I have nothing to tell you. Watching an John Agar movie. He plays a scientist who creates a serum that turns him into a murderous monster. With Joe Besser not long after he left The Three Stooges and Butch Patrick who went on to play Eddie Munster.
Someone noted that, had Night of the Living Dead been made just a year or two earlier, it would have started with a mad scientist or a Voodoo priest doing something to cause the Living Dead to walk around eating people.
It was a more innocent time. And maybe things were better then.
Look at Roger Ebert's initial review condemning of Night of the Living Dead. Back then, horror movies were considered children's films. Ebert saw it in a theater full of children and was appalled, like people who later attacked Beavis & Butt-head because they assumed all cartoons were intended for children.
Once Night of the Living Dead killed horror as a children's genre, there was nothing for kids. There were a few movies produced in Utah, like Seven Alone or The Wilderness Family, but we really had nothing. One time, my uncle took all the kids to a movie. We went to Patton.
This gave Steven Spielberg and George Lucas the opening they needed. Spielberg's friends eventually told him to stop making children's movies so he set about infantalizing the grown-ups. That brought us to the state we're in today.
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