Episodio 2: El Zombie con otros Monstruos

00:00:30 - You are listening to the zombies, the podcast, in which we go for your brain.

00:00:59 - Hello and welcome to the second episode of Alossombie, my name is Jeronimo Rico,

00:01:28 - And I would like to be accompanied by my great friend, Charlie Roderíguez.

00:01:32 - Hello Charlie, how are you?

00:01:34 - Hello Zombie!

00:01:36 - It was not going to be late again here, bro.

00:01:39 - And here greeting our zombies, guys.

00:01:43 - Well, we are very happy to be here.

00:01:45 - Today's episode is very interesting, it is very exciting, because it will be about the arrival of the zombies in Europe and literature.

and everything that happened in that trip in which the Caribbean arrived, that Black Zombie

00:02:01 - Haitian and ends on the coasts of England and on the coasts of Europe, where you will find the monsters that exist in the European imaginary and especially with the vampire that we are going to talk a lot about in this episode. It is incredible how a zombie came through a literary text, that is the magic that we are going to talk about today. Yes, let's remember a little bit that text

00:02:23 - We were talking about William Seabrook in the last chapter about the magical island, the magical island that ended up being the first approach that the Europeans had to the zombies and we are going to meet with this shock of a literary monster world because what we are really going to see here is what did the zombies find when they arrived in Europe? Yes, the Europeans had a very extensive imaginary, spoiler alert, the next chapter we are going to talk about that and the monsters and the origin of the mythology but what we are interested in is that at that time it was plagued by vampires, it was plagued by devils

00:03:09 - Momias, Skeletons...

00:03:12 - He already talked about the ghosts, and by the time he was a very famous novel by Oscar Wilde, and also about romanticism, the idea of the vampire, how to recover.

00:03:28 - Something that I was talking about was the case of Polidori.

00:03:31 - Yes, the Dr. Polidori, which is the first one to talk about it in the literature and the paradigm of the vampire,

00:03:39 - But the vampire, as we know it, but if it is the being that somehow, through the blood, starts to generate that togetherness that evolves later with...

00:03:50 - With Dracula, with Bran Stoker.

00:03:52 - With Bran Stoker, which is already that book that is popularized, a pistol book, along with letters, like at the time it was a very good recreation of the moment, which is the icon of the vampire that we know, the one that lived far away in the castle, the one that has rabbits, the immortal, the one that doesn't eat.

00:04:06 - That can withstand the light of the sun.

00:04:08 - Exactly. That's part of the conversation we had about the light of the sun that has a lot to do with this religious idea of Kain.

00:04:17 - One of the punishments of Kain, of the many punishments that had more to do with that sign in front of him, is that he couldn't see the sun.

00:04:24 - He always had to go against the direction of the sun, looking for the moon, which is also part of the myth of the vampire that can't see the light of the day.

00:04:31 - Yes, and that vampire, let's say, was very interesting, we are talking about the beginning of the 19th century, but it was like that European representation of the non-death, of that immortal being who, through a pact or something, a satanic cult, became immortal, but a being, a sedent of blood, more a beast than a man, and also surrounded by a very magical question, because we were talking about transformation.

00:04:59 - In the Dracula of Ernesto, it is something very interesting that the man transforms into a wolf, for example.

00:05:04 - In fact, he can walk through the walls as if it were a spider.

00:05:07 - He transforms into a wolf, he transforms into a fog.

00:05:11 - But it comes from the Slavic area, from the mountains, and that's why it is called Transylvania, which was a part of Romania.

00:05:18 - Moldavia, I think it was. In that time, it was a kingdom.

00:05:22 - And well, this immortal being, which was Blatepes.

00:05:25 - Blatepes, the work of Polidori actually captures exactly the same origin of the one that Tom Abram, Stoker, conceptually raises his argument because Polidori speaks precisely of Blatepes and the North of the Carpathians and that one of his distinctions as a warrior and as a regent of that area was the Sadik, who was the guy because he loved to encourage people

00:05:48 - With that very brutal war technique, he managed to attack the Ottomans and the Turks when they came to invade because one of the first things he did in his first battles was to attack the Turks that he attacked

00:06:01 - But it's very crazy because it was a practice of the Turks, and the man took his practice and turned it into a subcontract and he is one of the first impulsors of propaganda, I would say, in a very macabre way, obviously very cruel

00:06:15 - But basically, that figure of a bloodthirsty monster that everyone was going to put a stick in because of...

00:06:21 - One of the famous pictorial works in that region is exactly the dinner of Vlad in the Forest of the Impalados, because he organizes a forest, I mean, really, if there is scientific data, he talks about a forest, hundreds of thousands of dead bodies, aligned like wood, impaled to the entrance of the river of his zone,

00:06:40 - And the guy sitting there in the middle of all his combatants in a dinner with his generals, showing the Turks that he was not afraid of anything.

00:06:47 - But it is also interesting how that goes against Christianity, and then Man becomes like a more devilish figure or something evil, super evil, and ends up going into history a little with that romantic representation, although in his country he is still a national hero, and that is an important thing.

00:07:07 - Of course, and being a highly Christian country, a very important Catholic Christian with a faith in Christ and in the Catholic religion, which is, uh-huh, which is also part of what Bran is talking about, because finally what I am saying is that Vlad, in this case, in order to save the Empire, in order to save the kingdom, the only tool you can find is a pact with the devil to consume blood, to become immortal and to be able to sustain...

00:07:30 - It's that they kill her, no. It's because they don't help her.

00:07:34 - Ah, yes, it's because they don't help him, they send him reinforcements, and he keeps his wife, his fiancée, in his castle, and the man goes in front of us, and when he comes back, it turns out that he had killed the wife and is there in the church.

00:07:50 - It's that they don't kill her, the Turks do it because they deceive her and they send a letter to the wife saying that the guy died in the war and that they are going to siege the castle, that it is surrendered, it does not stand more than the arrival of the castle, it is committed and it is thrown from the highest tower and when it arrives it finds it dead and it gets very angry and denies it, then of God and there is that it becomes an immortal being

00:08:17 - Let's listen a little bit to this soundtrack from the movie of Francis Ford Coppola, Dracula.

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

00:10:15 - Well, after this, and continuing with the idea, Bolidori calls Mariceli, who will be the author of the book of Frankenstein, or whatever it was, to modernity, like Frankenstein, but actually it's called The Modern Prometeo.

of the beautiful stories of this episode, because in reality everything starts with Lord Byron in Switzerland, he had his house in summer, in Switzerland, and coincidentally for that moment in 1819, Lord Byron invites Polidori, invites Percy and Mary Shelley, the couple husbands, to vacation in their house, that they spend summer vacations, and unfortunately

00:11:02 - At that time a volcano in Indonesia was erupting and the mass of ashes was so big that for a few weeks it blocked the light of the sun and at that time it started to get cold again, so it was a very cold summer and it had to be in Switzerland

00:11:21 - But the impact of that volcano in the scientific data was very high because it was dark and the sky was a few weeks

00:11:28 - They had to stay locked up.

00:11:30 - They had to stay locked up.

00:11:31 - So, it was part of the smart practices of Lord Byron.

00:11:34 - And for the time it was very hidden people who liked to take a hymn or a cognac in front of the chimney and read.

00:11:40 - It was to read horror stories, so they began to read stories.

00:11:44 - But there is a detail and this is like the funny historical fact.

00:11:50 - And it is that they were fans of absentee.

00:11:53 - Yes.

was to take absente, that is, Lord Byron took absente that night and well, they were already taking absente, then the absente at great levels can produce hallucinations and that is, imagine the atmosphere more the absente, more talking about horror stories. He was reading a anthology of stories, stories of German horror and after reading what he proposed to them, we are going to build horror stories, then he tells them all, tonight we are going to build a story,

00:12:23 - The only thing that really ends the whole story is Polidori, who, like 4 years later, decided to return it to a popular book, let's say popular, because it reaches people, it publishes it.

00:12:34 - But from that first narration that was built that night, is that Mary Shelley, who later writes Frankenstein, who also started, let's say...

00:12:47 - It was like a story contest, it was like they had a night to create a story and each one told it the other day and they all finished awarding Mary Shelley because it was the story that most of you know

00:13:01 - Even though the prize won Polydori because that's how the story ended

00:13:06 - The parameter of the mini-concursor that they made between them was that they had to finish the story

00:13:12 - Spolidor won it, but from that moment on, he became very intrigued, he liked his story a lot and he started to build that story and from that moment on, he became the most popular monster of the time

00:13:24 - And now that we talk about the monsters and the spectres, the first spectre, the first, like, monstrous ghost in some way, was the ghost of the opera, by chance, because it was the first one that became popular from that image of the monster that you didn't have that figure that we know it was more like a murderer yes, but for the people of the time in the literary it became like that monster because it was seen in every way the murder and the brutality as from the ghost as a monstrous act and it is also the time of the stripper exactly in the streets of London and Europe and Paris they also kill every day

00:14:04 - People are afraid of the darkness, because they throw the ladders and stuff like that.

00:14:10 - So obviously that also builds an atmosphere of victory, which is the one that ends up assimilating the figure of the zombie.

00:14:23 - But before we get there, with those first stories that we are going to play, especially one, the plague of the zombies,

00:14:32 - Let's go back a moment, because Frankenstein is going to be very important for the development of the literature of the zombies and the cinematography of the zombies.

00:14:45 - So, that monster somehow comes up with the idea of a creator, of a scientist

00:14:52 - And it's very interesting that from Judaism, it's believed in that kind of possibility

00:15:00 - Let's say a little bit like in the analogy of the Aitian Buddha

00:15:05 - In this case, the Rabbis, in their connection with God, had the possibility of putting life into an object that they had built, which was the Golem

00:15:14 - And giving life to an inanimate object is the same as Dr. Frankenstein when he creates his monster that makes him a part of pieces of death, but having realized that electricity had an effect on the cells and returned to life again.

00:15:33 - And the most interesting thing is that in that case the monster was not the primitive wild, the wind of blood, but it was not a philosopher who questioned his creator and he said, hey, why did you abandon me?

00:15:50 - Besides, the primordial data is that Frankenstein the monster had no name, the guy never had a name.

00:15:58 - The monster was the monster.

00:15:59 - The monster was the monster, and the image that we have of Frankenstein, for example, with the guy like by pieces, and two screws, and the skin green and all that, because the description of the text is completely different.

00:16:12 - And yes, it was made by pieces, but the skin was yellow and it was like transparent.

00:16:18 - Because let's say that within what is described a little, that in the process of electrocution the skin deteriorated, I don't know what.

00:16:25 - But the guy is not so big, he has a yellow skin, he has a very different aesthetic configuration than we see.

00:16:34 - He began to popularize himself after, more or less, in 1916, with a movie, the first movie that I talked about Frankenstein, he made it, Tomas Alvadelli, it was a 16 minute movie.

00:16:46 - In 1910, right?

00:16:48 - In 1910 the first cinematographic approach occurred, the jump in the literature of cinematography, talking about monsters, and from that monster of that little movie, that image of each armed and Frankenstein as a monster that becomes an important icon in literature and then in the cinema of that time.

00:17:48 - Let's talk now about what happened with the plague of zombies, which is like that first novel where the zombies are no longer in Haiti but are in England and they are part of an an English cult, but yes obviously the character, let's say the antagonist or the cheeser who in this case is like a lord

00:18:21 - English, he had a lot of money, but his father was the one who had the money and he died today, he inherited the mine, but the mine was totally destroyed let's tell a little about that story

00:18:34 - Well, as quickly as I want to say, there is a mine that somehow is associated with the father's death, so this guy tries again to raise it and reconstruct the family business.

00:18:50 - But what happens? First, the working conditions were not good, the mine somehow works illegally because it does not have permits and everything.

00:18:59 - There have been accidents in the mine, so the people who lived in the town had preferred to work in that mine because it was very dangerous and the guy was in Kiev.

00:19:09 - Exactly, it was uncertain, the authorities did not trust that the mine could work in any way, it did not work in the right way that people did not get into accidents.

00:19:18 - Second, he didn't have any permits, he didn't move the economy, but he continued to have that kind of reputations.

00:19:25 - To keep his family business in his position, that's when he found himself with all this mysticism and piano, and he began to recruit zombies and to make in Europe the issue of the hand of slave labor, zombie.

00:19:42 - And there's a parallel with the Dracula, because in this case it's also a doctor, a doctor, like Van Helsing in the case of Dracula, who goes to that town because a friend sent him a letter that he needs help, he was the surgeon of the town, who is dying a lot of people and they don't know what happened.

00:20:05 - And the guy arrives and is a Sherlock Holmes, a detective and he starts the investigation.

00:20:11 - He goes with his daughter, who is also a young woman and was the wife's friend.

00:20:17 - And the wife arrives, she's all wet, all...

00:20:21 - Deteriorated, sick, sad, depressed, bored, everything happens to her.

00:20:27 - And the doctor doesn't know about it.

00:20:30 - Besides, the guy doesn't know he has the plague at home.

00:20:33 - I have no idea.

00:20:35 - And it turns out that, due to fate's actions, the girl ends up discovering the cult of zombies.

00:20:41 - But that novel is going to be very eco-friendly, because it already has a similar structure to what the Europeans were used to.

00:20:49 - It wasn't as exotic as the exotic island, where no one could imagine it, but it was a closer context.

00:20:54 - And it really starts to resemble what the living dead are going to do in the future.

and we arrived at the end of the 19th century, the apparatus is invented and as you say, these first movies start in the movie Mudo, in 8mm one of them is the first version of Frankenstein, but we also have Murno's Anosferatu, which is the first vampire movie and which is very similar to the Polydori and Abraham Stoker, they have a resemblance between the two one important thing is that the aesthetics that we see today in the cinema in front of the zombies well, in the present, not so much because it has to do with the cinema as well as the technology and the way it tells the stories but even a long time ago and in any way within that same aesthetic it remains that terrifying effect and it is the construction of the story from an environment of castles, of dark forest, cemeteries houses, haunted houses, abandoned houses, all those spaces for example there are some films that recreate zombies in the war, after the war, places destroyed, the environment destroyed, people in trouble and somehow it starts to recreate a little the theme like the apocalipsis that is already a story like later let's say within the formula that George Romero plans, but if you make that analogy that somehow the world is in decline when zombies occur, although at that time they represented a little more like that monster that is made of the cemeteries or the shadows, well also you have to remember that the first zombie movie is White Zombie and it is the story basically of the Haitian zombies, it is also very similar to William Seabrook's idea of ​​the hairdresser who is Bella Lugosi who had been Dracula and who ends up being like that

00:23:07 - The figure of the fox is made of paper, it looks like an Arab fox, it has bigotics with a turban, it looks like...

00:23:19 - Very Egyptian, because if not the aesthetic of the movie, in that scene in which we die of laughter, because it is like in the final scenes, remember, when they are in the altar?

00:23:30 - Ah, that's the other one, that's the king of the zombies.

the king of zombies but finally if you compare the two it is very similar because it is a similar aesthetic then it is the chiseler with a cape and with the bigotics and well painted with the turban and as with rings if you feel a little egyptian there also for example and landing feels a little like the influence of the aesthetic of the movies of momias that also had that component like that of the chiseler with that and it was very Egyptian, really the ritual that these films are made has a lot to do with that and obviously with the itian magic and everything, the cult of...

00:24:08 - The case is that at that time in the cinema there were these big stars that were Bella Lugosi and Boris Karlov from the horror cinema of those 20 years and Bella Lugosi, of course, ended up giving a huge popularity to the genre of zombies that she hadn't had before

00:24:26 - And that really makes the zombies start to enter very deeply and especially from the cinematography.

00:24:32 - There's going to be a very long time in which the literature doesn't do so much production associated with the subject.

00:24:38 - And moreover in the cinema, it's going to be very frequent, so this one comes out as walking with a zombie, my girlfriend is a zombie, the plague of the zombies, then there's an English producer called the Hammer and they are going to make a number of movies until we get to the zombies from Romero but there we are going to get a lot further ahead and well, this was today's chapter we hope you liked what we talked about and we are seeing each other in the next one, which is going to be about once again the mythology of the zombies and why the living dead are coming to eat us all

00:25:20 - It's interesting, it's not only about the historical, but also about the psychological and mental.

00:25:27 - What happens with the minds of the people of the time to design that kind of monsters?

00:25:32 - And the search for immortality, according to Freud.

00:25:38 - Thank you very much for being with us.

00:25:40 - We remind you that you can follow us on our social networks.

00:25:43 - They are in the description of the chapter.

00:25:45 - See you next time.

00:25:50 - We are going to do it. We are very loud. We are very loud. Well, the important thing is...

00:26:01 - Oh my, how does it go up? Look. Hello, welcome. Come closer.

00:26:12 - I'm sorry.

00:26:14 - Blooper.

00:26:15 - Hola, bienvenidos a Pule.

00:26:16 - Se go, pero estamos importantes.