 at the store club four years ago, almost today. So thanks for being supportive. We want to give a shout out to the League of Women Voters. They're really back. Hi. Hi. Hi. We're trying to draw up these last few minutes for the vote. If you aren't kind of slacking or if you've moved, please go see them. They also have voter information templates, not partisan, like you kind of need to run down on issues. Local public library is also back there. We have it every month. If you don't have an open library card, it's only your fault because they'll give you one. You just have a list of resources related to all three talks, and they're fantastic and bold. I'd love to introduce the next talk. I'm not dressed as this guy from Brad who brings fun. But I'm dressed as this guy. Does anyone actually know who this is? I'm not so much of a big thing on this guy. This guy is Henry Hussbauer. He is the reason why we have a pitchfork wheeled in logs. So we might associate pitchforks, the fortunes with Frankenstein, whatever there's a monster. We kind of want to go pick them out of this place. But here's the title page of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the scene that was made in 1833, not once in this book. Well, now I can do control that. But I did read this book, and there was not a single mention of a pitchfork. And the mentions of torches and a kind of benign. Instead, they attacked the monster with essentially a projectile weapon with rocks. This guy is why we can now fight off our moving monsters. That's because he came up with the way that we now make steel. And essentially, the problem with the steel before was that there were a lot of non-periodism and there was oxygen in it. And these impurities made this steel very frugal, very weak. And so he made this class furnished. He heat up the steel, segregate all the impurities to the top, and burn off all of this extra carbon, all of this extra oxygen, get very big steel, very cheap heat. This is a very simple thing. It's essentially why we have the railroads and why we no longer have these pitchforks. This is a wrought iron pitchfork. We have the one of these guys, a fucking blacksmith. And it takes him like hours to do this. And we can just make the steel pitchforks to fight off our monster. In our first talk of the evening, we'll be from Streff and Taylor, who will tell you about the makeup designer behind Frank's sign and some of the other great Hollywood monsters. Please welcome to the stage, Streff and Taylor. Heather's back there. She's got a table with all of our stuff there. We'll talk to you tonight about Jack Pierce. And nobody knows who the fuck Jack Pierce is. It's kind of a shame, but at the same time, it's like that society, society we live in. And to make these documentaries, I'm a lifelong artist. I was in a heavy metal band. I've always done graphic arts and stuff like that. But now I do the kind of film. And first off, there's a show on the channel too called Creatures with Bob Wilkins. And I remember vividly, as I dealt with my two brothers, we had a black mark TV in our bedroom. And we would get put to bed on Saturday night and told him, you've got to go to sleep. But we could watch the TV with no sound, because my dad's turn's not so good. He'd watch you Creatures with a volume up. So we'd hear him through the wall. So I would get to see the classic horror films, like Frank's Sign, Dracula, and all that stuff. But Bob Wilkins is really unique in that he would invite people from the Bay Area to come on to his show and talk about whatever they're up to. The Wilkins robots and stuff. This is the 70s, so rock out stuff. And there was a guy named Ernie Fasalius, who came on, who I did a movie called Hardware Wars, which was a short, it's a very first parody short, from Star Wars. And he invited Ernie on. And as a kid, I saw Ernie. And the documentary I made on Jack Pierce, I got Ernie to Gary it. So Ernie is in my film. And the reason I made the film was pretty much because, rather than that, I saw these classic films on Creatures with Bob Wilkins. I was also super lucky that my grammar school, when I was a kid, had horror movie books. I don't know why in the library they would have horror movies for little kids, but there was a whole section. And I was here putting on a movie. Yeah, it was a cool school. So I was looking at horror stuff. And that's why you see, it's just black and white photos of Wolfman, Frankenstein, and Dracula, and the Mummy, and all the other horror films. And we don't really think too much about it. But it discovered, as a teen, well, still a young kid, Famous Monsters of Filmen, which is a magazine by Forrest J. Ackerman, who we did a documentary later on about his house. He used to be able to go and visit his house. In Famous Monsters of Filmen, he always made jokes about things. But they were heat pictures of Jack Pierce. And it was the first time I ever knew that there was one guy that did the majority of makeup for all these classic horror films. And I'm like, oh, there's just one guy that did these makeup and stuff. And that's kind of cool. And I didn't really think too much more about it growing up. And then also an adult in it making films, which is what I started doing. And one of the first films I did was on Bob Wilkins and his sister. And for me, I was at a party at a place called Vortex Room in San Francisco, which is a speedy, easy place to play these B-movies. And it has a bar, but it's closed now. But back then, it was totally under the radar. And at the time, I was doing a bunch of other music stuff. And I got into arguing with a very passionate in front of me about, eventually, it just came back to, well, we just got to do film. That's what you got to do. You got to do it. But I didn't do anything. So I didn't want to do anything film-wise. So since I was already in music, what I decided to do is take classic silent films, like Nosferatu, The Balm, and re-put music to them so I can learn how to edit on a computer with the software. And so we ended up doing three silent films, and put new music, but then we just put dialogue in it. And we put sound effects, too. So we just sit down and smoke on and watch the movie without even a read, and it'll be right there for you. At the same time, I was working with a bunch of people in San Francisco at Coffee TV. We have a show called Creepy Coffee Movie Time. It's on Saturday, Wednesday. And so we got to show those movies, the silent movies, fully done, again, on Creepy Coffee on Halloween specials. So I thought, okay, cool, I'm bringing silent movies that younger generations probably wouldn't bother to watch, because you have to read them. And I thought we'd be good about that. But what it did do is it taught me how to edit. So one of my first films was about obliques, and I learned, we have it here tonight, but you'll learn everything about obliques from channel three and seven and all of them. Back to Jack Pierce, because I wanted to go find any kind of information I could on Jack Pierce, because after I made the other documentaries particularly about Wilkins, it's like, oh, I should probably look into, there's gotta be something about Jack Pierce. So there was absolutely nothing about Jack Pierce. And I'm like, wait a minute, this guy created all of these effects, all of the make-ups for a universal, and there's nothing about them at all, anyway. So, of course, the light flashed, I was like, do something on Jack Pierce. So I started searching more, and the only thing I could find was a Scott S. M. Panthel. It's a book on his history, but it's not, it's really vague. It's really good that it gets you to meet of what Jack Pierce is about, but it doesn't really delve into it. I didn't know that there was more to delve into when I read this. I was like, oh, that's cool. It's just about what we have, but I didn't know I was more to describe than what I eventually found out about him. But I had been collecting material on Pierce. I have an eBay addiction, sorry. And I buy stuff on two things, Jack Pierce and London After Midnight, which is a launching film that's lost that was on a vampire film. So I had already been collecting stuff on Pierce for a long time, but when I decided to do a documentary on him, and this was the only thing that was there, was his pamphlet on this history, I started looking more. So besides eBay, I started finding more material. And one of the best places I found material from was, what else is it? Bryant Saturday, Matt May. And any Bryant Saturday night, Matt May is in Los Angeles. It's a throwback video store. So you go in there and they still have VHS on the wall. But they have one of the largest collections of stills, 8x10s in movie stills, probably in the world this time. And this is how you get to see them, in tax sheets. So for months and months and months, I was getting these tax sheets mailed to me, and I go through, and I found a lot of material on Pierce, because as soon as you know what films you work on and what you look like, you can collect material. So I think that was part of the gathering of material, was that. I did know through research that Pierce had a scrapbook, and the scrapbook had been sold. I found auctions that were online, that it had been sold for a lot of money, and it had passed hands several times. And while I was doing the research for this documentary, I also reached out on online blogs, it's like after like Universal Films, people doing, just chatting about it, but they were pretty passionate about it. So I'm like, hey, I'm looking for anything on Pierce. And I got an email from somebody anonymously, saying, hey, I have Jack Pierce's scrapbook. Would you like to see it, or would you like to use it? I'm like, absolutely, I would love to see Pierce's scrapbook. And then he wouldn't respond. I kept saying, hey, what's up, what's up? And he wouldn't respond. And I had been in contact with Scott Esmer this time because of the book Keep It Out, and he was giving me lots of good information. And I told him, oh yeah, this guy said he had the scrapbook and he's not responding. And Scott Esmer said, well, I was an initial events investor on the scrapbook, so I actually photographed the entire thing. Would you like to see that? Oh yeah, of course, I want to see the scrapbook. So I finally got to see the scrapbook. And the scrapbook was awesome because it had, it was Pierce's own thing, and Pierce did horror, but he was universal for a really long time. And he did all of it, though. So the horror was just a very small part of what he did. So getting ahold of the scrapbook put so much more history together for me about what Jack Pierce was when he did. And the terrible and horrible thing about it is that his scrapbook has been pilfered, so it's gone through a couple of hands. But all the horror stuff has been torn out of it. It's sold off piece by piece. So the pages of the scrapbook, or the pictures have been torn out. So his book is no longer what it was. What I've heard is the guy who currently has it, who wouldn't respond to the astronomy ability. Look at that. So getting to look at the scrapbook was awesome. And that got me to the point of like I had enough material to actually start working on a documentary about Jack Pierce. The other thing that I just got ahold of was an actual TV interview that he did in 1962. It was a video though. The guy named Bob Burns, who is also a big horror guy who collects horror stuff. He had a friend audio tape the interview in 1962. And I got ahold of that. And so, but it is the only full-on history that Jack Pierce actually tells us about history through this audio interview. So when I got ahold of that, I had all the pieces I needed to start putting together a documentary on this guy. Then he started scouting stuff. So as you go along, making a film on anybody or anything, I found that he came from Greece, was reeking in the 1900s, moved to Chicago, this family. Eventually he moved to San Francisco in 1906. He claims in a newspaper interview that he was in the United States earthquake and then moved to LA after the earthquake. So he's a Los Angeles in 1907 away. But he was a shortstop when he first got to Chicago. He's a sports person, he likes sports. From the best California, he couldn't play sports because the competition was just too great. So he became a manager. And early on in Hollywood's history, actors and people on set would actually have sports teams, the movie crews. And this is Larry Siemens' basketball team. Basketball was brand new to sports. So this is Jeff Pierce, right here. He is the manager of the basketball team. And so it's just basically keep everybody physically fit and all together so they're not running off in whatever between movies. So it was really interesting to me. It's like, okay, he was a shortstop, he came to California and he got into the movie industry slightly by doing sports and managing. But then he got into actually doing movies. And the way he got into movies was he had, Harry Clover was a developer in Los Angeles who was giving away land to anybody who wanted to build a movie company or a movie set or a movie building he would give it to you to do them for free. A man named Thomas Ince bought land and hired Jeff Pierce to run a projection roof forum in Los Angeles. But they became friendly and Jeff Pierce started working on his movies. And the earliest pictures I have of Pierce are like 1913 or so in Los Angeles and other parts of California. Do you movies being an actor and also doing his own makeup? And at this time, this was the sheet he would go to a movie production company and say, hey, I can do makeup. I can make myself look at any one. He was really short though and he couldn't be medicine as a villain. So he could make himself a movie development but he wasn't on screen, he couldn't pull it off. But he was really talented at doing what he did. And now he's not locked. The most famous makeup artist at times on a chain and he's universal. And so this is basically the cast of stuff Pierce would probably get, do his makeup until he was hired to do not himself makeup but makeup on other people. And he did a thing called a movie called The Monkey Talks. The Monkey Talks is amazing. I found a three-file millimeter primitive from Eastwood Codec and I had a transistor. It's in the film, a clip of it. But it makes kind of the age look crap. I mean, and this is decades before the kind of age it's made. And it's a really good, the review that said that they train the chimpanzees so well, you're gonna think he's human. It's like, you know, it's a guy in makeup and that's Jeff Pierce doing makeup. But this put Pierce on the map. So all of a sudden heads of movie studios are going, whoa, that's really good. And at the same time, Long Change, that universal. Universal had a range to make a movie called The, this one, the man who lasts with Long Change. And he's gone. So this is Jack Pierce's makeup. If you look close, that's the joke. So he created this makeup on his own and the creators of the joke are eventually, I mean, because of that, this is Bob King, stole from Hollywood. That's the joke there. But that is the first makeup that he did full on for Universal. And that made his career. At that point in time, it was like, Universal was on him. Parliamentary Junior, Parliamentary Grand Universal, Parliamentary Junior was his son. First 21st birthday, Parliamentary gave Universal to his son. His son said, I'm hiring Jack Pierce as our head of makeup. So from that point on, with Parliamentary Junior, Jack Pierce was Universal's makeup artist. And that gets you to drag him up. So, fellow nosy was playing Jack up on stage in New York as a play. And they decided to make a movie out of it. And they hired fellow nosy because he was the best actor. Because the actor who played the last film, Universal had a history of, whenever they had a great actor playing a character, they would keep that actor on phone all the time. So it was Tom Reddit who played the man who last. And he was cast to be Dracula. And he ended up not being able to do it because it's a talk, it's the first talk that now allows us to sign it. And Tom Reddit was German. And he actually played the assistant analyst in the counter-production Call of Duty before he played the man who last. But he had a really thick German accent. So the talkies, he couldn't do it. But then hired fellow nosy who has a giant accent as well to play Dracula. When the nosy got hired to do it, he hoped he was already doing his own makeup on Hollywood, in the plays on Broadway. So he demanded that he got to do his own makeup. So Pierce actually designed the makeup for his brides and for everybody else on the cast because that's what he was doing. But he also developed a green grease paint for the nosy to be able to pick more pale for Dracula. So he definitely had a hand in that makeup for Dracula. The little nosy was offered the role for Frankenstein. And he turned it down. He was offered the role, actually, would be the scientist that they said his accent was too 15 scientist. So that he was offered the monster and he turned it down. And this brings Boris Karloff into Universal. Boris Karloff and Jack Pierce Karloff famously. They're both barbers. They both love to grow flowers. They hit it off like no other and they have lifelong relationships from this movie. But this movie puts, besides the monkey tops, this puts him far beyond anybody who's ever done makeup on the screen. Pierce designs Frankenstein's makeup. There was lots of talk of the director, Jay's way out, Ashley designed the makeup. But everything I ever, everything I read up until the 1960s, everybody gave credit to Pierce until that point when God's Amongst was written and God's Amongst was made and all of a sudden it can all track and they said that Pierce designed it. Pierce designed that makeup. That's his makeup. He also got a really bad rap. Pierce, if you ever, since nobody knows who he is, you don't know what I'm talking about. But Pierce gets a bad rap because he eventually got let go from Universal. But he didn't look him for 20 years and the bad raps came from some individuals I got later on. But he did more make-ups, older costumers were too. And that's Karloff again, which he was a great friend with and eventually did this makeup for the month, which is the only one award while he's alive and that was for the makeup for the month. And if you've seen it on which I'm sure you have, that makeup appears for a very short period of time for just a glimpse. And it was only one day of work for Pierce to do that. Karloff shows up as the living mummy later on in the movie that's what you see him for most of the time. That was a pretty basic makeup. But that was the makeup that Pierce won. And he's the only award living with. And which is what you should do when you research that and look at it, there was the newspaper articles and different pictures of Pierce getting his award with Karloff. There was a woman that had a brooch on her shirt next to Pierce. And I was like, is that his wife? Because I know he's married. I knew his wife was there. And I had pictures from a Halloween party with Pierce for the same woman with the brooch. So I figured out that was one of Pierce's wife. And the only way, probably the only person that ever put the tune to it was like, okay, I have a picture of one of his wife. That's kind of cool. Well, from the person that's like, yes. I got a little bit more of a history from Jack Pierce. So there's another misconception that Lugosi was angry with Pierce and with Karloff not taking the role of Frank Stein. The truth is, Karloff was a work of universal. He did great other roles. It's the same year that Karloff was doing a film and Pierce did his makeup as well. So there's no truth in that or that. That Lugosi was cast aside or any other thing. I think that his drug addiction could actually eventually affect his career. But it wasn't anything to do with universal. It was his own doing and he had that in the makeup. In fact, we did a film called White Zombie, which it's now public domain. It's one of the greater public domain comes out there. But he didn't make up for that as well, Pierce did. And it was an independent film. So Pierce did freelance. And another thing, when you do what I do, there's a lot of people out there that are historically passionate about universal and all that stuff. And in Jack Pierce's scrapbook, there were photographs of makeups for other studios. And I actually included them in the documentary when I first made it. And then I had several different people that I showed it to her. This one's going, oh, you're totally wrong. No, no, no. He didn't do that. He didn't do that on her. It's in his scrapbook. Well, we don't know what's in the scrapbook we can do. It's like, he did feelings. He worked outside of the studio. He wasn't bashed in. He probably didn't even have a contract with Universal. It was probably a handshake contract. Because it universally had a contract in the files on Pierce. But anyways, he worked very hard and did independent film, which is pretty amazing as well, because most people, if you run into a Universal eat your crack, no, you only did this. He worked outside of Universal. In fact, that's what saved Universal. Universal had been on the ropes multiple times the horror films that Jack Pierce helped create the iconic makeups for. He did that, worked with them, and that saved the studio multiple times. Also, Manchester, Brom, by Frank Stein, another super iconic makeup that Jack Pierce created. This is Henry Hall from the The Bear Wolf of London. This is what's going to come later when he does the makeup for the long chain junior for The Wolfman. Another risk succession is that Henry Hall demanded that he could see his face in the makeup. But actually, because the original makeup was a full wolf makeup. And Henry Hall pointed out that in the script, people can recognize that in the movie, you can recognize that it's this scientist who's the werewolf. So that's why Pierce stripped of them. I should prefer this makeup to The Wolfman makeup, but if you can see that, Pierce did all the heroes of the work. So he did all the work on the makeup as well. He worked for the Universal for 20 years on all the films he's had in America. So he actually, in researching, he actually, in papers, the newspapers would do an interview with him if he would give women makeup tips. He's like, stay out of the sun. You know, don't put on too much blush. Don't put on too much rubies. You don't want to look like, you didn't say harsh, but you didn't want to look too bad. He looked just accentuate. So he did so much more than just the horror makeup that everybody knows them for the horror makeup. And then you go back to his secondary passion. At Universal, he managed Universal's basketball team. So besides doing all that makeup, he was also managing, since Larry Seaman, he'd been a manager for sports and he did Universal and made one national championship, which was pretty amazing for his time and he was the manager and his team got invited to the Olympics. And it was the first Olympics to have basketball, the very first Olympic basketball game ever. Pierce's team was invited to be there. He had to step down because it happened to be Hitler's Olympics. And Carl Amell, senior engineer, still ran Universal at the time. And Carl Amell said, hey, he didn't say, he was actually using his own money to pull Jews out of Germany, actively because he saw what was coming. And he said, anybody who goes to support this Olympics will not work in Universal ever again. So seven of the team's basketball players did go to the Olympics and they won gold. So Jack Pierce's manager team won the first gold medal in Olympic history in basketball, but he had a distance somewhere from it because of the political situation that was happening at the time. Which is, to me, I think he probably would be more well-known for this than even his makeup, you know, just his sports are so much more popular in general. Anyway, so that's the things you discover about people when you start looking, you know, just scratching the surface and certainly when you look at it, it's like, wow. This guy was way more than just the maker of Frankenstein. And he did go on and do, we brought his mummy, did a son of Frankenstein. It was pretty much a golden age of the war industry because of in 1938, there was another feature played in Los Angeles of Dracula and Frankenstein. It was, back then they didn't really do rewind movies. So it was the first time somebody did that and it was huge. They broke Los Angeles records. He knew who Frankenstein and Dracula were and they were willing to throw money at that. So it was one of the actual first franchise films. Frankenstein is actually one of the very first characters that can be reprised, reprised, reprised and the universal hat on the first thing. So like today, we can see remakes, remakes, remakes, very serious movies. This is early on, it didn't happen. This was happening to be one of the things. So he's also the grandfather of making a character that can be reduced over and over again. And let's say you're universal again. We get to the Wolfgang. And the Wolfgang's probably his last iconic make up that he did but it's like what he's done, this is a fifth one that's like burned in all of our memories from being, watching horror films. So the, and Launcey and Junior. Launcey and Junior, I got a copy of a tape from Johnny Carson of Launcey and Junior on Johnny Carson. And the video doesn't exist anymore, it's just not your tape. And he talks massive shit about Jack Pierce. That Jack Pierce tied him down to a chair and nailed his hands to boards and all this crap. And Elsa Lanchester is the other one if you get in her biography, I read her biography and she's talk shit about him too. She's like, he's horrible, he came in and he just demanded, you know, I sit there and he never kept a smile and now he can pay 20 cents to do the make up he did on me and he demanded all this. So he got a bad rap from people that I think were kind of pricks. I think Launcey and Junior was kind of a prick and I think Elsa Lanchester was kind of a prick. Because Pierce, again, he don't work at the Universal for 20 years, he and I did. You're not gonna make it. And his, his, uh, the scrapbook has massive, just page after page of autographs to him from different artists. And he had a long-term relationship with Carlisle, which even, like in The Dark Mirror, he did a, uh, a movie now where you're now saying with Carlisle and they're both totally jovial about it, you know, 20 years after that. So I think that Pierce was an incredibly professional and Pierce came in in 1910s, 1913, Los Angeles. So the birth of movie making in Los Angeles and Burch's way up to being head of make up Universal. So I don't think he really appreciated Prima Banas walking into the studio and treating him differently than he was used to you. So I think that he gets a bad rap because some movie stars have larger voices and talk more than you think he was. He continued doing make up with Universal. He got to do The Phantom, which I'm sure he thought, when they made the first pound of the opera at Universal, it could have charred everybody in Hollywood. It was thousands of people working that film. So I think that if he ever had an opportunity to talk with Juan Cheney, that was probably it, because he was a make up artist, but he actually got to redo The Phantom of Claude Reigns. And it's interesting that his make up originally for Claude Reigns was way more graphic than this. There's no photograph that exists, it's just written. There's numbers that said that we have to tone it down because of all the tunes that's going on. And people from back in the world were very start, so they decided not to let him get away with making some of the really horrible start because people were actually coming home and got it off. Again, it became a situation in Universal where it was more as better. So every single monster in a movie, and Pierce is doing hand-done make up on all these people all the time, so it must have been very taxing at a certain point that the movie down there is probably a rubber make up mask. He, Pierce always put him in these rubber appliances, but there's definitely proof that he had used, at some points, rubber make up. But at this time as well, he's let go from Universal. And Bud Westmore takes his place. And Bud Westmore is super pro rubber make up, super pro doing things quickly and fast and down very, which is fine. And what you'll hear if you know any about Pierce, people say, oh, you got very busy as Dick. Besides Dick, there was a guy who was probably going to work faster and cheaper, who got hired and he was replaced. I don't think there's any more than that. But Pierce did go on to do more work after that. And Joan of Arc is one of my favorite films he did after that. And only because doing the research, I found pictures of Pamela with Margaret Merman, who was Joan of Arc in that film. And it was so fucking happy. Both of you just have smiles that are going past your head. And she's looking through this scrapbook, and there's pictures of a Halloween party where she's dressed as a witch, and talking about making the team again. And he's in the background, like, hey, you know, so I don't think he was sad. I think he was, he was like, go to the university, yeah, he worked for the 20 years, but he seemed very, very happy in his role after he ended up doing lots of B-movies. This is the thing I was talking about earlier about on TV where he's with Power Walk, which is in the documentary where we talk about it. So he's doing B-movies in a TV that's true. And again, to show that he's a really good guy, he was working at a university, there was a guy named Arthur Boothman, who was a director, who did mostly art and cellophones. When he heard that Pearson worked, he hired Jack Pierce to be the mega-barber on this stage show. So at the end of his career, Jack Pierce was the head of makeup for his dread. So he did iconic makeup that all of us remember. And again, as a kid, learning that one guy did it in natural research, he started to feel like he kind of knew a person who started researching far enough. And I kind of know more about Pierce than I did before. And it's sad that nobody knows who he is, but at the same time, that's just how history goes. It just runs that way. But I mean, he did iconic makeup, he managed the first role in basketball team, and he had no heirs, he has no children. And he's buried right next to his wife in the Los Angeles cemetery. And 24 people served at this funeral when he died. And I have, in the documentary we have the last review of Boris Karloff, it's actually the same year that Pierce died and it's on the set of Western. And Karloff is talking about Pierce as a first person, but I think he was already dead at that point. So he just hadn't known, there's been a social media, Karloff's in Northern California and Pierce died in Southern California. So there was no communication between he had no idea that he'd already come on. And I always say, you know, Justin Bieber died today, there were plenty of people at it, but Ray Garry wasn't died recently, he was the guy who did all the stop motion for most of the 70s films, and there were a lot of scary people at the funeral as well. It's just part of, you know, he did great stuff, but out of sight, out of mind, it's gone. But fortunately, Rick Baker, Dick Smith, Greg McChara, Tom Zagini, they all go right back to Pierce. If you talk to them, if you ask any of these guys, who's your inspiration? Jack Pierce. So it's, he's here. I mean, Jack Pierce is here, and there's that app. I think the mummy, who did the Universal, they interviewed a bunch of people that was a part of Jack Pierce. And one of the guys said to one of the people they never knew, he didn't have kids, but every Halloween, when kids come to your door and shut the tree, you're gonna see flames there, you're gonna see the wolf man, you're gonna see the mummy, you're gonna see Dracula. So his kids are all over the place, they're always here, they come and visit you every year. So Pierce has a huge legacy. And Leo, I mean, if you're a horror fan, if you're a Halloween, Leo Pierce tons. That's Jack Pierce. Thank you, thank you very much. A question, okay, so the question is, what do I think about the new, the new idea of the Universal Mahore music? Okay, I actually don't have an issue at all with remaking anything, but I read, I was listening to a podcast recently about it from a director and he said, the only reason they do those kind of things like they remake, I understand, remake this or remake that is because it has a intrinsic value immediately. An audience, you have a percentage of people that will automatically come in. So like, he will get it when they redo the evil bed. I'm gonna go see it, but I love the original one. Ash received it there, and I was like, hey, that's way better than they did previously. So when they remake it, yeah, I'll go see it, but it's just because they're doing it because there's an insult on it. It's like, why not make a different movie? You know, it's not supposed to be a recap of past stuff, make something new. So I'll go see it, but I think it's kind of, it is what it is, it's meant to solve things. I have a question. I was wondering, how we saw one color, did he do only black and white makeup, and was there a switch like similar to like from the silent drill, the hockey, from color, or from black and white to the color makeup, does that make sense? Okay, so the question is that basically he only saw black and white, the photographs, and only one color. And it was a transition, the same as hockey, the silent's hockey as black and white's color. He worked, like I said, from 1913, basically the earliest picture I have on him, all the way up until he was let go from Universal, and the only color when he did for Universal was the family. But actually I did a few independence that were colored, but I think the transition from color, from black and white to color was far easier than the transition from silent to talkies, because one, the equipment in the studio was in theaters that had been changed. For makeup, I think yeah, I think it was a massive change, because he developed lots of different colors that worked really good on black and white, because on black and white film, particularly on a photo frame, or whatever they were using, he used to cut films, like I was doing my own research, there was a couple of things where he said, an interviewer would be on the set, and say, oh, I just saw the actor, and he's painted bright red, and piercing the eye, yes, because that could drop gray, and he was working on the camera, putting it on as well, he was more than, he was an actor, he was a director, he was an editor, he knew his ins and outs, that's why I would say that people that talk shit about don't know what they're talking about, because they're talking to a very good professional. So yeah, there was a change, and yeah, it was probably pretty dramatic going into color film, so. Any other things except for the paint? They're in the documentary, the only color film I have, I have paint on the set, I got actually from Sarah Karloff, which is Boris Karloff's daughter, I got at home movies, and there's a scene with Jack Pierce and Boris Karloff, joked around in color on the set, and Karloff's makeup is like a green, so that looks gray on the black mark film, but that's the only color film that existed, so yeah, it was another technique that Pierce used for black mark film that was meant for that. Cool, thank you. My wife's back there, we have a table, if you want the last members to come in, we have the next member. Okay, so we're gonna take the time to break, you're free to get this to me, you're free to ask Shephens some questions at his table. Lou DeWilman butters at Oakland Public Library, also back there, see you in 10 minutes. Obviously. And I'm just gonna stop. So as scientists, or art scientists, do you want to come up? Come on up. This is the devil's workshop. And zombies, you know, do the thing, and the zombie caterpillars, the zombie spiders, the zombie whatever the fuck that is. It's real. Well, there's a lot of information out there that's mostly false about whether or not zombies are real. You can find a couple of zombies, zombie big pedias, zombie inside the pedias, zombie strategy sites, zombie survival guide, awesome to fun read, but it's not real. The fact that the toxin in the puffer fish is often used in various places like D.D. To have seen like a lot of zombies in D.D. by old old four who come in and instantly they have a zombie under their control, right? Cool, yeah. And so this, the federal vampire and zombie agency, it's less I have this exact same layout on color scheme for like 10 years, so if you couldn't believe this was real, it's not, but you might believe that. It's not real. And in my zombie research stone library, so I do research and I found out about zombies for two things and one was that zombies were used as a tool of oppression. And I hate slides with a lot of text, but I could not have said this any better than she did, which is why I put this here. So suicide is a slave's only way to take a goal or his or her own body. And yet the fear of becoming a zombie might stop them from doing so. This final rest and agree and leave the head of the Africa, you know, sugar painted cut, master to appease or serve is unavailable to the zombie. To become a zombie was the slave's worst nightmare to be a dead and still a slave in the maternal veil hand. And so zombieism was used and appropriated by slave masters as a way to control the people that they were enslaving. That's a very real documented thing. And to me, that was fascinating. That's kind of a new take on zombies. The other piece of zombies that I found fascinating was kind of as appropriation. So white appropriation of a black trope, and we've very much done that. If you look at zombie movies, zombie films, going way back to the very beginning, the white zombie was actually about a white zombie. It was like the first time a white person was portrayed as a zombie. I think that this is another piece that we need to think about, is whether or not zombieism is something that has been appropriated culturally and isn't super comfortable. And I like The Walking Dead. I have no problem with The Walking Dead, but it does represent a larger cultural appropriation. And I think, as I think about zombies, those two sociocultural issues are much more interesting than that are zombies real or not. But to talk to us more about zombies, we have Joe Chen, and he's gonna talk to us about how zombies and real science, like real, for real science exists behind zombies today, and what's being done. So welcome Joe Chen. All right, thanks so much. First, I would like to thank Rick for inviting me to be this year's Halloween speaker. I think this is a great venue, so thanks so much everyone for coming. So just a little bit about myself. So I'm a scientist. My career has focused mainly on, so as I was saying, my career has focused mainly on molecular biology, as well as women's translational topics. You know, very important. And yeah, whoa, come on. And then, so my training is, I got my PhD at Rutgers, East Coast, and I did my post-doc work at UCSF. I did some NIH support award at the Clarkson Institute. It's a great, great institution. And now I'm a scientist. I see myself here, over here in Berkeley. In addition to all those accolades, I'm also a zombie expert, and I have the honor of speaking at Merlin 9SF back in 2013. So thanks to Bart Bernhardt, he does a great job there at Merlin 9SF. And I was also invited to be at the Cal Academy of Sciences. So if you guys have me check that out, to show it, does a really great job. So before I get started, because this is a read-doc's talk, I just wanted to give you guys a quick update. In 2013, I hypothesized that in the next 10 years, scientists and doctors would attempt to put themselves, and I'll explain a little bit about what themselves are, into the brains of the recently deceased in an effort to reanimate them. And a lot of people came up to me and said, Joe, that's fucking crazy. That's never going to happen. Now as of today, a US-based company called BioCorp in collaboration with the company in India called Reveal Life Sciences have gone government and legal approval to take embryonic stem cells, put them into the brains of the recently deceased in an effort to try to reanimate them. The project is actually called Project Reanimate. That doesn't sound scary or anything, right? And there's actually a clinical trial to do this. And that has sparked years from the public, years from the scientific community about the zombie apocalypse. So this is going to happen. So before we get too freaked out, let's start at the beginning. Okay, so how do we get here? Well, we as a culture love the whole zombie mythology. From the original Night of the Living Dead, which kind of found me into the genre, the comic books turned into hit TV shows, books turned into movies, and even some stories like 28 Days Later that have a cheap cult status. You know, in general, we just, we love the mythology and we love to be scared by zombies. Okay, but we'll share this side. We're probably saying, you know, Joe, how do we really get to this point? I think the answer is that, you know, that is scary, it's permanent, and it's sad, you know? Just close your eyes and imagine for just one second that you're loved one, whether it be your child, your spouse, your dear friend, and they just died. Now, wouldn't you do everything in your power to try to bring them back? Now, even if they smell a little bit funny, you look a little bit funny, and sort of crave your flesh, it wouldn't matter. I mean, I think about my beloved wife, you know? God forbid if I lost her, I would do everything in my power. That's right honey, everything in my power. We're trying to bring you back, and we chain you up in the basement, and every now and then when a girl scout came around, I could see you, you know? And of course, this is the great David Morrissey, who plays the governor on The Walking Dead. You know, I'm a real big geek, so I met him at this Walking Dead convention, and we spent like 30 minutes talking about how he would chain up his child and pull out her teeth. I was like, you know, this is just a character, right? David, he's like, no, no, no, I would do this. I love my children, you know? So before we start on what would happen, I just want to quickly talk about the improbable scenario, which is the reanimation of dead necrotic tissue, the idea that a corpse could climb out of the ground, put these on your flesh. This, I just don't think could happen. One of the reasons is because, well, you take like a rotting, angriest life like this, okay? This leg will never work again. You know, this is tissue that's rotting, cells are dying, spilling the toxic components into the extracellular environment. And the reason that reanimated corpse couldn't happen is because we don't have to look at the details. This is just a book from like a first-year med school physiology book. There's a whole ton of electrical, physiological, and molecular things that has to happen for a normal muscle function. So the idea that corpses could walk, this couldn't happen. So I'm just getting that disclaimer out of the way. So this is a probable zombie apocalypse circus on the show, okay? So let's see how this can happen. So one of the hypothesis is that stem cell technology is what's going to cause the zombie apocalypse. So first I'm going to talk about embryonic stem cells. What are embryonic stem cells? Well, these are the cells that you get when you have a sperm from a guy's greenweed and if that's the one with an egg from a girl's pooha, then you have this mass of cells that we call embryonic stem cells. These cells will eventually become a baby. But until then, these cells have incredible healing and regenerative potential. We take these cells and they can essentially differentiate into all sorts of tissues. Cardiac tissues, nervous system tissues, neuronal tissues. And it's really easy to make embryonic stem cells. All you need, and I made these, all we need is like an intracetoplasmic sperm injector of ELO site, a very high-tech microscope in the self-contained culture system. And by OLA, we can make embryonic stem cells. I actually have an entire refrigerator of embryos after the eventually being baby's. So this is the power of embryonic stem cells. If you look at the screen over here, we have a paralyzed rat on the waist now. Now, I know you guys are probably thinking to yourself, how do you make paralyzed rats? Well, it's really easy. You just sort of hold the rat, throw it against the wall, and then like one out of every 10 times, you get a really good paralyzed rat. Oh! And now you look at the rat on the right. Now this rat on the right is the same rat that's been given an objection of rat embryonic stem cells. And you know, why does the funny looking confidence ask? It's kind of back to normal when you're walking, right? So this is how embryonic stem cells work in rats. So you may be asking yourself, well, how does it work in humans? To help us explain is a late, great Christopher Reed. See, the stem cells from a fetus like this one can form into whatever cells in the body are damaged. They are the most powerful thing on the planet. And now does someone like yourself make use of the stem cells, Chris? Well, it's very simple. So the way human embryonic stem cells work is that you, like Donald Trump said, you have to rip the unborn fetus from a human at the old moment. And you have to break it open and then suck up its delicious, healing juices. And in that way, you can revitalize yourself. Now, this is not our fetch. If you take a look at this paper which is available at PubMed, we've already started this tech report in Russia of all places. So the design is thus, they took a bunch of people that recently deceased. You can find plenty of those in Russia. And what they did is, they took some aborted fetuses and they ground it up into a fine paste. And then they injected this paste into the patients. And I think one out of every 50 times, they were able to successfully re-animate the recently deceased. Now, the problem is that they didn't really come back 100% there. They suffered what they call psycho-defects in their psycho-emotional sphere. I've been a scientist for a long time. No, I never thought that means, okay? So they tried to do it again. And yet the sub-drugs were made, you know, neurological defective, which limited their functional abilities. They essentially became a walking dead. So you guys may realize that there's an issue of morality and religion. Not everyone is going to be okay with ripping out an unborn fetus and sucking out its healing powerful regenerative juices. So the other strategy is to use a type of stem cell called induced pluripotent stem cells. And this is how these iPS cells work. You take a normal cell, like a spin cell, and after some Charlie Brown magic hands, you now have cells with stem-like qualities. And these cells have a property that we call protein potency. They have the ability to turn into any kind of differentiated tissue, like heart tissue. Like what I talked about before. Interestingly, back in 2008, nine or 10, Shinya Yamanata at UCSF won the Nobel Prize for this. And even more interesting is, and I welcome everyone to go to be able to look at this story. In addition to Shinya Yamanata that I'm sure everybody knows for winning the Nobel Prize, who is another scientist, Jamie Thompson, who I had the honor of watching speak. Just an amazing guy. And a lot of people felt that he was raw at the Nobel Prize because his work, which laid the foundation for Yamanata, was winning and browning stem cells. And so the Nobel Committee felt a little crazy about giving him the award. So I really encourage you guys to look at this story. It's a really compelling story. You don't have to be an expert in stem cells to understand it was a really interesting race between Thompson and Yamanata for the Nobel Prize. So okay, the stem seed bag with IPS cells equals zombie apocalypse. And in the world I'm talking about, families are not in aquatic slow walkers. They're fast and they're scary and they're angry. So you're probably thinking, why? How? What? Like we're talking about the zombie apocalypse. This is like a Halloween event. How would IPS cells lead to this? Well, you know, there's something that's, I talked about how powerful the fear of death is at motivating us to do certain things. Well, there's something that's just as sad as death, which is the disease of aging. And the diseases that are associated with aging. Two of the most prominent diseases are, Alzheimer's disease, as well as Parkinson's disease. So these two diseases are sort of the things that really have less, you know, zinc in them. So I'm going to talk a little bit about my experience as an Alzheimer's disease researcher. This is something that I'm very passionate about because Alzheimer's disease affects a lot of people because aging is going to affect a lot of people. So as you can look on this figure, you have a normal brain with bioelectric activity. And when there's cognitive impairment, you will see this dark spot. And these dark spots are essentially where a tissue necrosis has occurred. And that's really what happens with Alzheimer's disease. One of the hypothesis for why this necrosis happens is that there's this group that builds up in your brain called beta amyloid collapse. Just think of it as this complete thing that forms in your brain and eventually kills your brain cells. And one of the main areas that this group builds up in is the hippocampus. And now we're going to talk a little bit about the role and the function of the hippocampus figure on. And when I first started out my career, one of the projects I was on was we were trying to create a transgenic mass. And a transgenic mass is essentially you can genetically manipulate mice so that they express a disease similar to the disease that we're trying to cure. So the strategy is to create these mice that also have these amyloid collapse in their hippocampus. And then once we develop it, we can use these mice as guinea pig for all sorts of cool treatments that can remove the parts. So how do we make Alzheimer's mice? Well, we take a mouse and you see this is a very clean section, cross-section of the mouse hippocampus. After some Charlie Brown magic hands, you have the hippocampus that has these brown spots are essentially the beta amyloid collapse. And again, in the pursuit of great science, one of the things we do is, well, let's just inject random stuff into their brains. And what's the worst that could happen? And some of the things we try are drugs, stem cells, as well as IPS cells. So this next video is kind of boring and graphic, so just to kind of give you guys a little bit of a heads up. So what some of my colleagues told me is that, well, you know, Joe, we've noticed that injecting stuff into mice hippocampus, particularly IPS cells, creates interesting behaviors. So this behavior I'm gonna show you in this movie clip, we call this the mirror side. So if you keep a rat and a mouse in the same cage, for some reason the rat does not recognize the mouse as a cuter subspecies of itself. The rat becomes enraged and just feels the compulsion to rip the head off the mouse. So here's the video of that. So if we see here's a rat, it's not happy that the mouse is there, and it reacts appropriately, or girthing that head off the mouse. So what a lot of my colleagues have noticed is that when you try to inject IPS cells into the mice, these mice experience a lot of side effects, including mirror side aggression, loss of learned behavior, and loss of species recognition. Have you guys seen enough, have you gone? So I don't wanna offend any neurobiologists out there because I understand that it's one big, complex, like, chemistry, but in short, your hippocampus regulates in association with your cerebral cortex and your midbrain, it regulates what we call inhibitory behavior or membrane associated responses. So all of you understand that there's a series of behaviors that are acceptable, and there's a series of behaviors that are not acceptable. And you know this because of your memory, because of your experience, because someone has taught you at a young age what's appropriate and what's not appropriate. So to kind of drive this message home, I wanna have a interactive exercise with you guys, okay? I'm gonna show you images of a series of inappropriate behaviors. I want you guys to raise your hand up high if you've never fantasized about it, okay? You don't have to have actually participated in these behaviors, but just the idea that you fantasized, you thought about it, okay? So, can you guys be honest? Okay. We'll start easy. How many of you have fantasized about stealing? Come on, be honest, okay? How many of you guys have fantasized about telling your boss to go fuck themselves? Okay. How many of you guys have either fantasized about strangling or being strangled by your lover during sex? Well, thank you. Okay, you guys are kicking me when you're cool. When you guys are standing on a train platform and someone's standing a little too close to the edge, who do you have just at least 30 feet out about what it would be like to push them into the way that they're having trains? Okay, I don't know if that's good. How many of you guys have fantasized about roofing someone you know and then fucking their unconscious body? Okay, okay, fine, you guys are honest, right? And then, how many of you guys have at least contemplated what human flesh tastes like? Okay, great. Now, of course, you guys know cannibalism, stealing, murder, rape. These are inappropriate activities, right? They're inappropriate behaviors with consequences, right? And your hippocampus plays a major role in that. So you're saying, okay, Joe, like you're telling these 30 jokes of, oh, oh, oh, oh, so what? Well, so this, currently, the massive experiments are underway to lay the foundation for projecting IPS cells into humans in the possibly 10 years. This is an old slide from 2013. Actually, I think we're not at the five-year mark. And for IPS treatment involving Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, regulations or comedians is never before observed. In fact, I think that these news that they're planning to reduce all limitations from based on basic science all the way to clinical trials with treatment involving Alzheimer's disease. Remember that in Russia, they're already grinding dead baby into pigs to inject into dead individuals. There's also reports of IPS problems servicing from multiple labs. Hopkins have published lots of papers indicating that IPS cells and embryonic stem cells are not the same. The famous UC San Diego Stem Cell Center have reported that therapies that are using IPS cells are encountering immune rejection problems. It's actually a new speech on the science indicating that, hey, listen, there's a lot of dangers working with IPS cells, so we need to back the fuck up and slow it down. And the famous Lanzelac have also reported that, you know, when you inject IPS cells into animals or patients, they don't behave the same and some of them die immediately after the injection. And so what we're really talking about is to look around, look around at people sitting next to you. Every single person has the potential to be a murderer, a killer, a rapist, someone who would drown their babies and then go clubbing right afterwards. And so if we inject the IPS cells as treatment, we could have a major social energy. Okay, so some of you are saying, okay, so what if we have a few violence armies? That's what pills are for, right? We just put them down hard and we put them down fast. There's a small problem with that. This is how we make IPS cells. You take these four genes that are involved in stem-ness, KLA for OctoGrid or Sox2 and C-Mate, some of you may be familiar with these genes. When you package these genes and what we call, let's just say a transfer vehicle, okay? And then you use this transfer vehicle to bring these genes into a skin cell. And this skin cell now becomes the IPS cells that are just engorged with these transfer vehicles. Good question for you guys. What do you think this transfer vehicle is? A virus. Yeah, it's a virus. And so what a lot of scientists are concerned about is that if you use IPS cells, not only will you have the potential to create zombies, but these zombies may have an inheritable infectious disease. And those reports are already servicing animal studies that when they use IPS cells to try to treat certain animals, that these animals develop infectious diseases. So here's a preview about to come. This is also kind of violent in graphics, so just, I'm gonna pick a story for you. Let's say you're just one day snugly with your husband in bed, and all of a sudden you notice the neighbor. Oh, sorry. All of a sudden you notice a neighbor that has water in her mouth, and she's walked off. So your husband runs to the little neighbor girl, and she throws the shit out of her. Now you can say it's a little gross, but you're gross and you're all over it. But now your husband's bleeding to death. And you're calling 911, but it's a zombie apocalypse. So now all of a sudden you're responding. Your husband's bleeding to death. And now your husband's dead. So your husband is now also infected, and he has become the walking dead. Who's bleeding? He's calling you for your life. Don't kill your husband. And because of stem cell research, you're now stuck in your bathroom, and it doesn't mean that you need to be outside. So you guys are probably asking, well, what can we do, right? Because obviously, death, dying, neurodegenerative diseases, it's a really horrible thing. My wife and I, we actually volunteer at geriatric hospitals, and there's nothing that takes away your dignity more than Alzheimer's disease. So I, you know, verbally believe that we need to continue with the research. So one thing we could do is to don't stem cells. Okay, so what are the don't stem cells? So the don't stem cells are cells in your body that doesn't come from dead babies and it doesn't come from viruses. You have certain organs in your body that has incredible regenerative potential. And you know what, let me ask you guys, what do you think are some of those organs in your body that has incredible regenerative potential? Anyway, excellent, what else? Deep. Deep, deep, really? I'm not a dentist, I don't think so. Skin, hair, okay? So one organ that I have a lot of expertise on is the endometrium, which is the inner lining of the uterus in the adult woman. Now this lining is where embryos are attached to during pregnancy, and in the absence of pregnancy, this inner lining is shed and renewed as part of the monthly menstrual cycle. So part of the work that I was involved in is isolating these stem cells that participate in the regeneration monthly, and we made incredible strides at UCSF. We can pick these C-146-P-G-R-B-S stem cells and differentiate them into both stem cells as well as fat cells, and this is incredible because as you can imagine, for skin cells, we can use that to treat burn victims, and for fat cells, we can use that to, I don't know, make like really good tits, you know? But like, you know, the health care implications is amazing. One other place is the ball tissue of a man, okay? Now as you know, the ball tissue also has incredible regenerative potential because ball tissues make sperm, and we make julians of sperm, you know? Just julians and julians, that's just all over bathroom walls and pillow covers, you know, hotel desks. And so one of the strategies from one of my colleagues at the Productive Science Center at UCSF is that, for example, there was a young boy or a young man, God forbid, has cancer and needs to undergo chemotherapy. Unfortunately, one of the side effects in men is that the chemotherapy essentially kills your ball tissue and you won't be able to make any new sperm. But with this new technique, you can just sample a little bit of that tissue, cryopreserve it, and when this young boy becomes a man and he wants to have children, we can then revive that tissue and differentiate that into sperm. It's actually a really incredible technology. The group that I was at at UCSF also did some incredible work, indicating that not only are adults themselves useful, but it can also unlock the secrets to disease. So there's a disease in women that's really painful. I love you for it, but it's called endometriosis. It's actually quite a horrible disease. Essentially, your endometrium becomes inflamed and it begins to migrate all over your stomach cavity. It causes depression, pain, and fertility. And for the longest time, the only way to sort of resolve this pain is to have a hysterectomy. And I actually know a girl that got a hysterectomy at 18 years old because the pain was so bad. Well, in this breakthrough paper that we published, which was featured in biology and reproduction and then later on featured in the news, was that we found that the cause for endometriosis is due to some defect in the stem cell to participate in the regeneration. And now there's actually new studies that's going to try to replace these stem cells to cure endometriosis. And so the final option is therapeutic learning. Raise your hand if you've heard about therapeutic learning. Okay, good, so I will explain therapeutic learning. So therapeutic learning or somatic cell and nuclear transfer now. Again, going back to morality and religion, the main issue that religious people have with embryonic stem cells and creating them is that, well, only God should take a sperm in combination with a egg. This is a sacred act and we are going to help if we try to do this in culture. So a way to get around this is using this technology. If you take a somatic cell, which is essentially just like any adult cell, let's just say skin cell, a skin fiber cell. You can isolate that nucleus. The nucleus is where all the DNA and information is. Then you convince one of your female friends to donate an egg, and then you can remove the nucleus of the egg as well. Now you combine the nucleus of the skin cell with the outer stuff of the egg. Sorry, I forgot the technical term list. And then you have this sort of a hybrid fusion that can eventually become an embryonic mass. And we know this is possible from belly to sheath, bob to dog, math to mantis. We know that this is possible. And theoretically, this mass of embryonic cells could go on to become a baby. So we haven't obviously thought about that because of the other moral implications, which is that you could use this technology essentially to clone people and, I don't know, you guys think cloneing people's a good idea? Yeah, I don't think so. But what if your wife is dying? Would you want to clone her? I don't think so. I don't think so. It's okay, maybe not. And then something that other people have talked about is that you can use this technology to create new cool species like lion or something. I mean, no one has a problem with that, right? No. Okay, so to sort of conclude, the road to pokey pokey pokey sea is a complex road, definitely. It's not easy and, you know, I pulled a lot of inappropriate jokes tonight, but at the end of the day, the scientists that have dedicated their lives to either embryonic, IPS, adult, or cloneing, I mean, everyone has the best attention. We have the embryonic stem cells, which work really, really well, but who wants to suck it, baby juices, right? We have IPS cells, which will lead to the zombie apocalypse, and frankly, it just doesn't work, no offense. We have the bone stem cells, which work really well, and it's actually progressing to curing a lot of painful, horrible diseases, but we're probably still about 20 years away from making this effective. And we have cloning, which concludes most of the problems. And so this is definitely not an easy issue, but it's definitely an issue that's gonna make significant progress within the next five years. I just hope that the choice that we make as a society does not lead to the zombie apocalypse. And with that, I'll take any questions. Just a quick hint. So I dressed up as this clown for Halloween at UCSF, and that was the only time that I got called into human resources. We told him that, I can't do this, I don't know. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Yes, sir. As a non-American, I think that it's very fascinating that Americans have this fascination with zombies. They don't think it happens in any other country. At least they don't have a problem that I've gone to a level of being a non-American. If there's this fascination, we need to arrest them. Do you have any to reply to that? Thank you. Oh, so the question that that gentleman asked is that, why are Americans so fascinated with zombies? Because, I'm sorry, sir, where are you from? So maybe in South America, like they're not that fascinated with zombies. And I guess my answer to that is that, maybe not specifically in zombies itself, but really ask yourself this deep question. If somebody that you really loved died and there was a small chance you could bring here or shoot back to life with some minor problems, wouldn't you want to do it? Or if I have some of the problems that zombies have. Yeah, sure, sure. So, I mean, I don't think it's just, I don't want to deconstruct it into just zombies. I do think the issue is we, as people, have a hard time dealing with that. We form powerful bonds. I mean, I love my wife. I wouldn't know what I would do without her. So, perhaps you guys feel differently. I would bring her back no matter what. I love you, honey. I love you. I love you too. I'll take one more. Yes, she did get under the back room, yeah. That movie is from Gone to the Dead, the new one, so I highly recommend it. One last question. Yes, sir. This is a very hard question. Do you bat or make a mouse that will happen in the direction of the idea? So, let me clear that up. The gentleman asked, like, the rat that ate the mouse was an after injection with the IPS. So, no, because I don't have footage of the mouse cannibalizing the other mice because all that footage was destroyed. What I wanted to just outline to you is what the mirror side looks like because what essentially happened is that the mice no longer recognize his or her buddies as members of the same species. And if you think about it, it makes sense because I mean, we don't do harm to each other because we're the same species. We have no problems killing cows and pigs and anything like that. So, the hypothesis is that the minute you stop recognizing something as your own species, you have no problems doing horrible, violent things to them. All right, thank you. Well, thanks again to Joe. Put me right around here to feel free to ask me questions off mic. We're gonna take a very quick break, like two minutes, three minutes. The essential enough time to switch to laptop. Feel free to go talk to the legal voters of the open public library or grab a drink, but we wanna dive right into the video game talk. We reckon to have this ideal of individuality that we treasure a lot because we believe strongly in the ethic of individual freedom and individual uniqueness. And the zombie represents the total loss of that, becoming subsumed in forces larger than yourselves. So, basically, it's communism. In the tradition of this time of year, this has nothing to do with even talk really, which is about horror video games, which I'm really looking forward to. But it's usually appropriate. So, trick-or-treating started in like the late 19th, early 20th century. And really took off in the 50s, like the 40s and 50s. In the early 20th century, like the 20s, there was a problem with Halloween hijinks and kind of out of control. The vandalism and the wish of making was becoming a problem. And trick-or-treating was kind of a way for communities to get that back under control by sort of allowing the energy to be harnessed toward extortion, basically. Forcing people to give you treats so that you won't play all these horrible tricks on them. And of course, the baby boom generation was there and needing to be pampered, too, as always. What's interesting about trick-or-treating is that warning, in fact, it actually turns children evil. It has the opposite effect from what is desired. Maybe you're thinking this is totally obvious because candy and sugar, and of course, they get evil, but that's bullshit, by the way. Candy does not make children hyper. Sugar does not make children hyper. Look up, it's true, it's something called science. But it's more to do with this thing, de-individuation, which is what social sciences call what happens when you're in a group and you start engaging in behaviors you ordinarily wouldn't if you weren't in a group. Behaviors that are anti-informative and disinhibited, which is similar to what we were just talking about. Stuff you know better than to do normally. Somehow when people get into groups, they start acting differently, and this is especially prominent when they're wearing masks and being anonymous. But don't take no word for it, there's a couple of great studies, Halloween masks and de-individuation, if you wanna look it up, if you want information here. They took some little mine-tip of teen-year-olds and I love experiment systems. They put it in a row and they're like, there's some candy. You can have two pieces. Masks were significantly more likely to take more candy than they were supposed to. Even though researchers knew who they were, the kids knew that, but they're wearing masks, so it becomes okay to start taking more candy. But masks that are a factor, there's another study, effects of de-individuation variables on stealing among Halloween drinkers. In this study, consumers concealed readers and they're crucially observed. Tons of trigger-treaters, which I love. And the kids were given opportunities to steal candy and money, and indeed they found it significantly more stealing occurred when they were in groups and when they were anonymous, basically when they were wearing masks and when they were in the presence of a group. And a big factor was whether they believed an authority figure was present or not. So you take out an authority figure, you put them in a group, and you give them masks. It's kind of a recipe. Other kids need criminal behavior. Leave them today, just watch out. Stay on your guard. All right, so here to talk about four survival video games is... You can hear on. How did it get here? It's my first nerd night of the talk ever. I've actually never been to a nerd night before. I'll just keep her at odds one, but this is, yeah, it's my first nerd night. I'm also a video game designer. I've been a designer for over 20 some years now at this point. I'm mostly specializing in level and content design. I've worked on a number of big action games, RPGs, but actually I've never actually worked on a horror game. And this is actually something I really want to do someday because I really love the genre. So tonight we'll be talking and taking a look at survival horror games. We'll be looking at some of the earliest titles to some of the more modern classics. We'll delve into how horror games differ from regular action games. And we'll look at elements and techniques that developers use to keep games serious and tense. And finally, we'll see some choice examples of great horror survival games throughout the years. And this has to be why they're so effective. So of course you'll bring us. Do many of you guys play horror games? So part one is history of horror games. Now before I start, I'm not going to talk about every horror game that's coming and gone, but I'm going to try and list the key points that the ones that have stood out in history of games. But so one of the earliest noted games in the horror genre was a title called Nostroma. It was made for the peak of the past 2001 and developed by Akira Takaguchi in 1901. It was loosely based on a Japanese-style game called Nenkei Soju and the classic horror film Alien. In it, the player is trapped on a ship with an invisible alien creature that is hunting them and they're trying to escape. It also included collecting items throughout the ship so you could be the first graphical horror game. That was game called 3D Monster Mates. It was originally released on the scene. The player is DX81, back in 1982. It was a simple maze game where you score points just by walking around. Also in the maze was a hunger and tyrannosaurus rex and that was also stalking you. You were lured to the proximity of the beast by text cubes at the bottom of the screen. The goal was to find the exit of the maze before the T-Rex found you. So, here's an example of the game play. This is what it looked like. It was early, early video game technology. Yes. Okay, so actually, you can see the text there. So, yeah, you can see that. You have to understand, this is thanks to the issue. This is revolutionary technology for that point. People were like, oh my God, you're going to work for her? But, yeah, so, we're gonna venture it by our standards, but, oh, okay, hope. But, instead of approaching, look out. Oh, no. It's coming. Oh, geez, oh, boy, oh, run, oh, it's over. Yeah, okay. So, yeah, again, this is revolutionary technology back in the day, but it's kind of a poor little apple in it. All right. So, the early games really started to see the rise of the horror genre in games. Games like Connor House, who was very much in 1600, I've seen above, and Terror House, by Bandai, really started to explore the genre. Both of these titles were released in 1982. Gameplay, I believe, both of these games is typical of future survival war games. As it emphasized, puzzle solving and evasive action were rather than violence. By 1986, there were several games that had been released that could justifiably be called classified as horror games. Namely, Ghost House, and Picture Gear, by Sega for their Master System, and Quicksilver's 3D Anti-Tek. By 1986, 1986, I would have brought us two classics that are still remembered very fondly today. So, here we see Castlevania, the very first Castlevania that was first released in Japan on the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1986, and later in the US in 1987, 1988. It remains to this day one of the all-time classic horror video games, having spawned several sequel scenes at its initial launch. It utilized several techniques to just create sound effects and become only soundtracks, to really drive home a horror genre home for the players. Also, there was a fun interesting thing about this game. There was no save feature, so you had to do this very game in one sitting, which I think is kind of horrifying in that itself. And again, this other window thing. So, yeah, yeah, all right, good, right. Okay, there was also, the same year 1986, brought us to Latterhouse, also by Sega, which used a lot of horror games in the game. But, actually, essentially, it was just a fun brawler. It was just an action game. But, despite that, it was still pretty fun, but it was really, you know, wasn't it horror games or something like that? Another very notable game in the early horror genre days was a game called Alone in the Dark, which was released in 1992 by Infogrames. It was one, if not the me first, came to use a fixed camera in a 3D space. The controls on the turtle in this game were a bit clunky, because you basically had to basically stop and rotate and move and stop and rotate and move. It was very, very clunky. But the use of 3D space was quite remarkable for its time. Yeah, at least nothing's a little bit sad, but, you know, and you can see the very rudimentary, you know, at the time, this was great, but now it's kind of like, yeah, I'm gonna return this game home. Okay, so, let's see. So, by 1996, the first Resident Evil game by Capcom came out. Exactly. It is generally regarded as the first true survival horror video game, and actually helped coin the threads and the genre, so that all similar games that came after it used the title and referenced Resident Evil. It helped to define many of the tricks and techniques that developers used to make these kinds of games, which we'll be talking about later. So, depicted here actually, the classical counter from Resident Evil 2 is the first appearance of what's called a liquor. Again, you can see the fixed camera. There's, you know, oh, right answer. Make sure he's done, yeah. Okay, so, moving forward. Okay, so, part two, how survived the game horror games are constructed. We'll look right now at elements that game developers used to create survival horror games. Actually, before I give you a mention, I should mention that, so I'm a designer, so a lot of the things I'm gonna be talking about are coming from a very design-centered viewpoint, so keep that in mind. Player character, so we're talking about player character and enemy design, settings and locations, visual effects and lighting, sound and music design, story and dialogue writing, and also in the very last piece, which is also critically important. So, let's get started. Okay, so first up, we'll look at player characters and how they're depicted in most survival horror games. As a general rule of thumb, most characters start off as human or something generally very relatable, something, you know, nothing in two grand games. With extremely limited, as I'm sorry, as opposed to a lot of other action-oriented games, player abilities in horror games tend to stay on the side of the constraint. Characters don't usually run as fast as in other games, they don't jump as high, they have less hit points, they're very little bit more on the big side. Of course, there are exceptions to this, but mostly player characters in survival horror games don't exactly start off as bad as this. Another common trait with many survival horror games, especially with the Resident Evil and Silent Hill games, is a limited amount of ammo for your weapons and other items that players can pick up and collect, such as med kits, things like that. The scarcity of items in the world oftentimes are used by developers to lure players into settings like having this classic scene from BioShock. So most horror and survival games are single-player experiences. The genre doesn't really lend itself too well to multiplayer gameplay, although again, there are some exceptions. Also, player character health hit points have been on the low side, like I mentioned. Oftentimes, your character can't take the hits like you can in conventional action games. Stealth is also a very common mechanic that is utilized in survival horror games to get around threats. Or, and also, usually, some lot of games have also a limited amount of sprinting to get away from the threats that you don't stop them from. Finally, most survival horror games utilize some sort of inventory system that usually requires the players to manage what they are carrying around with them. So this is a scene from the Resident Evil. So enemies in survival horror games tend to be outranged in some way. There are definitely, human has fallen, the villains to blow away, but many times they are of the things that go bump into night variety. All of the classic types of enemies have been explored in horror games thus far. Zombies, demons, aliens, other risk-equal horrors, all have had their time in one game or another over the years. As a general rule of thumb, most enemies in horror games start off hitting, concealed in some way, and reveal themselves after the player has triggered that in some way, like entering into a groove. The classic examples of this, of course, are the monster closets in the DOOM games, where enemies will pop out of small concealed cutty holes after you turn her back on them and convey the data. So the setting and level layout for survival horror games is incredibly important. This is a very close game, because I make maps for games, and this is very true. Oftentimes in these games, the designer needs to really channel the players into key locations before something can happen. Take for instance this classic scene from the very first Silent Hill. Oh. Oh, boy, what was that? Okay. So, it's one of the very, and to be honest, that's actually, when I played that, the reason was, I don't know if that made me throw the controller across the room, it was freaking scary. Okay, now, know how the layout guides the player up to, to go after the red herring, the rattling locker, there's nothing in it. Only then to force the player to go out the way they came, and to reward the player with a jump scare, with a big popping out, right? So many horror games utilize the strength by placing something scary or challenging on the path, for the player to go and check out, and then as they're backtracking along the way, boom, this thing happens, right? So, very good comment, it's a common trend. Floating horror are common elements in many survival horror games, but the really good games utilize this element strategically. Simply putting blood, spiders, and human remains everywhere, really honestly, they'll lose the experience. Believe it or not, players do get known to nonstop violence in games over time. However, when used correctly, blood and horror can be served multiple purposes, ranging from foreshadowing an upcoming encounter, to helping points towards items the players might need. So, I should have been an example of a jump scare before, but it's worth keeping talking about a bit more game. So, like blood and horror, like blood and horror, the pacing of how and where you place a jump scare in a game is crucial. In order to maintain the pacing and flow of the experience, if you have way, if you have too many, then it becomes, stops becoming scary and risks the possibility of the schtick being annoying to the player. So, as much as like, I mean, okay, so a modern game that came out a couple years ago, which I would absolutely love to take on alien isolation, did this fit too much with a motion detector mechanic. After a while, I stopped trusting it because it oftentimes lied about where the alien was and if it's proximity to our eyewitnesses, etc. It became its own red heron. So, another element that is carefully considered in games, in these kind of games, is the lighting. As a general rule of thumb, most survival horror games rely on low lighting and oftentimes plunge the player into complete darkness. Lightwood jump scares above. It's vitally important to keep the balance between intense and frightened versus just being annoying. Thankfully, many games use some sort of flashlight mechanic, which helps to alleviate the issue of darkness. And it also adds a sense of tension for the player since their field of vision is now limited to whatever the light beam the flashlight is looking at. Sound effects and music are both critical elements in making a compelling horror video game. So, nothing can kill the mood of a scary game that achieves that. Oftentimes, the music of these types of games is muted in heavy, weird background. Oftentimes, to help accentuate or shadow a scary scene, the music is cut out entirely. At the right moment, however, the musical will pick up in off events with increasing volume and intensity. Generally, when their clearly nasty and zombie or genius rushing at it. So, sound effects are generally speaking louder and more pronounced than they are in action games. When combined with a lack of music, it can turn going down an empty corridor towards a closed door into a very tense and heart-racing experience. So, dialogue is also very important to scary games. The voice actors are going to really, truly add a tremendous amount to the game experience. Dialogue in a survival horror game also includes dialogue that other players say. But oftentimes, more often than not, character characters don't really speak much. It's don't take as much as an environment of non-player characters. So, the example here I have is, even though it's not really a survival horror game, the opening speech in Half-Life 2, that the one performed by the Jeanette, really honestly speaks to what I'm talking about here. Can you guys hear that? It's really creepy. If you haven't played Half-Life 2, you will play it, it's amazing. Okay. So, the story. Story in survival horror games is also another crucial element. Like, why is a character there? Like, how did they get there? Like, why is it overrun with zombies? These are the questions that a good story can answer. A good horror game will only be bits and pieces of a story coming. Oftentimes, the reward at the end of a fight or encounter will be bits of more, bits of more of the overall story. Good horror games always leave this dangling, this kind of character dangling in front of the player, enticing the curiosity of the player to keep going to see if they can get the key picture of what exactly is going on. So, this also adds to the added benefit of letting the player's own imagination kind of fill in the blanks, as it were, to try and figure out exactly what I think is going on. Last, when all is said and done, every good horror game should allow you a breath of fresh air or a breath of breath or it's kind of like before your next scary section. These things are key to keeping the players going. Like, with other elements mentioned above, you just can't turn the stairs up to 11 and it's leaving on there for the entire game. Then there have to be safe areas to allow the players to assess their situation and get themselves ready for the next challenge. So, the examples we'll include and some examples we'll just say include APM puzzles such as combo blocks, safe combinations, since I've had many games. Pre-planned canned dialogue, which encounters with NPCs. So, a lot of times I'm talking to various NPCs for the game. It's a recipe that's a constant horror of the game. Guided player travels, such as like being on an elevator or some sort of like vehicle as it's going on a track. And treasure periods. So, this is an opportunity to allow players to chance to rearm themselves. So, part three. Here's, I'd like to see this opportunity to basically show you some, everything we just talked about. And I'd like to show you some examples of, like what I believe are some good examples of horror survival games to the right. So, first off, we have a scene from the game in action for Alien Isolation. It was made by Creative Assembly and published by Sega. This game did an amazing job of pacing the action, keeping the players pointed in direction that they're next ejected. And they were very successful in using writing sound and music to absolutely show the results. Actually, something I really want to play in this game is actually a VR. When I was playing this at home, I was pretty much writing my goals the entire time. I was just like, ah! Okay, so, next on is another game called Dead Space 2. Made by EA, this role, this role of Studios. There's a familiar and nerve-racking scene in this game. Anyone who's played it knows what I'm talking about. Where you need to inject a needle into the on your own eye. And anyone who's squeamish about eye stuff is just being like, I'm not sure I'm making this one. But the player actually controls the needle device and failing the procedure, it's really messy. So, I'm a big fan of this character, by the way. This is, yeah, you have to do this. Yeah, so there's that. Okay, and finally, we have the opening scene from Alan Wake by Remindy Studios. For one, it includes games that include because it relies a lot more on atmosphere and excellent writing, as opposed to letting you have sole action. It's also a very darkly readable game. The developers almost gave an amazing job at the environment, so, never knowing the environment. And like I was mentioning before about the closed spaces, this is a very channeling setup. Okay, so that's pretty much it for me. Thank you, and I hope you enjoyed the presentation. Woo! Question and answer? Yeah, that's a good one. Okay. Oh! Great, really good. The question was, what's my favorite horror video game and why? That is a good question. Probably the first Silent Hill, just because it was, it probably, they played horror games before that, but that one, I just obsessed over for whatever reason. I mean, there's a lot of good reasons about the first Silent Hill, but it's one that I probably played the most and finished the most. Yeah, so, again, very simple. There's a couple things that would bug me about Silent Hill, because it relies a lot on maze. There's a lot of mazes in it, which kind of bug me as a designer, but overall, the atmosphere and the enemy design and everything about it was just, I got very sublime and very enjoyable. Hi. Hi. So basically, you know, you come down and you start to play. Yeah, there's a certain, the question is, a lot of the things I talk about in terms of making good horror games seem to be influenced by movies. That's true. A lot of, that's a very common thing about a lot of horror games, because they keep Kennedy cinematic. So I think that's also because of the constrained nature of the games. A lot of times, the game, the horror games are designed to change into certain experiences. So therefore, it's an opportunity to have very cinematic, very strong emotional products, right? And we know that the player's gonna do eventually, right? One thing I didn't talk about in this talk though is that as opposed to movies or TV shows or books, and I think that's what's books, there's no time constraints. You can walk around and do whatever you want. The horror, the tension, is purely player-driven. It's their desire to keep moving forward. So in that regard, it is very, very cinema-like. So. Yes? That's a good question. The question is, based on jumpscares and other techniques for games, how would I rate the replayability? Like, a lot of people wanna play it again. That's a good question. A lot of more modern games do have branching, so there are a lot of things that are off to the sides. You know, like, they're not on the main path of the game that you can go and explore. That's a good question. I think it's case by case. I mean, good horror games will have like a lot of stuff to go back and explore, especially now with achievements or other kind of reward structures that will, like, have players go back and try to get 100% of the condition of the game. So, but for an experience, that's a good question. I think, truthfully, when it comes to it, I think most horror games, you play it once and that's it. You know, you kind of, you put it away, you kind of, like, that was a good, or that was a good scene in Gamebook. I feel like I don't have to re-agreed it again, you know? Versed action games or the next games where, like, there's more of a regret about it. So, yeah. This is true. Yeah, now you're obviously right. And the collection of horror games I love, too, so. Oh, thank you. So, this game, you're going to need a little man to stick around to your all-incorporative speaker's question and vote. And, of course, believe in the winners of the Oakland Public Library. I want to get through this really quickly. I'm glad that you stayed. This isn't going to save you all $20, and I'll tell you how. First of all, next week, this week, is the Bay Area Science Festival. There's a ton of awesome events here. I'm only going to list a couple of them. One is Astronomy Untapped. This is going to be full. You should just come here next month and hear one of the guys who runs this. Talk about dark energy. Pacific Middle People Expo in the new facility in Alameda is going to be awesome. We have a show at Alameda Draft House along with Nernette North Bay, Nernette Silicon Valley, and Nernette San Francisco. Here's where I say, everyone who lives in Spain, $20. Tested is taking over the Castro Theater. There's Adam Savage and Norm from the podcast. 10,000 Ways to perform their science-based songs here on the stage. A bunch of other people who have performed at Nernette. It's Mel Gears, J.K. Gilo Bezal, family duets. All Nernette alums, of course, Kishora Harri, who runs it. It's this Saturday. It's normally $20, but if you go on the website and use the code JOURNEY16, it's free. We're going to sort of put this out on the Nernette San Francisco list tomorrow so you probably want to take this night. If you want to share this with your friends, please do that. There's only like 75 free tickets, so take advantage of this opportunity. That's going to be awesome. Next month, we're back to our usual time, the last money of the month. We'll have a talk on dark energy. We'll have a talk that's still a little too medium-determined, at least we have a speaker. We'll have a talk on stoicism. See you next month.