Carradine, John

      The well-known Hollywood actor Ving Rhames has starred in no less than three zombie-themed movies: the 2004 remake of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, 2008’s Day of the Dead (which was also a Romero remake), and the downright terrible Zombie Apocalypse (2011). In terms of starring roles in zombie movies, however, Rhames has nothing on horror legend John Carradine, who appeared in numerous undead-based productions, including Revenge of the Zombies, Voodoo Man, Face of Marble, Invisible Invaders, Dr. Terror’s Gallery of Horrors, The Astro-Zombies, Blood of Ghastly Horror, The House of Seven Corpses, and Shock Waves.

      It is most unfortunate that, at best, all of Carradine’s forays into the world of the zombie ranged from what can only be described as awful to mediocre, since he was actually a highly skilled actor. Born in 1906 in Manhattan, New York City, Carradine broke into the movie industry in 1930, in Bright Lights. It is ironic that Carradine should be so associated with horror-movies, since his very first credited role in the field of acting was a comedy-musical of no particular, longstanding merit. Nevertheless, Carradine, like all actors, had to start somewhere.

      Dramas and westerns soon followed (although Carradine did have un-credited roles in both The Invisible Man of 1933 and the 1935 movie, The Bride of Frankenstein), as did the 1939 version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles. It was a film in which Carradine took on the significant role of Barryman, the sinister butler of Baskerville Hall. Interestingly, in the original novel, Barryman is named Barrymore, but Twentieth Century Fox chose to make the change to prevent viewers from thinking there might be a connection to the actors John Barrymore and Lionel Barrymore, both of whom were big draws for cinema-goers in the 1930s.

      While zombie fanatics may wish to check out each and every one of Carradine’s movies of a reanimated and undead fashion, very few are worthy of comment. Revenge of the Zombies (1943) is somewhat notable, as it was the sequel to King of the Zombies, which was made two years earlier. Voodoo Man (1944) starred Bela Lugosi in the lead, which made it a crowd-puller with the viewers, but it can hardly be regarded as a classic.

      Certainly, the most interesting of all of Carradine’s zombie movies is a 1959 production, Invisible Invaders. It focuses on a hostile alien force that plans on enslaving the people of Earth by inhabiting the corpses of the recently deceased, and using the newly animated bodies as vessels to attack and kill the living while simultaneously causing chaos all across the planet. Not quite Night of the Living Dead, but most definitely ahead of its time in terms of its concept—although sadly not in terms of its less than impressive special-effects and less than great acting.

      Although Carradine worked alongside such famous actors as Spencer Tracy, Basil Rathbone, and Charlton Heston, made more than 200 movies on a wide and varied body of subjects, and spent extensive time working in the world of theater, it is for the incredibly huge number of horror movies that he made for which Carradine is most remembered and loved. He was still active right up until the time of his death, in Milan, Italy, in 1988. Carradine did not, by the way, subsequently “come back.”

       Cats of the CIA

      Pre-George A. Romero era, pretty much each and every scenario involving zombies revolved around not the literal dead, but mind-controlled individuals behaving in a distinctly undead, emotionless state. Such movies as I Walked with a Zombie and White Zombie make that abundantly clear, as does Wade Davis’ book, The Serpent and the Rainbow. It may very well be the case that none other than the CIA took deep note of some of those old black and white zombie movies of the 1930s and 1940s. Such a theory is born out by the fact that in the 1960s, scientists of the CIA tried to create an army of loyal and obedient zombie cats.

      It was an operation that covertly received funding, not in the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, but in the millions. The idea was to transform regular, everyday cats into something hideous, something akin to the Terminator or Robocop. CIA boffins came up with the ingeniously odd idea of implanting transmitting devices and listening gadgets into the bodies (and even the tails) of cats, and then have them wander around the grounds and—if the CIA got really lucky—the interior of the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C. Anything the cats might have picked up, conversation-wise, was deemed that it could have had a major bearing on national security.

       Believe it or not, the CIA was also involved in a plan to create zombie cats that were obedient to commands. The result was, to say the least, unsuccessful.

      Demonstrating that the CIA’s finest knew more than a bit about how to place a cat into a zombified condition, not only did they slice the poor animals open and fill them with wires and metal: they also tinkered with the brains of the cats. Doing so placed the cats into a kind of lobotomized, subservient state, one in which their natural instincts and wild urges were reigned-in, thus allowing the CIA to keep their zombie-spies under control at all times. Unfortunately for those involved in the operation, and particularly so the first cat that was designated for zombification, it didn’t work out so well. And that’s putting it mildly.

      One of those that had an awareness of the program (which went by the amusing, but admittedly appropriate title of Acoustic Kitty), was Victor L. Marchetti, Jr., formerly a special assistant to the Deputy Director. Marchetti says that when the controlled cat in question was ready for its very first mission, CIA agents carefully released it close to the Soviet Embassy and prompted the animal to make its way to the building, where, hopefully, it would pick up a few juicy nuggets of information. What the 007-like zombie cat actually did was to get squashed under the wheels of a speeding taxi. The undead cat was now well and truly dead.

      The CIA, having decided that the program was not going to work as well in the real world as it did on paper, quickly closed it down and gave it the proverbial bullet to the head. So far as we know, the project has never since been reanimated—so to speak.

       Cattle Mutilations

       See also: Foot-and-Mouth Disease, Mad Cow Disease

      Since at least 1967, just about the entire United States of America has been beset by a disturbing phenomenon. It has infamously become known as cattle mutilations. Exactly who, or indeed what, is responsible for the widespread killing of cattle under very bizarre circumstances is far from clear or understood. On many occasions, farmers, police officers, and veterinarians throughout North America have come across cases where cattle have been subjected to unusual surgical procedures, such as having organs expertly removed and being completely drained of blood—and also in the exact locations where both UFO and black, unmarked helicopter activity is highly prevalent, too.

      This has inevitably led to suspicions that extraterrestrials are engaged in a covert, and possibly sinister, program that may relate to the attempted introduction of a lethal virus of truly cosmic origins into the human food chain. Adherents of such theories suggest that the destruction of the human species in a War of the Worlds-style scenario may not be the only way to systematically wipe us out.

      On the other hand, there’s

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