm.

mike (07:35.281)
Yeah.

mike (07:38.559)
Mm.

Jacob (07:39.414)
But they’re still, they represent like the upper, the rational, the intelligent, the, from a Christian perspective, like the image of God stuff. And the zombie hordes are like the masses of like humans that are just following their passions and things like that. In this case, those passions mean eating brains, which Return of the Living Dead, that’s where that comes from. That whole meme of like brains, brains.

mike (07:44.913)
Mm-hmm.

mike (07:48.795)
Yeah.

mike (07:58.516)
Mm.

mike (08:08.198)
Yeah.

Jacob (08:08.49)
that is born in Return of the Living Dead. That’s the movie that coined that. The more you know.

mike (08:12.44)
Okay.

mike (08:17.628)
So that’s kind of part one of the why are zombies scary. Part two is, because obviously they represent death, right? I mean, they’re called the undead, or you’ve said the night of the living dead. Like it’s this whole idea of, and then they’re dead people that rise up again. And now it’s the idea of that in one thing, in one way, we in like modern culture, we can kind of like sequester or compartmentalize death and we can keep it in a box and keep it away. But here it’s actually pursuing us, right?

even if it is slowly pursuing us in some cases, it’s slowly inching towards us. And isn’t that the great metaphor, right? For this idea of what are we afraid of? We thought we could keep it contained. We thought we could keep it kept away or kept aside. And yet it keeps kind of slowly, incrementally inching towards us. And we have to look at it in the face, right? We have to look at the decay right in front of us. We have to look at, you know, so…

Jacob (08:48.343)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob (09:07.926)
If.

mike (09:14.212)
That’s again where it’s like, why is this such a lasting or such a, yeah, just prominent, you know, kind of a story.

Jacob (09:21.346)
I’m going to go ahead and coin two labels for these types of trajectories in a zombie movie. The first one being we are the monsters. That’s the one where the zombies are the backdrop that we have to look at. The second one is the so the first one I said was we are the monsters. The second one is the monsters are us. Okay. So the second trajectory is when you look at what the zombies are doing, you see us like oh they are supposed to be us.

mike (09:29.618)
Mm-hmm.

mike (09:39.901)
Mm-hmm.

mike (09:47.397)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob (09:49.142)
When you go into the monsters are us type films, I think it’s a really good analogy for what you just said, which is to say, you can see them slowly like creeping, like basically if they represent our passions, if they represent like basically the sin that consumes us and self-perpetuates like a virus and things like that throughout humanity, then when you have movies where you have sane, rational humans,

looking at these like barbaric hordes of zombies. You know, I think that to some extent, that’s kind of the Christian in this world, right? Like, and what we’re really supposed to do to get all cheesy with it is we have the zombie vaccine, and we’re supposed to go out into the hordes and like make more humans out of the zombies, right? We’re Will Smith and whoa, bring it back, way to circle it back. Oh, yeah, pretty good. We’re all Will Smith, everyone.

mike (10:35.968)
Ah, we’re Will Smith and I am Legend in the movie, just in the movie, just in the movie version. Yeah. Uh huh. Yep, exactly.

mike (10:49.309)
Or we’re Ellie from The Last of Us, and we just need our brains taken out. Is that kind of the, to go Last of Us on us?

Jacob (10:55.772)
Well, if you really want to turn Ellie into a Christ figure, then she is the Christ that sacrifices so that the world can become not zombies anymore.

mike (11:03.712)
Oh hey hey, just give a teaser, you gotta go back to our last of us episode, right?

Jacob (11:07.79)
Or just go check out episode 6 or something like that. It is. I know that because I’m editing all these. Yep, that’s yeah, there you go. No, that’s the next one. That was the last one. You’re right. Yeah. No, you’re right. You’re right. Yeah. That’s the gay zombie episode.

mike (11:12.172)
It’s the six. No, yeah. It’s the save the whole world and lose your soul. Save the whole world and lose your soul. Yep. But anyway, so yeah. No, episode six was the long, long time. That was episode three. So all right. OK, your words. So we’ve got.

Jacob (11:35.155)
Okay.

mike (11:38.348)
But again, yeah, because you make the connection clear, and it’s not going to be made as clear in the actual zombie movies. But in the same way that death is pursuing us, death is chasing us, well, death is just the result of sin. So it should look like sin, whether it’s the societal sin of consumerism or whatever the case is. But it still is this idea of it is slowly pursuing us, plus we can’t avoid it anymore. We have to look it in the face. But it doesn’t just mean the death of the individual.

In most of the zombie movies, you have this sort of death of culture that takes place. And it could be a purging of a bad part of culture, like you kind of mentioned with the consumerism part of the Romero version. Or in some ways, people see it as the superficial societal conventions that are finally stripped away because of this catastrophe that happens. And like I said, maybe there’s some… Yeah, go ahead.

Jacob (12:17.57)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob (12:29.59)
Well, we’re much more on the track of the we are the monsters side of things now. The way are the monsters side of the things, sometimes the humans that, you know, so the zombies are just a phenomenon, excuse, some kind of natural disaster events backdrop to study human nature. And so, yeah, catalyst. And so you’ve taken the facade of civilization away and humans can still choose to be civilized.

mike (12:44.315)
Mm-hmm.

The catalyst, yeah.

Jacob (12:58.806)
But most of the time these zombie shows or movies depict them as breaking apart into factions, a few of which try to keep civilization alive, but most of which revert back to a much more, you know, kind of tribal barbarism. Yeah, like, you know, and the culture doesn’t matter anymore. It’s just survival. Like who cares about beauty? It’s utilitarian through and through.

mike (12:59.446)
Mm.

mike (13:10.206)
Mm.

mike (13:14.669)
A barbarism, like you said, yeah.

Jacob (13:27.174)
You know, like who cares about retaining music or whatever. Like we just need to like find the next meal even if I have to kill that guy to get it kind of thing.

mike (13:27.788)
Mm.

mike (13:38.632)
And this is, so this is actually go back to why I wanted to bring up the game of the zombies and Game of Thrones is because there you have one of the clearest most explicit, it almost like spells it out for you that this is not, this is not just about killing the people, right? So that the bad guy can have more undead soldiers. This is about the entire like death of civilization, death of culture. And like you said, it’s not an accidental feature that civilization crumbles. That was the intention of this.

you know, big bad guy of the what’s it called? The something king, the ice king, night king. Thank you. Yeah. So I was going to say, yeah, I was thinking, yeah, white walkers. Yeah. Anyway, moving. They, you know, they start up in the ice. So, okay.

Jacob (14:09.006)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, it’s like it’s an agency the Night King Ice King is Adventure Time

Jacob (14:21.426)
Yeah, Night King. Uh, yeah. That’s another kind of, it makes them kind of unique because they’re all like frosty. You know, not a lot of frosty zombies.

mike (14:29.388)
Yeah, yeah. Well, and you know, you’ve got the whole like, and obviously if it’s like a parallel to kind of Northern Europe, England, and it’s coming down and all that stuff, but moving on. So yeah, you have this like very, yeah, I try to bring that in as much as I can. So.

Jacob (14:39.731)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob (14:43.515)
Wait for the Game of Thrones episode, Mike.

Jacob (14:50.042)
I know, the bingo card is on full display with Mike’s Game of Thrones reference.

mike (14:56.416)
So you’ve got this, like I said, this death of culture slowly creeping towards. And it does speak to, if you want to see the Christian parallel, it’s this apocalyptic where the old way is thrown off. And you could look at it in one of two ways. You could look at it as a recycling or an actual renewal. And as you were describing, in some of these examples, yeah.

Jacob (15:18.886)
Yeah, this is like the flood, right? This is like Noah’s flood in like, uh, evil, undead, horrid form.

mike (15:27.276)
And so it kind of brings us to, well, I guess, you know, what we kind of has gone through, like what does it teach us about humanity, you know, when stripped away, when certain things are stripped away, who are we really, or what are we sort of left with? And you kind of get left with this sort of like fallen humanity versus redeemed humanity. And that’s what, in this case, the, you know, the zombie story, maybe not entirely specifically, but in some ways the zombie story can really kind of highlight that.

Jacob (15:44.974)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, sure.

mike (15:55.836)
because of the unique human element that the zombie monster kind of brings forward. You know, I can even think of like, there’s some scenes in like The Walking Dead where people will actually start to use the zombies as almost like tools or almost like cattle or like livestock, you know?

Jacob (16:13.358)
Well, there’s yeah, so like, you know, Day of the Dead, the third film in the Romero trilogy. Well, it’s not trilogy. He made like five more later on. But like, the big three that kind of capped off a trilogy and in the 80s. The third one is about them being in a military bunker trying to harness zombies. So most of humanity has turned into a zombie horde. The remaining people are in a military bunker full of scientists and soldiers.

and they are trying to domesticate zombies. They want to like zombie power, right? Like, what is that from? What is that from? I want to harness… Dune. That’s where I’m getting that reference from. You know, desert power. If you’ve seen the new Dune movie, because I don’t think, I don’t know if he talks like that in the book, but the new Dune movie that came out a couple years ago…

mike (16:50.327)
Yeah.

mike (16:58.035)
Ah.

Jacob (17:08.966)
They talk about harnessing desert power, which is to say like the Basically the bedouin types the people who live out in the desert. They want to harness them for their purposes That’s kind of what they’re trying to do with zombies. I make connections

mike (17:18.3)
Mm-hmm.

mike (17:23.588)
Yeah, no. So I mean, and so the last, I mean, the last kind of, I guess, point, you know, to sort of bring this all home is you think of the idea of, well, it’s the it’s the dead who are coming back to haunt us. Right. And we can see this, you know, we see it very physically and very violently in the zombie movies. But do we is there also this sort of parallel when we think of like, and you know, GK Chesterton called tradition, the democracy of the dead. And so you think of

Jacob (17:50.049)
Yeah.

mike (17:51.264)
Is this the dead coming back to haunt us, or we’re paying for the sins of, you know, our past ancestors or whatever? Is there a sort of element, I think, like tradition is coming back to haunt us and consume us in the case of zombies. Is there a sort of parallel that we can, you know, draw upon or find or whatever?

Jacob (18:07.666)
A constant, a constant, constant folklore theme all over the world constantly everywhere is you have to respect the ancestors. Right. And so basically in a lot of pagan civilizations, there would be ancestor worship or ancestor appeasements and we’re talking like across all time and geography. Right. This is like super basic to human instinct. Where if you don’t respect the dead.

If you don’t respect the ancestors that have gone before you, they will haunt you. They will come back and they will become a vampire and eat you, or there’ll be a ghoul or a revenants, what we call a zombie and eat you, or they will become a poltergeist and a ghost around and like mess up your life and curse you. Right. So that’s all rooted in this idea that’s what drove a lot of, um, respect for the dead was a fear.

mike (18:40.303)
Mm.

Jacob (19:06.122)
of the dead in a lot of ways, right? And there’s something, there’s something to that. You know, as Christians, we have a notion of the saints. It’s not the same thing as ancestor worship, but it is.

mike (19:06.95)
Mm-hmm.

mike (19:23.717)
Oh yeah. We both come from traditions that honor tradition, that have always held… We even call it sacred, you might say. So it’s very much…

Jacob (19:31.358)
Right. Well, and so we have, we have kind of a positive inversion of this where like, we love the dead, you know, like, we, we pray to those who have, you know, slept, you know, because we, in some sense, we don’t consider them dead, right? Like, Christ says he’s the God of the living, right? And so that’s, that’s where the prayers for intercession comes from, right?

mike (19:39.92)
Mm-hmm.

mike (19:49.742)
Mm-hmm.

Mm.

Jacob (19:56.194)
But you know, in regular parlance, yeah, they’re dead. Like they’ve ceased this earthly coil, right? And so we seek to be in communion with them because we know we can benefit from them. That’s not being afraid of the dead. But at the same time, we also know that we will be judged. Like the saints will judge the world, right? And in some sense, when we are…

at the end of time in the final judgments, there is going to be the sheep and the goats, right? And you’re either going to be on the side judging the rest of humanity, or you’re going to be a part of like humanity being judged by the saints, right? And I don’t think that anyone should take that to mean like some kind of like jurisprudence, like a bunch of people, yeah, a lot of people like finger wagging at you from like a like a tall balcony or something like that. But it is

mike (20:43.992)
It’s not a vindictive, yeah. It’s not a vindictive thing.

Jacob (20:53.226)
we have to respect I mean like the nexus of fear and love is like respect right and so we respect the fact that the dead have something to say to us both literally at the end of time we will either be on this side or that side of like the conversation right um but also because they have the wisdom they have the they’ve lived the life and they they’re

mike (20:59.609)
Mm.

mike (21:07.142)
Mm.

mike (21:12.936)
Mm.

mike (21:18.636)
Yeah. So we’re convicted just by its presence. We’re convicted by, you know, when we hold up certain heroes or certain figures, we should be convicted to, of course, imitate, right, those same heroes in his or her virtues. And so that’s where in a sense, the tradition is there, but it’s not haunting us. It’s not trying to consume us. It is, you know, like we become, we see ourselves as a part of that same tradition. And just like we can look backwards on it, we then are, you know, we’re that same example.

Jacob (21:24.205)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob (21:30.254)
Mm-hmm.

mike (21:47.812)
in the next 40 years, the next 100 years, looking back upon it. So it’s seeing yourself in line with it, not as, like I said before, we try to put death in this box or put it in this corner and either forget about it or try to keep it sequestered, but it will inevitably keep creeping towards us. And it will become that object of fear, like the zombie, you know, always is.

Jacob (22:04.422)
Right.

Jacob (22:10.926)
The, you know, the idea that nowadays people judge the past, right, instead of letting the past judge them, you know, there’s been a turn from how we’ve lived historically, right, where there’s a veneration for the dead, there’s a veneration for the past. Within the last hundred years or so, there has been a kind of revolution, a kind of Jacobin

mike (22:28.975)
Mm.

Jacob (22:41.278)
against the past, you know, and it started not just the 21st century. This has been happening for a long time now. But we’re very much in an age of judging the past now. Like we’ve hit the full nexus. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I mean, it goes technically, you could keep pushing back to the Reformation, starting with its judgment against like, you know, Catholic Christendom, you know. You know, but like

mike (22:52.572)
kind of an enlightenment, it seems like an enlightenment sort of redded thing.

mike (23:04.268)
Oh yeah, shots fired. He went there.

Jacob (23:09.886)
You could go further back than that. But like anyway, like really but even then I think that there’s been a the last hundred years have really like we’ve reached a plateau of disconnect from the past and A lot of people are afraid that the past is going to come back and bite us like this idea that we can utopian You know recreate the world Tablo Rasa We don’t have to think about where we came from

mike (23:22.07)
Mm.

mike (23:25.138)
Hmm.

Jacob (23:39.234)
We don’t have to think about who we are as people and what our traditions are or what constitutes the human condition as such that we can just like make it up, kind of transhumanism basically. Will that work, right? Do we not respect the dead well enough and are they gonna rise up and show us to be the monsters that we actually are? It works.

mike (23:51.195)
Yeah.

mike (24:07.428)
Well, and that’s what I think, you know, that’s that is one of the I think the dangers when people are just starting to have this conversation about AI and this isn’t you know, this is just an aside. It’s not another AI conversation. But it’s the idea that when it’s well, when it’s taking when it’s taking that human well isn’t a Frankenstein isn’t that just another zombie right? Have we? Yeah, you established that already. It’s the it’s the

Jacob (24:20.066)
That’s the Frankenstein episode.

Jacob (24:28.502)
He’s kind of like a super zombie because he’s like many corpses tied together.

mike (24:33.636)
It’s the mix of alchemy, science, and agency. But the whole AI thing is, what is one of the big dangers, is that when they, because it’s replacing the human element, right, this is the fear, is that when it replaces the human element, it’s taking out something that will look very similar to it, but it will be missing that one thing. And this, again, it kind of takes us back to that on Canter Valley, where it’s like, the zombies share a lot of, yeah, it shares a lot of, and what’s it gonna do, though?

Jacob (24:58.402)
the image of God, you know, like.

mike (25:03.352)
is it’s going to overrun, it’s going to take over the culture, right? And that’s again, it’s the death of the individual, it’s the death of culture. This is the Night King. The Night King wanted to take out all of the, all that was alive, right? There’d be no culture, there’d be no story left, I think is the line that, you know, the show uses.

Jacob (25:12.182)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob (25:18.205)
Right.

Jacob (25:24.686)
I’ll throw another really good zombie movie in there, Re-Animator. This is another movie that is not very wholesome, so be warned, this is not a wholesome movie. But I feel obligated to let people understand that we are not necessarily talking about movies that are… I think we’re going to be held responsible for all of our words, Mike. But like…

mike (25:35.428)
as opposed to my Game of Thrones references.

mike (25:42.564)
You’re so responsible, Jacob.

Jacob (25:51.178)
This is kind of a riff on Frankenstein. It’s an H.P. Lovecraft character. The movie’s not very much like the story, but it is a movie about Herbert West, who is a great character. The actor who plays him, oh, I’m blanking on his name. Anyway, he’s a classic villain, but he creates a zombie formula. And the rest of the movie is about him losing control of that zombie formula and things like that. Now, why I’m bringing up this topic though, or this movie, is that

he thinks from his like scientific materialism that he can just bring back the dead and they’ll be fine you know immortality eternal life that type of thing right um what happens when he brings back the dead though is they are monsters they’re zombies as you think of like they just they’re cannibalistic they they’ve lost the image of god like so in other words this is that uncanny

mike (26:44.24)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob (26:48.898)
The arrogance is that you can achieve eternal life or bringing people back from the dead and they’ll still be human, right? But God’s the only one who can make humans and then bring humans back from the dead. Because even if we can go and bring humans back from the dead, quote unquote, they don’t come back human. They are an uncanny valley-esque imitation. They are a lumbar. They have the shape of humanity, but they are not human.

mike (26:57.67)
Yeah.

mike (27:15.512)
It’s more than just the physical parts and the, you know, what do you want to say, electricity that flows through us, so to speak, right? The soul is something a little bit different than, you know, yes, it’s the organizing principle of the matter or the form of the matter. Hmm.

Jacob (27:22.639)
Right, exactly.

Jacob (27:27.782)
Well, it’s tethered to God that makes a difference. It’s the connection to God that matters, you know. And so if you bring back a human body, right, and it’s not God who’s living in that, like, who’s animating that body, but some kind of like mechanism that we have constructed, electricity or alchemy or whatever, you know, radiation, you know, slime.

mike (27:44.567)
Mm-hmm.

Jacob (27:56.11)
You name it, there’s so many different options out there. You know, all you’re doing is animating tissue, right? You’re not making humans, you’re animating tissue.

mike (28:02.704)
Well, and you’re, it’s, it’s.

mike (28:07.416)
And yeah, to put it even more overt, you’re reanimating the dead, and not just in the functional sense, but it’s like the thing is not just functionally dead, but I guess you’d say ontologically dead. It is just death walking around. And then again, that’s the whole, that’s why zombies are scary. It’s death that follows you. It’s death that is trying to consume you.

Jacob (28:19.63)
Mm-hmm.

Yep.

Jacob (28:29.654)
That’s why Easter is not Happy Zombie Day or whatever the smart alecky meme is. Yeah, I know, terrible. You know, it’s, this is a divine act. The human life is a divine act. And so, yeah, you can take a human body and you can turn it into something else, but you can’t turn it into a human again once it’s died. God has to do that. That’s up to Jesus. But…

mike (28:34.312)
Oh yeah, I know. That horrible, that stupid meme. Yeah.

mike (28:43.951)
Mm.

mike (28:53.444)
Mm.

Jacob (28:57.922)
You know, what makes the zombie phenomenon, the reason why it’s so popular, it’s because it’s so versatile. You know, if you go back through this conversation we just had, we kind of covered so many different angles in this. And it’s because there are that many angles to cover, you know.

mike (29:09.668)
Yeah, and actually in directions I wasn’t expecting too. So I thought it was, I mean, I do like that. You know, we’ve gotten the.

Jacob (29:15.05)
No, it’s a, the zombie is the absolutely, hey, the only reason, the only reason I agreed to it is because I know that we have the edge, the edge of your seat take, what is it? The hip new thing, the hot, yeah, something better than what I just said. You got it, we got the hot take on this stuff, Mike.

mike (29:20.232)
And you thought we’d have nothing new to add to this. You’re like, oh, zombies have been done before.

mike (29:35.708)
hot take, the spicy take, the… Yeah, apparently.

Jacob (29:43.854)
We know we got angles that people don’t even know exist. But, um, you know, this, the zombie is a modern, this zombie figure, the zombie monster is the most modern. Monster, right? Ghost vampires, all these things have been around forever. Kaiju even giant monsters, you know, to some extent you could think of like them being around forever. Zombies as we’ve constructed them post George Romero, these, this is modern man.

mike (29:47.994)
Mm-hmm.

mike (29:57.762)
Okay, yeah. Sure, yeah.

mike (30:10.405)
Mm.

Jacob (30:12.414)
making fables about modern humanity. Every single zombie, every single zombie thing you’ve ever seen, this is a modern conversation using a horror trope like the zombie to comment on ourselves. And, you know, just because just like you can, if I say let’s have a conversation about humanity, well, there’s a million different conversations you can have with that kind of header. There’s a million different zombie tropes.

mike (30:15.76)
No, I know that’s, yeah.

mike (30:22.851)
Hmm.

mike (30:33.542)
Mm-hmm.

mike (30:37.452)
It kind of reminds me of actually, so I know I’ve given a GK Chester and quote about tradition already, but he has this other quote where it’s like the ironically the most obvious dogma of Christianity, that one that you don’t even need a Bible for, you just need the today’s newspaper for is original sin. And it kind of reminds me of this thought that I’ve had after a couple of TV shows that I’ve watched or movies that I’ve watched where it’s like Hollywood actually gets its own depravity. It gets its own.

Jacob (30:55.305)
Mm.

mike (31:06.624)
sense of excess or gets its own original sin really, really well. It just doesn’t, it doesn’t know that it’s original sin. And it doesn’t know what the answer is, right? Doesn’t know where the redemption lies. See, there’s your title right there. Brain dead redemption. So it gets it really well. And the zombie story is like you’re saying, it’s the perfect conviction of humanity. It’s humanity’s conviction of humanity or modern humanity, I should say. Yeah.

Jacob (31:08.3)
Yeah.

Jacob (31:20.951)
Nice.

Jacob (31:28.766)
Yeah, of sin, whether it’s talking to the we’re the monsters or the monsters are us. It’s always talking about the monster, right? Yeah.

mike (31:36.144)
But, and actually, and like I said, I think I want us to do that in a separate conversation where it’s like Hollywood gets its own original sin. But I think like you’ve kind of touched on, the zombies are a really good example of that. And so, you know, as we’re not only finishing up the Halloween, the October, it’s actually bringing us into the All Saints Day, All Souls Day, prayers for the dead, or the month, prayer praying for the dead. Zombie is, the zombie story is kind of a perfect transition between monsters and, you know, redempt, the,

Redemption of the Dead.

Jacob (32:08.322)
You know, we are going to do vampires next though.

mike (32:14.54)
No, vampires are coming before this, Jacob. This is gonna be after vampires. Vampires are gonna be…

Jacob (32:16.738)
Nope, nope, no, I know, I know that’s what you’re trying to do. This is going to lead into our vampire conversation. The vampire conversation is going to lead into our Dracula conversation. And then we can go, but then we can go into…

mike (32:24.208)
Ugh.

Bring everybody behind the… Vampires are the precursor to zombies. We gotta do vampires, then zombies, and then we go into…

Jacob (32:34.062)
No, no, no. Revenants are the precursors to vampires. I have this mapped out. All right, audience, we’re gonna find out. We’re gonna find out who wins. We’re gonna find out who wins this argument based upon what episodes drop in what order. Yeah, but…

mike (32:40.82)
Oh gosh, I can’t wait. I’m so glad this is visual.

mike (32:50.444)
Yeah, apparently. Yeah. Thanks for giving everybody that look behind the veil. Now with that, that actually brings us to our conclusion. I was trying to wrap us up neatly and then you get us down this whole new argument as usual. Thanks everybody for coming to listen to this episode. Well, if you want to call it an episode or a just a little tiff between Jacob and I of the voyage podcast and just want to keep encouraging you guys to like subscribe to the show, leave a five star rating, positive review.

Jacob (33:11.31)
Mmm.

mike (33:20.709)
so that it doesn’t come back to haunt us, that it does come back and we can celebrate the past episodes of this show. How’s that?

Jacob (33:31.499)
and more cops.

mike (33:38.064)
Somebody ate your brains for that one.

Jacob (33:40.042)
I’m sorry.