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Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to the best of Coast to Coast podcast,

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Speaker 1: out of body experiences, the scientific search for extraterrestrial life,

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Speaker 1: and biblical prophecies which may have foretold our current state

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Speaker 1: of global turmoil. So head on over to Coast to

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Speaker 1: Coast a m dot com and sign up for Coast

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Speaker 1: Insider to catch up on what you may have missed

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Speaker 1: from Coast to Coast. Now here's a highlight from Coast

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Speaker 1: to Coast AM on iHeart Radio. Jonathan Maybury's a New

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Speaker 1: York Times bestselling author and five times Bram Stoker Award

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Speaker 1: winning author, anthology editor, comic book writer, magazine feature writer, playwright,

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Speaker 1: content creator and writer, teacher, lecturer. He was named one

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Speaker 1: of the top ten horror writers and he has been

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Speaker 1: studying the pure normal for more than forty years. He's

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Speaker 1: got a love for vampires, creatures, and the undead, started

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Speaker 1: at the age of six and continues to this Jonathan,

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Speaker 1: welcome back. It's been about four years. George. It's great

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Speaker 1: to be back. You do six years old, you started

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Speaker 1: getting interested in this. I did. I had a very

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Speaker 1: interesting old grandmother who taught me a lot about the

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Speaker 1: folklore and legends of monsters in Europe and around the world.

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Speaker 1: She had a fascination with it, so I kind of

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Speaker 1: was raised with monsters. Did she scare you, No, she

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Speaker 1: actually fascinated me. I She never made it terrifying for

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Speaker 1: me because she talked about the folklore, the beliefs, but

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Speaker 1: also looked into the anthropology and the science of it.

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Speaker 1: So kind of helped me grow up with a with

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Speaker 1: a rational view of the belief and monsters. And I

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Speaker 1: mean there were things that did scare me, but she

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Speaker 1: she wasn't one of them. That's good. Now you have

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Speaker 1: keyed in on zombies. Tell me, first of all, what

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Speaker 1: the heck is a zombie? Uh? It's a couple different

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Speaker 1: ways to answer that. The historical version of the zombie

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Speaker 1: from Haitian folklore and beliefs is somebody who is brought

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Speaker 1: under the power of a bocor um as a sorcerer

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Speaker 1: to do their bidding and sometimes and they relieve sometimes

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Speaker 1: that it's a dead person or a person put into

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Speaker 1: a trance. That's what the historical zombie was. But when

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Speaker 1: most people talk about zombies these days, they're not really

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Speaker 1: talking about those. They're talking about ghouls that eat you know,

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Speaker 1: living dead creatures that eat the flesh of the living.

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Speaker 1: And this was originally a fictional construct um, but it

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Speaker 1: does have some some connections to beliefs from around the

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Speaker 1: world going back many, many thousands of years. Well why

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Speaker 1: his Hollywood grabbed onto this, Jonathan and you you know,

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Speaker 1: you're you, you've got some experience there, I do U.

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Speaker 1: Zombies are are fascinating. You can tell any kind of

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Speaker 1: story using the zombie as a setup because you know,

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Speaker 1: unlike vampires, you know, zombies don't have personality, they're uh,

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Speaker 1: they represent a massive shared threat. Once introduced, it impacts

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Speaker 1: the visable the characters in the story. And if you

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Speaker 1: if you look at most zombie stories, including shows like

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Speaker 1: The Walking Dead and so on, once the zombies are introduced,

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Speaker 1: they kind of fade to the background and the story

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Speaker 1: that becomes about people in crisis, and there's no end

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Speaker 1: to that. That's that's the core of all drama. Hollywood

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Speaker 1: will never run dry telling stories about people in christ No,

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Speaker 1: not at all. Are you working with George Romero I

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Speaker 1: am George and I did a project actually launched today

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Speaker 1: and tell people who he who he is. Well, if

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Speaker 1: you don't know George ra merror, shame watch you. George

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Speaker 1: Ramera wrote and directed Night of the Living Dead the

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Speaker 1: very first October two nine, and I was in the

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Speaker 1: movie theater when that launch. I was a ten year

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Speaker 1: old kid who snuck in. George created the monster, um

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Speaker 1: built the genre around it, and it's actually in Slovenia

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Speaker 1: right now overseeing another one of his Living Dead films,

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Speaker 1: so he continue to be active in it. Forty nine

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Speaker 1: years later. Were these low budget Initially, Oh my god,

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Speaker 1: the first movie I think it was a hundred and

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Speaker 1: seventeen thousand dollar budget UM and it shows, I mean,

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Speaker 1: the low production, but at the same time there's an

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Speaker 1: earnestness to it and it made a tremendous amount of

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Speaker 1: money for uh. It was actually one of the highest

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Speaker 1: grossing independent low budget films ever until I think Blair Witch,

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Speaker 1: which which then eclipsed it. But very low budget, a

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Speaker 1: lot of fun and it still holds up pretty well.

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Speaker 1: Still creepy, you know, even after all these years. Now

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Speaker 1: back to zombies and some of your work with them,

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Speaker 1: you're fascinated by them, aren't you I am, Um, Both

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Speaker 1: from the the fan perspective, I like a good zombie story.

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Speaker 1: I'd like to be I like something that's going to

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Speaker 1: try to scare me, but also from a storyteller's perspective.

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Speaker 1: And I've worked with zombies in nonfiction and all different

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Speaker 1: kinds of fiction, from comic books to short stories and novels,

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Speaker 1: and uh, I absolutely love the exploring the possibilities of it,

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Speaker 1: and I like exploring the science of it too. Every

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Speaker 1: time I've seen some zombie films and flicks and segments, Jonathan,

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Speaker 1: you know they're coming at you, they fall on your

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Speaker 1: car windshield and they're looking at you, and then you

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Speaker 1: know you hit them with a car and they like

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Speaker 1: blow up or something like that. Yeah. Well, I mean

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Speaker 1: there if they are actually what they're supposed to be,

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Speaker 1: which is a decay in corpse, They're connective tissue is

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Speaker 1: going to be failing and they're going through future faction.

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Speaker 1: So high impact of course would destroy them and it

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Speaker 1: makes it easier to fight them. A fresh zombie, so

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Speaker 1: to speak, would be a little harder to fight because

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Speaker 1: their muscle integrity would would would be would be better,

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Speaker 1: and their strength, would be would be more, would be greater.

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Speaker 1: Are there real zombies That's a really tricky question. Um.

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Speaker 1: There aren't real zombies in the way that we see

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Speaker 1: them on The Walking Dead or The Nation. UM. But

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Speaker 1: there are zombies that are part of world culture that

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Speaker 1: go back, you know, as I said, hundreds of years

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Speaker 1: that people believed in it in some places still believe

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Speaker 1: in So I guess it depends on on what what

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Speaker 1: you believe in. UM. But they're everywhere in culture. Um,

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Speaker 1: They're everywhere in our history. And what what makes a

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Speaker 1: kind of a zombie model is something that eats the

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Speaker 1: flesh of the living, and that actually crosses over a

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Speaker 1: little bit with vampires and werewolves some of the and

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Speaker 1: ghosts to some of the legends aren't clearly defined, like

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Speaker 1: what we would consider a Hollywood version of these monsters.

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Speaker 1: It's a little bit of each. You know, arisen dead

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Speaker 1: corpse that feeds feeds on people, and there are lots

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Speaker 1: of different versions of that. You know. The science as

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Speaker 1: it continues to evolve, is it very conceivable that we

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Speaker 1: will be able to make zombies in a laboratory. It's

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Speaker 1: actually a little disturbingly possible to a degree. When I

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Speaker 1: was doing my novel Patient Zero, which was the first

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Speaker 1: zombie novel I wrote. I worked with a number of

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Speaker 1: molecular biologists and other types of scientists to come up

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Speaker 1: with as plausible a background of science for zombies, and

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Speaker 1: we used the prion disease UM spongeform and stuphalitis with

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Speaker 1: mad cow. Disease has a couple of different variations, one

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Speaker 1: of which is called fatal familial insomnia. It's a it's

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Speaker 1: a disease that once you get it, you can never

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Speaker 1: fall asleep again, so you you particularly eventually become exhausted

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Speaker 1: and paranoid and delusional. Um So, in my story, somebody

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Speaker 1: weaponized that by combining it with with a couple of

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Speaker 1: parasites that deliver the disease more quickly. Um. Nature can't

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Speaker 1: create a zombie, but bioweapons can get pretty darn close.

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Speaker 1: And that's that's a little scary. It would take money, investment,

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Speaker 1: and a real corrupt attitude. But you know, we know

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Speaker 1: that people build bizarre weapons anyway, It's not unreasonable that

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Speaker 1: somebody might try that if they thought, you know, they

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Speaker 1: could bring that to bear in a in a conflict

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Speaker 1: where they couldn't say out gunned the other side, So

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Speaker 1: instead of going bigger with guns, they go smaller with

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Speaker 1: with disease vectors. Are zombies supposed to be cannibalistic? Um?

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Speaker 1: Pretty much? We uh we we think of the zombie

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Speaker 1: is something that eats. It feeds on living flesh and

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Speaker 1: recently dead flesh. Um. In the zombie stories, most of

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Speaker 1: the movies and so on, they tend to stop feeding

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Speaker 1: on human flesh after it gets cold, which is why

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Speaker 1: you don't see zombies eating other zombies. Um. But they

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Speaker 1: are flesh eaters. That's what's what they're called necrophagus, something

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Speaker 1: that feeds on on human flesh. Wasn't there a case

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Speaker 1: of a guy in Miami called Eugene who was higher

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Speaker 1: than a kite on on drugs called bath salts. But

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Speaker 1: he was he was a cannibal, wasn't he? He was?

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Speaker 1: And it was a really freaky story when when that happened. Actually,

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Speaker 1: a lot of Miami papers gave me a call. They

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Speaker 1: asked me if I thought that was the beginning of

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Speaker 1: the zombie apocalypse. Luckily it wasn't. It was you know,

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Speaker 1: deranged behavior. But there have been a few cases like

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Speaker 1: that of of somebody actually um going out of their mind.

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Speaker 1: And attacking and cannibalizing, and we certainly know that cannibalism

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Speaker 1: is part of our human experience in our history. Well,

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Speaker 1: I gotta tell you, it is a frightening topic for

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Speaker 1: a lot of people, and it seems to be growing.

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Speaker 1: It's more prevalent, isn't it. It is um There there

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Speaker 1: are a lot of reasons that the zombie concept kind

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Speaker 1: of works for people because it represents a lot of

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Speaker 1: what they fear, that the paranoia, especially these days when

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Speaker 1: when there's more of a polarization in on our belief

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Speaker 1: systems where the politically religiously or so on. And also, uh,

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Speaker 1: you know, there are wars everywhere. People seem to be

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Speaker 1: turning on each other. So it's kind of easy to

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Speaker 1: have that paranoia where somebody you know suddenly becomes something

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Speaker 1: unknown to you and something threatening to you. And that's

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Speaker 1: that's a pretty easy metaphor for the zombie, and it

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Speaker 1: makes it scary, it makes it immediate. Does now many

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Speaker 1: people are fearful that Again, let's get back to the

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Speaker 1: advances of the medical and genetic technology that they could

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Speaker 1: help create accidentally or otherwise zombie type people. Yeah, there

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Speaker 1: there are a lot of uh ways to manipulate brain function,

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Speaker 1: to reduce the ability to to think, to to make

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Speaker 1: somebody more suggestible, at the same time to amp up aggression.

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Speaker 1: We see it in some of the new street designer

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Speaker 1: street drugs like Flacca, where people get very aggressive when

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Speaker 1: they're coming down off their high. Well, you can take

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Speaker 1: something like that and weaponize it. But probably that the

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Speaker 1: area where there were more likely to see a zombie

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Speaker 1: like bioweapon would be in parasites. I did a book

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Speaker 1: called Dead of Night, which, by the way, Georgi or

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Speaker 1: Marrow now considers to be the official prequel Tonight of

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Speaker 1: the Living Dead, And in that I I explore the

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Speaker 1: use of parasites toxoplasma, the green jewel, wasp, and a

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Speaker 1: few other parasites that in nature actually do hijack a

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Speaker 1: host and even turn it against its own kind. We

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Speaker 1: all receive that nature, so weaponizing something like that is not, sadly,

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Speaker 1: is not that much of a stretch. What is the

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Speaker 1: zombie apocalypse exactly, Jonathan. The zombie apocalypse would win would

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Speaker 1: be when something like that, some weaponized pathogen, gets to

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Speaker 1: the point where it breaks down enough of the infrastructure

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Speaker 1: that we can't get ahead of anymore. We can't stop it. UH,

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Speaker 1: there's no longer an opportunity for police, emergency, medical, FEMA,

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Speaker 1: the military, whatever to to be able to control the

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Speaker 1: spread of the outbreak. In limited circumstances, we can definitely

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Speaker 1: do that. If it gets larger, or if it if

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Speaker 1: it breaks out in several local aaans at once, you

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Speaker 1: could have a geometric spread that would make it impossible

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Speaker 1: ultimately to stop. Could this happen a zombie apocalys? Could

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Speaker 1: this happen in warfare? Yes, it very much could happen

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Speaker 1: in warfare. And that's kind of the idea behind biological weapons. UH.

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Speaker 1: Something that spreads by itself, so you don't need to

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Speaker 1: continue to have your own assets in place to continue

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Speaker 1: spreading it. The disease spreads. One of the UH ways

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Speaker 1: of doing something like that would be to weaponize something

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Speaker 1: like pertussis like whooping cough, where you could take, um,

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Speaker 1: give somebody a disease that they would cough and the

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Speaker 1: spittle would actually spread a disease, turn and inert or

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Speaker 1: a non airborne disease into an airborne disease through that,

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Speaker 1: And that's actually doable. That's actually possible for someone to do,

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Speaker 1: which is very scary listen to more Coast to Coast

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Speaker 1: a m. Every weeknight at one a m. Eastern, and

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Speaker 1: go to Coast to Coast am dot com for more