The Most Confusing Franchise in Horror History

[00:00:11]So, you finally opened your eyes to the magical world of Italian zombie movies.

[00:00:16]Congratulations.

[00:00:17]Consequences will never be the same.

[00:00:20]>> CONSEQUENCES WILL NEVER BE THE SAME. THE Zombie franchise or [music] the Zombie 2 franchise or the Zombie Flesheaters franchise, whatever you know it as, you'll no doubt come to find that it's a tangled [music] mess of Italian sequels that go nowhere and loop in upon themselves like a [music] fetuccini mobius strip.

[00:00:41]But to understand how this pasta cadaavver was made, we have to take a look at the raw ingredients.

[00:00:51]In 1968, George Romero directed Night of the Living Dead. Shot in black and white in rural Pennsylvania on a budget of around $114,000.

[00:01:01]It more or less invented the modern zombie.

[00:01:03]>> Yeah, they're dead. They're all messed up.

[00:01:07]>> Not the voodoo zombie of Caribbean folklore or the Hollywood Bem movie variety. Both subjects for another time.

[00:01:14]>> Zombie, >> but the shambling flesh-eating zombie that's been a fixture of horror ever since. The film was a commercial success that Romero saw almost no money from.

[00:01:24]Partly because when the distributor changed the film's title from Night of the Flesheaters to Night of the Living Dead, they struck new prints and forgot to include the copyright notice on them.

[00:01:34]And under copyright law of the time, that was enough to put the film in the public domain forever. Dang it. Which is why you can find 700 different DVD editions of it at any given moment. A decade later, Romero wanted to make a sequel.

[00:01:50]>> [music] >> In 1968, George Romero brought us Night of the Living Dead. It became the classic horror film of its time. Now, George Romero brings us the most intensely shocking motion picture experience for all times. Dawn of the Dead, Night of the Living Dead has [music] ended. Dawn of the Dead is here.

[00:02:14]It would pick up during a zombie apocalypse already in progress and follow two SWAT officers and two TV news employees hold up in a suburban shopping mall.

[00:02:26]Keys to the kingdom.

[00:02:27]>> The mall setting wasn't incidental.

[00:02:30]Romero used it to make an argument about consumer culture with zombies shuffling through department stores by instinct while the living survivors raid the same stores for stuff they don't need. Hey, how the hell are we GOING TO GET BACK?

[00:02:44]>> WHO THE HELL CAN? LET'S GO SHOPPING [screaming] FIRST.

[00:02:48]>> IT wasn't a subtle film, but it was an effective one, and it arrived right on time. The 1970s had an appetite for horror that major studios were only beginning to understand.

[00:03:01]Dawn of the Dead was a hit.

[00:03:05]Oh, great. Let's go see this.

[00:03:12]While Dawn of the Dead would go on to become one of the most revered horror films ever created, getting it made would require an international alliance.

[00:03:20]Romero's production company, The Laurel Group, couldn't find American financing for the sequel. His previous film, Martin, had underperformed at the box office, and nobody was eager to back another Romero horror film on that track record. The script eventually made its way abroad through the group's foreign distribution representative, landing with a Romebas based producer named Alfredo Cuomo, who translated it and passed it to Clauddio Arento, brother of legendary Italian horror maestro Daario Arento of Sesperia and Deep Red fame.

[00:03:51]Daario had been a fan of Night of the Living Dead and when he found himself in New York for the American premiere of Sesperia, he was introduced to Romero and producer Richard Rubenstein.

[00:04:14]He offered to co-inance the film and invited Romero to Rome to write the script. So Dario said you come. I said I'll write it. He said no you come.

[00:04:23]Come. You write here. You write here.

[00:04:25]>> Reading drafts as they came in but leaving the writing entirely to Romero.

[00:04:34]In exchange, he received European distribution rights and the right to cut his own version of the film. Arento's European edit ran just under 2 hours, stripped out much of Romero's humor and social satire, and cranked up the gore and action. It went out across Italy and much of Europe in 1978 under the title Zombie.

[00:04:53]Arento's cut removed much of the subtext Romero had built into the film and what resulted was leaner and meaner and scored in full by Goblin Arento's regular musical collaborators.

[00:05:04]Because Arento held the foreign rights, his version was what most international audiences actually saw. George R.

[00:05:11]Romero's [music] film.

[00:05:21]So before anybody made a cash grab, >> cash grab, >> Dawn of the Dead was already two different films, the legal engine for what followed was a provision of Italian law at the time that allowed any film to be marketed as a sequel to another, regardless of whether there was any official connection or not. Cash grab >> producer for Briio D'Angelus had an unrelated zombie film already in production. [music] He pointed it towards Arento's Zombie and called it Zombie 2. Whether Romero minded or not is genuinely unclear. Some accounts say the retitling was done over the objection of both Romero and the director of Zombie 2, Luchio Fali. Other accounts say Romero was delighted at the prospect of having an Italian zombie wave.

[00:06:01]>> I'm not so sure what to believe, doctor.

[00:06:04]>> What we do know is he had no contractual obligation over it. Either way, Luchio Fulchie's film was never intended to be a sequel to anything. [music] Its plot involves a scientist's daughter traveling to a Caribbean island after her father's abandoned boat drifts into New York Harbor carrying a zombie that attacks harbor patrol officers.

[00:06:30]>> Don't move. I said >> don't move.

[00:06:35]>> There's no connection to Dawn of the Dead beyond the fact that both films contain the [music] undead.

[00:06:41]What Fali understood whether or not he was making a real sequel was that his film was distinctly its own thing.

[00:06:49]>> [music] >> Where Romero zombies were pale instruments of social satire, fulties were rotten, maggotinfested creatures risen from the muddy earth.

[00:07:07]The film produced two scenes that have been discussed and flinched at ever since. The first is the eye splinter scene in which a character is slowly dragged towards a jagged piece of wood while the camera holds on her face until the impalement. It makes Uni and Andaloo look like nothing. It's [ __ ] stomach turnurning.

[00:07:28][screaming] Jesus Christ.

[00:07:34]Effects artist Gianetto Dasi did the makeup work throughout the film and this scene is his most notorious contribution to it. It's the scene most responsible for the film's classification as a video nasty in the UK.

[00:07:48]The second is the zombie versus shark scene shot underwater with a real tiger shark. Vulti found the premise too absurd to shoot. So producer Ugoi brought in a second unit. The person originally scheduled to play the zombie was director Renee Cardona Jr. who was unavailable on the day of the shoot. So Roman Bravo, an underwater photographer and filmmaker who had worked with Cardona Jr. on other projects, stepped in wearing zombie makeup instead.

[00:08:15]Bravo also directed the underwater footage himself. The scene became one of the most famous images in the film and arguably in Italian horror in general.

[00:08:24]The franchise's signature moment was improvised, performed by a photographer standing in for a director, and shot without the director present. This is the perfect introduction to how the Zombie series operated. Zombie 2 was released in the United States in 1980 by the Jerry Gross Organization under the title Zombie with no stated connection to Romero. The tagline we are going to eat you was one of the more famous taglines in exploitation history. Though I've always felt that we are going to eat you would have been a better fit for Dawn of the Dead. and Dawn of the Dead's tagline of when there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth would have been a better fit for zombie.

[00:09:02]Regardless, American theaters handed out, or at least joked about handing out barf bags to the squeamish, which was the style at the time, >> which was the style at the time.

[00:09:12]>> The film was a major commercial success worldwide, despite critical dismissal, and debate continues about how much of that success belongs to Fali versus Fabio Frizzy's score and Dasi's effects work. The irony is that while Zombie 2 was a wholly original idea in a sequel's clothing, it would go on to be the film that everyone would try to cash in on and would spawn one of the most chaotic lineages in horror history.

[00:09:41]The only film in this chain with a plausible claim to being an official sequel is also the one its director publicly disowned.

[00:09:50][music] Am I going to go to hell for that?

[00:10:00]>> No, not for so little.

[00:10:02]>> Fali signed on to direct a proper follow-up produced by Franco Guandenzi and shot in the Philippines. The plot involves a stolen reanimation virus called Death One released on an island with hazmat soldiers and cremated infected corpses spreading the plague throughout the air.

[00:10:17]>> We believe what the scientists tell us.

[00:10:20]And what they tell us is that there are only a few small traces [music] of pollution left in the upper atmosphere.

[00:10:30][screaming] Much in the vein of Return of the Living Dead or the crazies, Vulti shot roughly an hour's worth of usable footage before departing.

[00:10:39]>> What are you waiting for?

[00:10:48]Now, why he left seems to be contested.

[00:10:50]Some accounts site a recurrence of hepatitis. Fuli was a lifelong diabetic.

[00:10:55]>> Diabetes. Diabetes. Diabetes. Diabetes.

[00:10:58]Diabetes.

[00:10:59]>> Diabetes.

[00:11:00]>> And the Philippines shoot was punishing for FI. Though he denies illness as the cause and blamed script disputes, calling the screenplay dreadful and claiming he couldn't get changes made.

[00:11:10]Nevertheless, producer Guandenzi brought in director Bruno Matai and Claudio Fergo, who happened to be finishing Strike Commando nearby to rewrite and reshoot enough footage to make a releasable film.

[00:11:32]>> [music] [music] [music] [music] >> Queen.ch.

[00:12:10][music] for Graaso and his coowwriter Rosella Drudy rewrote their own script on the fly to patch in the holes.

[00:12:41]Fali retains sole director credit on the opening titles because he was the bigger international name even though much of the film is not his work. Fali later called Zombie 3 the most foolish production of his career referring to Fergo in print as a natural-born cretton and also taking time to describe Matai as a former house painter.

[00:13:02]>> [ __ ] you man. [ __ ] you.

[00:13:04]>> Judy recalled more warm memories, noting that he wrote her apologetic letters about scenes being cut for budget.

[00:13:33]So, the franchise's only official sequel is thus a Frankenstein's monster assembled from two different scripts shot by at least two directors and completely disowned by Fali. For context, Matai had already directed his own Romero knockoff, Hell of the Living Dead, [music] four, >> which went out under at least four titles, including Zombie Creeping Flesh.

[00:13:59]Foro would later make Troll 2.

[00:14:02]This is the creative lineage of the zombie sequel.

[00:14:07]>> Oh my god. [music] Clauddio Fragrasso directed Zombie 4: After Death immediately after finishing his rescue work on Zombie 3. Also shot in the Philippines with a voice over that gestures at a connection to the previous film.

[00:14:26]>> There was once a group of men who believed they could solve the mystery of mysteries. They were scientists, experts in chemistry, biology, and physics.

[00:14:38]These men established a small research center on a remote tropical island where they proceeded with their humanitarian mission. Their aim was to conquer mankind's first, oldest, and greatest enemy, death itself.

[00:15:06]while telling a completely unrelated story about mercenaries.

[00:15:09]>> Shoot the [ __ ] >> A Caribbean island.

[00:15:17]>> Jesus, man. We're heading straight for the island.

[00:15:19]>> I'm not steering. The wheel's stuck.

[00:15:21]>> We'll have to stop and fix it.

[00:15:22]>> A voodoo priest.

[00:15:26][music] He described it as the last gasp of the Italian zombie gore film and said it was made under duress, which isn't hard to believe.

[00:15:50]>> [music] >> No, no, NO.

[00:16:10]>> [music] >> Zombie 5: Killing Birds was shot in 1987 or 1988 New Orleans and stars Robert Vaughn, who had no doubt made certain financial decisions that led him to that point. It was retroactively numbered into the series despite having almost nothing to do with zombies.

[00:16:32]The undead appear only in the final stretch. A single character is attacked by birds and the title refers to anthological subplot that takes up considerably more of the film than the puditive selling point.

[00:16:57]>> I'm still working on it.

[00:17:00]I just can't get it to look real.

[00:17:05]I told you it's not ready yet.

[00:17:07]>> Honey, just show it to them.

[00:17:28][laughter] My god, son. That's wonderful.

[00:17:32]Killing Birds was directed by Clauddio Lantanzi with heavy involvement from Joe Diamato and it was assigned the Zombie 5 designation sometime after completion.

[00:17:42]The series ended arguably where it deserved to. A Robert von Bird movie that somebody [music] called a zombie film so they could number it. There's nothing left. [music] >> Well, in that case, I guess we better be going. Wait, [music] there is one thing.

[00:18:07]Now, this is where the film starts becoming a cardographic problem. In Italy, the series runs Zombie, Zombie 2, Zombie 3, Zombie 4 After Death, and Zombie 5 Killing Birds. In the United Kingdom, distributed by Vipco, Vulti's film became Zombie Flesheaters. Zombie 3 became Zombie Flesheaters 2. [music] After Death became Zombie Flesheaters 3.

[00:18:33]In Germany, the sequence is entirely different. Dawn of the Dead was released as Zombie. George Romero's follow-up Day of the Dead became Zombie 2. And then the Italian Zombie 3 appeared as Zombie 3 with Roman numerals. The German series is stitched together for Romero's actual films in one Italian cash-in with Fal's film absent from the numbered sequence entirely. It went out separately there as Woo. In Thailand, the British numbering was followed but extended to include Killing Birds as a fourth entry.

[00:19:03]Australia built its own numbered series in Roman numerals labeled as sequels only. The Australian series begins at Zombie 4. There are no Australian entries 1 through 3, though you could attach 1 through 3 retroactively.

[00:19:16]The lineup includes Bacterion or Panic, an Italian science gone wrong film from 1982, Vengeance of the Zombies, a 1973 film from Spain, Dawn of the Mummy, 1981, and Night of the Seagulls, 1975.

[00:19:31]That itself being part of [music] the Tombs of the Blind Dead series, a whole other separate film franchise from Spain. It ends with Zombie 8, Urban Decay, an original film produced specifically for the Australian line in 2020.

[00:19:50]What the [ __ ] is this piece of [ __ ] >> Making Australia the only territory to commission new content for a series it invented out of spare parts. If things weren't confusing enough, the American home video label TZ Video, also known as Eddie Entertainment, constructed its own numbered zombie series in the late 1990s by acquiring rights to whatever it could find. Zombie Fali Zombie 2. Zombie 2 aka Zombie 3. Zombie 3: Return of the Zombies, a 1973 Spanish film. Zombie 4, A Virgin Among the Living Dead, a Jess Franco film with retroactively shot zombie scenes by Gene Roland for a 1981 re-release.

[00:20:30]Zombie 5, Revenge in the House of Usher, another Jess Franco film. [music] And zombie 6, Monster Hunter, Jod Diamato's absurd from 1981. a slasher film and pseudo sequel to his film Anthropophagus and Zombie 7, which is Anthropophagus itself. [music] So, the TZ line numbered Absurd as Zombie 6 and Anthropophagus as Zombie 7, but absurd is the sequel. So, they numbered the sequel before the original.

[00:20:59]Uh, this was either apparently not noticed or noticed and not considered a problem worth fixing.

[00:21:04]>> They don't know what the [ __ ] they're doing. Do you understand that? The line was padded substantially with Spanish horror films and Jess Franco erotica containing few or no zombies.

[00:21:14]>> You had yourself a ball. Yeah, a ball.

[00:21:17][laughter] And the whole operation has the energy of somebody with access to a label maker and a box of unclaimed VHS tapes.

[00:21:25]>> Okay, this one.

[00:21:30]Beyond the organized regional series, individual distributors retitled films opportunistically throughout this period. At least five different films were released at some point as Zombie 3, including Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, aka The Living Dead at Manchester Morg from 1974, Zombie Holocaust, 1980, Nightmare City, 1980, and Burial Ground, 1981, in addition to the actual Zombie 3. Hell of the Living Dead went out as both Zombie 4 and Zombie 5: Ultimate Nightmare, making it some kind of amalgamation of a prequel and sequel in its own standalone film. Oasis of the Zombies circulated as Zombie 6. Panic/Bacterion appeared as Zombie 4 in Greece and Zombie 4 in Australia. The most distinguished entry in this category has to be North Korea's 1985 kaiju film Paul Gasari, which was released in Pakistan under the title Zombie the Communist Bull Monster. This is by some margin the correct ending to any discussion of the zombie franchise.

[00:22:36]The zombie franchise is a fallacy. Every retitling was done with a rational business decision made in a pre- internet distribution environment with no global title control, where writing a hit in a local market required only the willingness to change the name on the box. [music] The chaos is a record of how cinema moved across borders in the 1970s and 1980s, opportunistically, fragmented, and without any coordination.

[00:23:01]Authorship, continuity, and sequence numbers are all equally meaningless here. There's no single thread to pull to untangle this [ __ ] show.

[00:23:09]>> Check this out.

[00:23:11]Take a look at this. Jesus Christ.

[00:23:13]>> That right there is the mail. Now, let's talk about the mail. Can we talk about the mail, please, Mac? I've been dying to talk about the mail with you all day.

[00:23:19]>> The map is the territory.

[00:23:22]And at the center of all of it is one 1979 film that itself was marketed as a sequel to something it had nothing to do with [music] became a legitimate landmark of Italian horror anyway and has been discussed seriously by genre historians for 45 years.

[00:23:37]Zombie Flesh eaters is a genuinely good horror movie. If you've never seen Zombie or any of its inbredad broods, I can't recommend it enough. The diminishing returns with the sequels is real, but they're all good fun for the most part. So, let me know if you've seen any of these, and if you have, what's your favorite? And if you've never seen Zombie, you don't know what you're missing.

[00:23:58]Thank you for watching. Thank you for subscribing, and [music] I'll see you next time. Bye, guys.

[00:24:04]>> The boat can leave now.

[00:24:07]Tell the crew.

[00:24:14][music] A massive thank you to my Patreon supporters. [music] If you would like to support this channel, you can find those links in the description. Bye-bye.