 Man, there are a lot of shadows on this green screen. I don't think it's gonna look great. Maybe I could just, yeah, is that, does that work? All right, so when I was younger, I absolutely loved the zombie survival guide by Max Brooks and I'm certain a lot of other people that are watching this love this thing too because this sold a lot and it later had a sort of sequel in World War Z, which is an amazing, amazing book. It came out in 2003 and it was basically a parody of a lot of the survival guides that were coming out in the late 90s and early 2000s. You know, there were a lot of them. They were talking about how to survive like Y2K or nuclear war or giant plagues breaking out, you know, that sort of thing. And I don't know for certain that this was the first parody of them or even the first big parody of them, but I know it was one of the first. And because it came out in 2003, that means it was well poised to take advantage of the boom in zombie related stuff that really took over in the aughts and early tens. You know, because that was around the same time that The Walking Dead comic began. It's around the same time that the Dawn of the Dead remake came out. Like, you know, it was when zombies were getting super big and the premise of this book is very simple. It's how to survive zombies, you know. It has an opening section which is just all about zombies. You know, it comes from a virus. It's not magic. It talks about their anatomy, how you're able to kill them, that sort of thing. And then it goes into like supplies and weapons and how to prepare yourself for when an attack comes. And then it goes into like different levels of attack and how you should be prepared for those because like, for instance, if there's only like 15 zombies in your town, you can probably just lock all the doors and windows in your house and hide upstairs and you'll probably be okay. Is there... I don't know if the microphone picked that up. It sounds like there's a dying whale outside my house. It tells you how to protect yourself when you're on the defense, on the attack or on the run. And all of them are pretty good. And then it ends with a whole long section about the history of various outbreaks of zombies and how people have dealt with that over the years. There's a very, very high attention to detail here, which Max Brooks is known for, you know. I mean, he also wrote De Evolution, which was one of my favorite books of 2020. And like I said, he wrote World War Z, which is just one of my favorite books, period. The movie's not great though. In fact, I don't know what I'm going to have playing on the screen. I might just have clips from the film playing back there while I'm talking. But basically, his high attention to detail makes it simultaneously creepy and funny. Like, you know, the very idea of writing a survival guide to protect yourself from zombies is pretty silly. But he just commits to it so much that it becomes weirdly plausible. And then it goes into detail about people being eaten and stuff. And it's creepy. It's worked on both levels. It's very impressive. And when this got big, it inspired a couple of copycats, much like, you know, it happens in all sorts of media. You know, in certain types of movies or books or whatever get popular. It inspires others that want to take over in that same genre, cut themselves a slice of that pie. Including the Vampire Combat Manual. And this is a very similar thing. You know, it's like, it takes a humanoid type creature, which doesn't actually exist. And then it tells you how to prevent yourself from being eaten by them. You know, in the zombie survival guide, the zombies are actually, you know, eating you. Whereas in the Vampire Combat Manual, they're just sucking your blood. But either way, it achieves the same purpose in that you die. And they can also turn you into one of them, which is also a pretty big threat to a lot of people. And this one goes over a lot of the same things that the zombie survival guide does. You know, it talks about weaknesses, how you can actually kill vampires, talks about the types of weapons you should use, the types of tactics to use, all that sort of stuff. And while it is very much the same book, it doesn't work quite as well. Because vampires are just a little bit too smart and too powerful. You know, because zombies, it's made pretty clear in both zombie survival guide and World War Z, they're only really a threat in large numbers or if you're just unprepared for an attack. You know, like one zombie, if you have a firearm and you know that you're supposed to hit it in the head and everything, that's not going to be that much of a threat to you. Whereas vampires in the mythology that Roger Maw creates here, they are just almost impossible to kill even if you have all the proper weapons and all the proper tactics. Because for whatever reason in this, the only way you can really kill them effectively is to either behead them and even then you have to go all the way through. Like if you only cut their head halfway off, they're still going to keep coming at you and it'll heal eventually. But you can either do that or you can hit them in the heart with a wooden stake. Now, it specifically has to be made of wood. Like if it's not made of wood, it won't set off this weird chain reaction through all of their cells which causes them to self-destruct and then they disintegrate. It's kind of weird. Or you can expose them to ultraviolet light. You know, those are basically the only ways you can kill them. Shoot them in the head, won't do it. Stab them through the heart even with silver which does irritate them and delay their healing a bit. That also won't work. Spray them with garlic, that'll hurt them but it won't kill them. They're just a little too powerful and the fact that you combine that with them having human level intelligence and they just become too strong. You know, it's just a little too much. Plus, there's this really big conspiracy that the book brings up about how vampires have inserted themselves in high levels of government and stuff. And to give you an idea of how ridiculous this gets, it's very heavily implied that Osama bin Laden was not actually killed in a raid on his house in Pakistan and he actually was turned into a vampire and joined up with them later. It's just really stupid and silly. And I mean, if it was going for parody then it would have succeeded but it wasn't, it was trying to be serious. And it just makes the whole thing feel hopeless which kind of defeats the purpose of the survival guide because the whole point of the zombie survival guide is that if you're unprepared, you're fucked but if you are smart and prepared then you should be fine. Like, that's a core tenant of the whole book and the vampire combat manual misses that. And very recently I read the Kaiju Survival Guide which if you're unfamiliar, a Kaiju is just like a big monster that runs around wrecking cities and stuff, you know, from like movies like Godzilla or King Kong or anything like that. You know, I think Kaiju actually just means big monster in Japanese or something along those lines at least. And this was a fun book although it wasn't perfect. And this one is unique in that it's not really about fighting the creatures that it brings up. You know, it's not about fighting the Kaiju because it makes it very clear a civilian with civilian weapons is not going to do much damage against one of those things. They're just not. It brings up a few minor situations where Kaiju have like offspring that are still small and growing or they have little parasites that ride along with them which are human sized and you know, those are still dangerous but you can fight those. But against the bigger ones it just says like, okay you can either hole up and hide somewhere or you can run the fuck away and let someone else deal with it. And it just goes over ways you can protect yourself that way. And in that way it is pretty unique. I did like that. But some of the issues the book has is that Kaiju is just too broad a term and the book even brings that up. It's like, yeah, there's not really a generic template for Kaiju. There's ones that hide out in the ocean and look like big serpents. There's flying ones. There's land-based ones. There's like some of their giant ants they bring up. There's just, you know, there's too many different types of Kaiju to really go into detail about them and the way they work which is a little disappointing. We don't get much information on their anatomy, that sort of thing. But the stories about encounters with Kaiju are really, really cool. I did like all of those. Those are a lot longer and go into more detail than they did in stuff like The Zombie Survival Guide. And I have read a couple of other of these Survival Guide books over the years, you know. Like I read How to Survive a Robot Uprising many, many years ago. That was a fun one. And I read a different one about How to Survive Vampires but I couldn't remember the title and I've not been able to find what it was anywhere in my research. So it's out there somewhere if anyone else finds it. And the thing is, this is a genre, is what I've been getting at this whole time. Like, it is a genre with a lot of potential but it's really frustrating because almost none of that potential is in any way realized and it's really obnoxious. See, when The Zombie Survival Guide got successful, other people took that same idea and ran with it. You know, it was, again, like I mentioned earlier, there are tons of examples of this happening in books or video games or movies, you know. Like when the Marvel Cinematic Universe came out, a bunch of people tried doing superhero movies and people tried doing connected universes and people tried to combine the two and it really hasn't worked that well in most cases. But the thing is, with The Zombie Survival Guide, when people wanted to rip that off both during and after The Zombie Boom when it was everywhere for a while, when they ripped that off, they just straight up did zombies again. And if you don't believe me, here's some examples. The thing is, if you want to take inspiration from this and do something very similar, that's fine. I'm 100% on board for that. But this isn't an inspiration and this isn't something in the same genre. This is just a straight up 100% rip-off at that point. Like, okay, when Twilight came out and got big, a lot of other people tried writing books that were similar to Twilight. Like, okay, Teenage Girl falls in love with Supernatural Boy and they did it with other creatures like Angels or Vampire, excuse me, not Vampires, like Angels or Werewolves or Fairies or Aliens or whatever else. You know, they did a whole bunch of those. But this would be like if someone wrote a book that was trying to cash in on Twilight's success but it was also about vampires and it also took place in Forrest Washington and it also had a love interest whose name was Edward. Like, there's a very fine line between something being inspired by something and something just being a straight up rip-off and it's not always easy to tell where that line is. But when you're just straight up doing, hey, how to survive a zombie apocalypse or something like that, you're just ripping off Max Brooks. And I find that annoying because, like I said, this is a genre with a lot of potential. I feel like you could just take other types of supernatural creatures and write a similar book about it and it could be a lot of fun. In fact, I tried this myself a couple of months ago with witches specifically. I didn't get that far in it but I might, I don't know, I might finish it off at some point. And so just for shits and giggles, here are some other creatures that you could write a survival guide for as it were. And I don't know, feel free to take the idea here. You could write one about ghosts, you know, like you could be, hey, ghosts are kind of dangerous. Here's some of the different types. Here's how you can deal with them, you know, things like that. That could be fun. Aliens, you know, it could be, hey, aliens actually are abducting people. The people that talk about that aren't crazy. Here's how you can defend yourself and your family and your cattle if that's the case. Mermaids might be kind of fun. Like, hey, be careful when you're swimming at the beach, that sort of thing. Fae, and by fae I mean fairies, and there's a lot of old stories about fairies kidnapping people or taking them away or replacing your baby with a changeling, that sort of thing. That could be fun. Witches, like I mentioned earlier, there's a lot you could do there. Werewolves, demons, you know, how to prevent yourself from being possessed and how to perform exorcisms on your friends, that sort of thing. Like, there's an endless supply of these things that you could do. And the fact that everyone just focuses on zombies is, I think, the reason why this never really took off as a genre. You know, there's a couple of entries, but I don't think any of them have really been that popular other than the zombie survival guide because, you know, you look on Goodreads, they have like 20 ratings and stuff. Like, just, there's room to grow here. And I just want to end off by saying there's no rule saying that the creatures have to be a secret in the world that you create. I mean, the Kaiju survival guide, it's impossible to keep Kaiju a secret because they're just too big and too destructive. So everyone knows about it and it's basically, it's in a world where the military already has plans and it's just like, okay, you're a normal person, how do you protect yourself? Like, just, I don't know, this was just a short, fun video I wanted to do because this is a genre which I wanted to talk about but there's just not that much there. There's not that much to it and I find that frustrating. So, that's about all. Take care, goodbye. You are all the best. If you want to get your name on here and get early access to videos and vote on other video topics, then consider becoming a patron. If you don't feel like doing that, you can always just tip me on YouTube or become a channel member or even just like the video, comment on it and subscribe to my channel. Anything helps. It really does mean the world to me. You are all the best and I'll see you later. Bye.