Food for Fright-Night: The B-Movie Cookbook

It’s almost Halloween, and time to ask What’s Cooking? My experts, of course, are Fiona Young-Brown and her hubby, Nic Brown. I first met Fiona at a serious writers’ conference in New York City; little did I know then that I’d eventually end up as a guest on Nic’s long-running B-Movie Cast, talking about Roger Corman flicks like Big Bad Mama and Grand Theft Auto.     

   Fiona is from England, and Nic hails from Kentucky, so of course they met while teaching English in Japan, before eventually  making their home in the  Bluegrass State. Fiona’s writing specialties include food and travel (she’s the author of Wicked Lexington) as well as science, and Nic devotes as much time as he can to his passion for vintage horror movies and other cheapie cinematic delights. Which is why he was a natural to join with the late Vince Rotolo in hosting a B-movie podcast that’s been on the air since 2006. (Vince’s wife Mary now joins Nic in capably anchoring new broadcasts.)

 Given Nic and Fiona’s varied enthusiasms, it’s no surprise that they have launched a series of B-movie cookbooks. Their first celebrated the Fifties, pairing drive-in favorites like Godzilla and Creature from the Black Lagoon with appropriate recipes. I’ve just finished reading the sequel, which is titled The B-Movie Cookbook: The Sixties. This slim, colorfully illustrated volume features 12 B-movie classics from the decade, everything from The Brain that Wouldn’t Die to Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. Nic engagingly summarizes the plot of each film and adds quirky production details, after which Fiona comes up with simple but enticing recipes guaranteed to make your home film screening complete. Halloween, of course, is one of the Browns’ best-loved holidays, which is why creepy films suitable for October 31 inspire some of their finest efforts. For George Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead, Fiona salutes the Polish community of Pittsburgh, where the film was famously made, with a serious recipe for Pierogies. But she also gets creative in suggesting the blood-and-guts aspect of this zombie classic. Apparently the actors playing the zombies in fact feasted on-screen not on actual human flesh but on a concoction of roast ham and chocolate syrup. Fiona takes mercy on her readers, sharing with them instead a Mexican-inspired recipe for Pulled Pork with Chocolate Mole (delicious but decidedly scary-looking). And for dessert she offers White Chocolate Mousse Brain with Strawberry Sauce. If yours comes out looking like the photos in the book, it will definitely give a shiver to your partygoing friends.

 Much space is devoted to Spider Baby, the 1967 creep-fest by Roger Corman alumnus Jack Hill about a family with weird inclinations. That’s partly because Fiona and Nic have located the film’s star, Beverly Washburn, who shares her on-set memories as well as some of her own family taste treats. But I particularly like Fiona’s culinary suggestions for this vastly bizarre film. The book informs us “there is a memorable dining scene in the movie featuring weeds, mushrooms, and an unfortunate cat. Sparing those, we’ve instead opted for some spider novelties and mushroom cookies.”  I love the photo of the Spider Leg Breadsticks perched eerily on a bowl of queso dip. And Spider Cupcakes are wonderfully cute. Serve those alongside your White Chocolate Mousse Brain for an unforgettable Halloween treat.

 But, hey – why are no Roger Corman movies included by the Browns?  I’d love to see recipe suggestions for such Sixties classics as  X: The Man With The X-Ray Eyes and The Masque of the Red Death. Perchance there’s a Corman cookbook in the offing?

Ghouls Just Want to Have Fun: George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead

Novelist Colson Whitehead, recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant and a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize, has devoted his latest novel to zombies. Is there a trend here? These days zombies are showing up in all the best places, including alternative versions of the genteel novels of Jane Austen. (I’m referring, of course, to Seth Grahame-Smith’s 2009 mash-up, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which one of these days may be coming to a movie theatre near you.)

Whitehead, who’s usually more interested in the African-American experience and the history of New York, chose to depict a zombie-ridden apocalyptic future in his new Zone One. His choice isn’t entirely out of the blue when you realize he’s been having zombie nightmares ever since he saw Dawn of the Dead (zombies take over a shopping mall!) at age nine. In promoting his new novel, Whitehead released a list of classic films that have stoked his imagination. Kicking off that list is George Romero’s seminal zombie trilogy (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Day of the Dead), which Whitehead categorizes as “Sane Black Man Vs. The Crazy White People.”

Whitehead’s focus on the racial aspect of Romero’s films isn’t inappropriate. In Night of the Living Dead, the last man standing in the war against the encroaching zombies is black. The 1968 film, made on a shoestring and shot in shaky black-and-white, centers on a Pennsylvania farmhouse where a cluster of locals seeks refuge from creatures who are literally blood-thirsty, and won’t take no for an answer. As the number of humans holed up in that farmhouse starts to dwindle, some become belligerent, and others weepy. Yet Duane Jones as Ben stays cool, bravely inventing stratagems to keep the monsters at bay. Ben’s skin-color is never mentioned, but it gives additional punch to the film’s shocking conclusion. When state troopers arrive at the farmhouse with guns and dogs to disperse the zombies once and for all, Ben is the only human being still alive. The troopers spot him in an upstairs window, quickly decide he’s one of “them,” and capably pick him off with a bullet to the brain, with one man congratulating another on his marksmanship.

Romero had never planned to make a movie about race. He cast an African-American as his hero because Duane Jones was the best actor who auditioned. But in the late Sixties, when the civil rights struggle was coming to a boil, the accidental resonance of this film could not be denied. Jason Zinoman’s article for Vanity Fair chronicles how on April 4, 1968, the print of Night of the Living Dead was sitting in the trunk of Romero’s Thunderbird convertible as he drove to New York to try selling his fledgling directorial effort to Columbia Pictures. Over the car radio came word that Martin Luther King had just been assassinated in Memphis. Though personally devastated by the news, Romero couldn’t help thinking, “Man, this is good for us.” King’s death convinced Romero of the timeliness of a film “whose defiant black hero fights off an army of the undead only to be gunned down by an all-white posse.” Americans already edgy about black-and-white tensions quickly picked up on the racial nuance.

This Halloween, we have a brand-new monument to Martin Luther King on our National Mall. But that’s not to say that all America’s racial problems have been solved. If Republican-leaning zombies start lurching toward the White House instead of a farmhouse, let’s hope Obama comes off better than poor Duane Jones.