Will zom­bies ever die? To zom­bie enthu­si­asts, of course, that ques­tion makes no sense: zom­bies are already dead, drained of life and rean­i­mat­ed by some mag­i­cal, bio­log­i­cal, or even tech­no­log­i­cal force. Most of us have nev­er known a world with­out zom­bies, in the sense of zom­bies as a pres­ence in film, tele­vi­sion, lit­er­a­ture, and video games. In the video essay “Where Zom­bies Come From,” video essay­ist Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer, goes back to the dawn of these dead fig­ures to pin­point the ori­gin of this robust “mod­ern myth.”

The first men­tion of zom­bies appears in 1929’s The Mag­ic Island, a book on Haiti by “jour­nal­ist, occultist, and gen­er­al­ly eccen­tric minor celebri­ty” William Seabrook. “The zom­bie, they say, is a soul­less human corpse, still dead, but tak­en from the grave and endowed by sor­cery with a mechan­i­cal sem­blance of life — it is a dead body which is made to walk and act and move as if it were alive.”

That 90-year-old descrip­tion may sound more or less like the zom­bies that con­tin­ue to scare and amuse us today, but the mod­ern image of the zom­bie did­n’t emerge ful­ly formed; 1932’s Bela Lugosi-star­ring White Zom­bie, the very first zom­bie film, may not strike us today as ful­ly rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the genre it found­ed.

But “in 1968 every­thing changed.” That year, the young film­mak­er George A. Romero’s Night of the Liv­ing Dead (watch it online) laid down the rules for zom­bies: they “devour liv­ing human beings. They hob­ble for­ward awk­ward­ly but relent­less­ly. They’re dumb, able to use objects as blunt-force instru­ments but noth­ing else. They can only be killed by being shot in the head or burned, and if one bites or scratch­es you, you’ll die not long after, then trans­form into one and pur­sue whomev­er is near­by, fam­i­ly or not.” To Puschak’s mind, the film holds up not just as a zom­bie movie, but as a movie: “In its neo­re­al­ist, black-and-white style, it is a smart, tight­ly craft­ed sto­ry made on a shoe­string bud­get with a third act that is absolute­ly bru­tal and pun­ish­ing even now, 50 years lat­er.”

Night of the Liv­ing Dead did­n’t call its zom­bies zom­bies, but its sequel, 1978’s Dawn of the Dead, put the label of zom­bie on not just them but us: “The film, which takes place almost entire­ly in a mall, uses zom­bies to cri­tique con­sumerism: as the zom­bies lum­ber through this famil­iar place, we see our own behav­ior as a grotesque reflec­tion. A zom­bie’s thought­less­ness, Romero under­stood, is the per­fect mir­ror for our own.” Dawn of the Dead bol­stered the poten­tial of zom­bies not just as as “cre­ative, pri­mal mon­sters,” but as satir­i­cal devices, and the finest zom­bie movies know how to use them as both at once. (So far I’ve seen that bal­ance no more impres­sive­ly struck than in a Kore­an zom­bie movie, Yeon Sang-ho’s Train to Busan.)

Over the past half-cen­tu­ry, post-Night of the Liv­ing Dead zom­bie sto­ries have made all man­ner of tweaks on and vari­a­tions to the stan­dard zom­bie for­mu­la. Dan­ny Boyle’s 28 Days Lat­er, for exam­ple, pop­u­lar­ized the fast-mov­ing zom­bie, and Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead pio­neered the full-on zom­bie com­e­dy. Most recent­ly, no less astute an observ­er of Amer­i­can cul­ture and re-ani­ma­tor of seem­ing­ly dead cin­e­mat­ic tropes than Jim Jar­musch has offered us his own entry into the zom­bie canon, The Dead Don’t Die. Jar­muschi­an zom­bies sham­ble com­pul­sive­ly toward that which they desired in life: cof­fee, wi-fi, chardon­nay, Xanax. As long as we can still see these our­selves in these both fun­ny and ter­ri­fy­ing crea­tures, the zom­bie apoc­a­lypse will always seem dead ahead.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Night of the Liv­ing Dead, the Sem­i­nal Zom­bie Movie, Free Online

How to Sur­vive the Com­ing Zom­bie Apoc­a­lypse: An Online Course by Michi­gan State

Decay: Zom­bies Invade the Large Hadron Col­lid­er in Movie Made by Ph.D. Stu­dents

Mar­tin Scors­ese Cre­ates a List of the 11 Scari­est Hor­ror Films

What Makes a Good Hor­ror Movie? The Answer Revealed with a Jour­ney Through Clas­sic Hor­ror Films Clips

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

It’s one of cin­e­ma’s great­est ironies that edit­ing can make or break a film, but few movie­go­ers under­stand what an edi­tor actu­al­ly does. Edit­ing involves tak­ing shots and assem­bling them in the right order, yes, but what makes an order — all the tran­si­tions from moment to moment and scene to scene — “right”? Even if we can’t explain good edit­ing, we know bad edit­ing when we see it, and even more so when when we feel it. The hard-to-pin-down sen­sa­tion of a movie being “off” or “wrong” often comes out of incom­pe­tent edit­ing, and by break­ing down the bad edit­ing in a vari­ety of recent pic­tures, these three videos throw into con­trast what it takes for edit­ing to be good.

Most of the nine “Movies that Were Ruined by Real­ly Bad Edit­ing” in the Loop­er video at the top of the post are part of high-pro­file fran­chis­es. Giv­en the size of their bud­gets and the impor­tance of their box-office per­for­mance, you might think such films would­n’t per­mit tech­ni­cal slop­pi­ness of any kind. Yet in Alien: Covenant every­thing hap­pens in an order that kills the dra­mat­ic ten­sion; the chaot­ic Tak­en 3, “a severe case of death by a thou­sand cin­e­mat­ic cuts,” plays out “at the speed any oth­er movie would run if you acci­den­tal­ly hit the fast-for­ward but­ton sev­er­al times”; Trans­form­ers: Age of Extinc­tion goes heavy on the wrong scenes and “treats its robot aliens as a sub­plot”; and Sui­cide Squad pro­vides an exam­ple of “a stu­dio pub­licly adver­tis­ing a movie as one thing, pan­ick­ing, then com­plete­ly reshap­ing the same film all inside of one fran­tic mar­ket­ing blitz.”

“Edit­ing is going down the crap­per these days,” says Fold­ing Ideas host Dan Olson in his in-depth exam­i­na­tion of Sui­cide Squad’s incom­pe­tent cut­ting. “The edit­ing was shock­ing­ly awful in every way,” he says, turn­ing it into a kind of neg­a­tive show­case of the edi­tor’s art: “I would seri­ous­ly advise any­one with an inter­est in the art of cin­e­mat­ic edit­ing to do their own full autop­sy to see just how much went wrong and plain old does­n’t work.” Olson points to exam­ples of Sui­cide Squad’s often inex­plic­a­ble choic­es, such as fill­ing the first half of the film with hyper­ki­net­ic char­ac­ter intro­duc­tions that play more like trail­ers, devel­op­ing char­ac­ters only to sud­den­ly drop them, los­ing track of the phys­i­cal loca­tions of char­ac­ters, and repeat­ed­ly abus­ing the Kuleshov Effect in a way that feels like the “cin­e­mat­ic equiv­a­lent of putting the emphasis on the wrong syllable.”

But then, it would have been more of a sur­prise for a crit­i­cal dis­as­ter like Sui­cide Squad to have been well-edit­ed. What about the Fred­die Mer­cury biopic Bohemi­an Rhap­sody, which won an Acad­e­my Award specif­i­cal­ly for its edit­ing? Its recep­tion of that par­tic­u­lar Oscar is inter­est­ing, says video essay­ist Thomas Flight, “because the movie con­tains sev­er­al scenes that are mas­ter class­es in poor edit­ing.” In one offend­ing sequence, “many of the cuts are unmo­ti­vat­ed,” which mean that the edi­tor made them for no appar­ent rea­son, at least none serv­ing sto­ry or the dra­ma. Oth­ers “ignore spa­tial con­ti­nu­ity,” which makes it dif­fi­cult or impos­si­ble for the audi­ence to under­stand who and what is sup­posed to be where. And “the pace is sim­ply too fast,” mean­ing that the lengths of the shots are too short for the action: edit­ing that suits a rock con­cert does­n’t suit a con­ver­sa­tion.

Even view­ers who oth­er­wise enjoyed Bohemi­an Rhap­sody will have sensed some­thing the mat­ter with the cuts in the scene Flight high­lights. But nobody could have a worse reac­tion to it than John Ottman, the man who edit­ed the film, and whose work has been cred­it­ed with mak­ing (rather than fur­ther break­ing) the trou­bled pro­duc­tion. As men­tioned in March here on Open Cul­ture, that par­tic­u­lar scene was cut not by Ottman but direc­tor Dex­ter Fletch­er, who came in to take Bohemi­an Rhap­sody’s reins after the depar­ture of Bryan Singer. “When­ev­er I see it, I want to put a bag over my head,” Ottman told the Wash­ing­ton Post. Most movie­go­ers don’t see edit­ing when it’s good, only when it’s bad — but when it’s espe­cial­ly bad, it makes edi­tors them­selves long for invis­i­bil­i­ty.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Dark Knight: Anato­my of a Flawed Action Scene

Alfred Hitchcock’s 7‑Minute Mas­ter Class on Film Edit­ing

Hitch­cock on the Filmmaker’s Essen­tial Tool: The Kuleshov Effect

A Visu­al Intro­duc­tion to Sovi­et Mon­tage The­o­ry: A Rev­o­lu­tion in Film­mak­ing

Bohemi­an Rhap­sody’s Bad Edit­ing: A Break­down

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

My friend and I share most opin­ions on film and art, but on one top­ic we vehe­ment­ly dis­agree: Jack­ass. He sees it as low­est-com­mon-denom­i­na­tor garbage, the kind of show seen on the TV in Idioc­ra­cy. And I can see his point, espe­cial­ly in an Amer­i­ca becom­ing more and more obvi­ous­ly sadis­tic.

But I would like to make a con­trar­i­an point: Jack­ass is the inher­i­tor of silent movie slap­stick. John­ny Knoxville is no Buster Keaton, but in an indus­try where so few actors per­form their own stunts, and where action sequences are edit­ed togeth­er from dozens of shots, Jack­ass and Knoxville’s oth­er movie projects show its self-inflict­ed com­ic vio­lence in sin­gle wide takes. It’s the only rea­son these films work: it real­ly hurts to watch. These guys set up elab­o­rate pranks, and suf­fer for our laugh­ter, masochists for enter­tain­ment. And while Hol­ly­wood has noth­ing but invin­ci­ble heroes, the Jack­ass crew excel in their fail­ure.

This comes at a phys­i­cal cost, as Knoxville recounts for this Van­i­ty Fair video. Usu­al­ly actors rem­i­nisce over their var­i­ous roles. Here Knoxville details the var­i­ous injuries he has sus­tained over his twen­ty year career.

And there have been some doozies. Bro­ken bones? That’s noth­ing. How about hav­ing a motor­bike land in your crotch caus­ing you to pee blood? Or knocked out in a box­ing match with But­ter­bean, send­ing you into a stroke-like seizure as your throat tries to swal­low your tongue? When it’s Knoxville, even the injuries are strange.

The man him­self takes us through his first (on screen) injury in 1998, where he was the guinea pig for self-defense tech, includ­ing pep­per spray (“one of the most painful things I’ve endured in my life”) and a taser.

Apart from injuries, there’s also the near miss­es. Such as the rock­et straight out of a Road Run­ner car­toon (anoth­er touch­stone for com­e­dy vio­lence) which failed on the launch pad and instead sent a series of iron rods shoot­ing out into the Jack­ass crew, near­ly decap­i­tat­ing a few. There lit­er­al­ly was a bunch of dumb luck on this show.

Knoxville’s most recent film was Action Point, based upon a real life amuse­ment park known for its reg­u­la­tion-defy­ing dan­ger, but that film sunk with­out a trace. Maybe the Jack­ass era is done now, but stay for Knoxville’s eye injury sto­ry in this video…it’s more enjoy­able than the 2018 movie.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Super­cut of Buster Keaton’s Most Amaz­ing Stunts

Why Is Jack­ie Chan the King of Action Com­e­dy? A Video Essay Mas­ter­ful­ly Makes the Case

Chuck Jones’ 9 Rules For Draw­ing Road Run­ner Car­toons, or How to Cre­ate a Min­i­mal­ist Mas­ter­piece

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

When’s the last time you gasped, while watch­ing a movie, at a pure bit of phys­i­cal com­e­dy? Of a clever move, over a stunt that left you breath­less, because you knew that no way was com­put­er graph­ics or green­screen involved? There are indeed some–that hall­way fight in the first sea­son of Dare­dev­il, the end­less apart­ment melee in Atom­ic Blonde, and, bear with me here, most of Jack­ass. But those are few and far between. Dur­ing the Jack­ie Chan hey­day, that gob­s­mack­ing dis­be­lief hap­pened every sin­gle film. We laughed, we winced, we cheered. For a moment, Jack­ie Chan was the king of action com­e­dy.

Per­son­al­ly, I can’t believe we *haven’t* talked about this Tony Zhou YouTube essay, because I have shown it near­ly every semes­ter in my film pro­duc­tion class. Part of me wants to turn the young’uns on to Jack­ie Chan (the HK films, not the Rush Hour series), and anoth­er part hopes that these future direc­tors will go on to cor­rect what Hol­ly­wood gets so so wrong these days.

Chan was com­pared ear­ly on to the giants of silent cin­e­ma like Buster Keaton, but as a young cinephile I couldn’t see past the obvi­ous homages in films like Project A, which famous­ly had Chan hang­ing off a clock tow­er like Harold Lloyd. It was only lat­er that the true com­par­i­son became appar­ent, and Zhou lays it out for us in one of his best essays.

His main points are thus: 1) Chan starts at a dis­ad­van­tage and must fight his way back to the top, which links him with Chap­lin and Keaton, but not like action heroes at the time like Willis and Schwarzeneg­ger, who come ful­ly formed. 2) Chan uses any prop to fight, not just the usu­al guns and swords. 3) He fights in clear­ly light­ed scenes, with cos­tume design to make him stand out.

And here’s the main direc­toral point: Jack­ie Chan and his group of stunt­men can actu­al­ly fight, and fight well. So the cam­era does not need to move a lot and the total­i­ty of the human body in space can be appre­ci­at­ed. This could only hap­pen in a film­mak­ing scene like Hong Kong where pro­duc­tions took time and spent mon­ey to get absolute­ly per­fect takes. Hol­ly­wood, on the oth­er hand, does not hire actors who can fight or act physical–instead they film and edit around the actors’ lack of skill. When we applaud a clever stunt in a Jack­ie Chan film, 50 or more imper­fect takes lay on the cut­ting room floor. (Zhou finds some good behind-the-scenes inter­views explic­it­ly lay­ing this idea out.)

Zhou also blames West­ern edi­tors for cut­ting too fast and cut­ting too much on every hit, ruin­ing the rhythm. Most direc­tors, edi­tors, and stunt coor­di­na­tors don’t know edit­ing, says Chan. There’s a tech­nique in Hong Kong edit­ing where you show the impact twice that to an audi­ence feels like one, strong impact.

One of the final points is that these Jack­ie Chan films focus on the pain of the pro­tag­o­nist. (Which, by the way, is why Jack­ass suc­ceeds as com­e­dy as well.) But so many Hol­ly­wood films skip this bit of real­i­ty, as our heroes tend to be invin­ci­ble. There is a larg­er social-polit­i­cal cri­tique to be made about the par­tic­u­lar lies Hol­ly­wood tells itself, and you can have at it in the com­ments if you wish. But for now, queue up some clas­sic Chan–my jump­ing off point all those years ago was Drunk­en Mas­ter II–and see how the mas­ter does it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Salute to Every Frame a Paint­ing: Watch All 28 Episodes of the Fine­ly-Craft­ed (and Now Con­clud­ed) Video Essay Series on Cin­e­ma

Safe­ty Last, the 1923 Movie Fea­tur­ing the Most Icon­ic Scene from Silent Film Era, Just Went Into the Pub­lic Domain

Judd Apa­tow Teach­es the Craft of Com­e­dy: A New Online Course from Mas­ter­Class

Buster Keaton: The Won­der­ful Gags of the Found­ing Father of Visu­al Com­e­dy

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

“There are a lot of dystopias around these days,” writes Kim Stan­ley Robin­son in his recent essay “Dystopia Now.” This, of course, “makes sense, because we have a lot of fears about the future.” We also have a lot of fears about the present, which get mapped onto the future in dystopi­an fic­tion, a genre that has become “part of our all-encom­pass­ing hope­less­ness.”

Dystopias feel famil­iar, even com­fort­ing, in that no mat­ter how bad things are, they are per­haps not quite as bad yet as the dark­est visions of sci­ence fic­tion. We might still change course if we can final­ly heed the warn­ings. But lit­er­ary and cin­e­mat­ic pes­simism, either as grim escapism or a wake-up call, “has done its job,” Robin­son argues, “it’s old news now, per­haps it’s self-indul­gence to stay stuck in that place any more.”

Anoth­er leg­endary sci-fi writer, Ursu­la K. Le Guin agreed. “We keep writ­ing dystopias,” she remarked in a 2017 essay, “instead of envi­sion­ing a bet­ter world.” Le Guin, who passed away last year, wrote of “ambigu­ous,” “clear­sight­ed,” and “trou­bled” utopias. And she prac­ticed, over the course of her long career, what Robin­son calls our cur­rent “task at hand”—“to imag­ine ways for­ward to that bet­ter place.” We may not see much rea­son for opti­mism, but utopi­an think­ing, “is real­is­tic: things could be bet­ter.”

An anar­chist, fem­i­nist, and envi­ron­men­tal­ist, Le Guin might be called an “ide­o­log­i­cal” writer, but not in the deroga­to­ry sense the word implies. All artists have ide­o­log­i­cal frame­works, whether they’re aware of them or not, and Le Guin was very much aware of the lens­es she used to see the world, what Robin­son defines as “the imag­i­nary rela­tion­ship to our real con­di­tions of exis­tence.”

She con­scious­ly restruc­tured her work to imag­ine new worlds in terms out­side the oppres­sive­ly hege­mon­ic norms that gov­ern ours, norms cre­at­ed by what she called the “yang” desire for absolute con­trol.  “I had to rethink my entire approach to writ­ing fic­tion,” she says above in Worlds of Ursu­la K. Le Guin, a new PBS doc­u­men­tary direct­ed by Arwen Cur­ry, avail­able free to stream for a lim­it­ed time.

“It was impor­tant,” Le Guin goes on, “to think about priv­i­lege and pow­er and dom­i­na­tion in terms of gen­der, which is some­thing sci­ence fic­tion and fan­ta­sy had not done.” In so doing, Le Guin showed her read­ers it was pos­si­ble to imag­ine func­tion­al, believ­able, even attain­able alter­na­tives to stark real­i­ties that seem too deeply entrenched to ever change. She showed oth­er sci-fi and fan­ta­sy writ­ers that they could do the same.

The doc­u­men­tary fea­tures appear­ances from con­tem­po­raries and suc­ces­sors to Le Guin’s world-build­ing bril­liance, includ­ing Mar­garet Atwood, Samuel R. Delany, Analee Newitz, Chi­na Miéville, Neil Gaiman, Michael Chabon, and David Mitchell, all of whom cite her as an influ­ence and inspi­ra­tion. (“I read A Wiz­ard of Earth­sea,” says Mitchell, “and things rearranged in my head.”)

In a way, read­ing Le Guin for the first time feels like being giv­en a pair of VR glass­es through which to see what’s tru­ly pos­si­ble, if only we had the will to col­lec­tive­ly imag­ine it into being. She did not think of utopi­anism as an eter­nal state of per­fec­tion or a thought exper­i­ment, but as a “process,”as Kel­ly Lynn Thomas writes at The Mil­lions, of “reflec­tion and adjust­ment, learn­ing and growth… com­mu­ni­ca­tion and respect, self-aware­ness and hon­esty.”

Though the word is typ­i­cal­ly deployed to describe dan­ger­ous naivete or pie-in-the-sky think­ing, utopi­anism need not be a grasp­ing after “ratio­nal human con­trol of human life,” Le Guin wrote. Utopias always con­tain some mea­sure of dystopia, she rec­og­nized. But she pro­posed that we find bal­ance by imag­in­ing what she calls “yin utopias,” spaces that involve “accep­tance of imper­ma­nence and imper­fec­tion, a patience with uncer­tain­ty and the makeshift, a friend­ship with water, dark­ness, and the earth.”

Such are the ideals that informed her vast imag­i­na­tive out­put over the course of near­ly 60 years, includ­ing 21 nov­els, 11 vol­umes of short sto­ries, essay col­lec­tions, children’s books, and poet­ry. In Worlds of Ursu­la K. Le Guin, we learn how she devel­oped and refined her cre­ative vision, and her cri­tiques of total­iz­ing “yang” utopi­anism and its despair­ing oppo­site. The film is avail­able to stream in full online for a lim­it­ed time. Watch it above or on PBS’s Amer­i­can Mas­ters page before it’s gone.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Cel­e­brate the Life & Writ­ing of Ursu­la K. Le Guin (R.I.P.) with Clas­sic Radio Drama­ti­za­tions of Her Sto­ries

Ursu­la K. Le Guin’s Dai­ly Rou­tine: The Dis­ci­pline That Fueled Her Imag­i­na­tion

Ursu­la K. Le Guin Names the Books She Likes and Wants You to Read

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness