You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News Read online

  And so ends an uplifting tale of a guy who got out of a rut with a series of violent escapades learned his lesson about taking it too far, and is going to continue with life the better for his experience. Someday he will look back and tell his grandkids this funny story about how he and grandma met, and then pit them against each other in combat.

  Moral of the movie

  Same as the book but without the consequences. It’s not totally surprising, then, that teens across the world started creating their own fight clubs, apparently mistaking the movie for an instructional video on how to achieve six-pack abs.

  4. THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK, ALLEGEDLY BASED ON THE BOOK BY ALEXANDRE DUMAS

  The man in the title is Philippe, identical twin of King Louis XIV of France. As often happens with twins, Philippe is good and Louis is evil. Philippe has been imprisoned for most of his life due to his dangerous potential claim to the throne. A group of musketeers finds him and hatches a plan to swap him out by making a dramatic charge down a prison hallway into a point-blank hail of gunfire. At this point in a story about the end of an era of heroes, as the aged, formally retired musketeers are making a brave suicide charge for a just cause, you would expect the heroes to die heroically …

  The book ending

  … which is basically what happens in the novel you read in school, though it probably took longer than you expected. When the musketeers are eventually defeated, Louis puts Philippe away for life and goes down in history as a great king. Thus we learn a sad truth about the human condition: History is written by the winners and the winners are often dickbags.

  Moral of the book

  The age of chivalry is passing because men of honor are at a natural disadvantage in our modern, amoral world.

  The Hollywood ending

  As the smoke clears, the firing squad looks into the haze and sees the musketeers completely untouched, striding forward. Moved to tears, the guards put aside their guns and join the musketeers in putting Louis away and proclaiming Philippe king.

  The epilogue proclaims that the good Philippe replaced the evil Louis XIV and was the best king of France ever, thus raising a big cheerful middle finger to everything we know about French history.

  Moral of the movie

  In a world where the age of chivalry is passing, three men must risk everything, which is cool because the good guys always win, especially when they’re fighting for a cause as handsome as Leonardo DiCaprio. Bonus moral: Hollywood proves that history can be rewritten by dickbags too.

  3. FRANKENSTEIN (1931), ALLEGEDLY BASED ON THE BOOK BY MARY SHELLEY

  Dr. Frankenstein decides to fool around in God’s domain by creating life from inanimate matter. When this results in a monster, he realizes he’s made a mistake and should probably kill it. Disagreeing, the monster fights back and eventually threatens to murder Frankenstein’s new wife.

  The book ending

  Mary Shelley’s beast is a monster of his word and kills Frankenstein’s wife. Frankenstein’s father then dies of grief. Somewhere along the line, his brother, best friend, and trusted family servant also die. Frankenstein ends up chasing the monster to the North Pole, fueled by grief and revenge, and dies of illness just as the monster bursts into his room, makes a speech about how woeful his lot is, and runs off to commit suicide. Everybody learns a lesson about playing God, or they would have if they weren’t all dead.

  Moral of the book

  When man decides to play God, he provokes His wrath.

  The Hollywood ending

  Frankenstein enlists the help of a good old angry mob to finish off the monster before he can hurt his wife. The film ends with Frankenstein’s dad raising a toast to the happy couple and a future grandchild. Sure, Frankenstein messed up with the brain part of his monster, but it’s pretty unfair to say it’s inherently wrong to reanimate a living sentient being from spare body parts or anything like that. There’s no reason he couldn’t try again, as long as he’s got the old monster-killing squad handy.

  Moral of the movie

  You can play God, just clean up after yourself.

  2. THE RUNNING MAN, ALLEGEDLY BASED ON THE BOOK BY STEPHEN KING

  Ben Richards is a contestant in a deadly reality show in which he gets money if he can outrun people trying to hunt him, and gets killed if he can’t.

  The book ending

  At the end of Stephen King’s book, Richards has almost succeeded in running out the clock, when he gets a call from Killian, the man behind the Running Man show. It’s a job offer to be the show’s lead hunter. The bad news? Richards’s wife and daughter were murdered shortly after he started running. Overcome by grief and unhappy at himself for participating in this exploitative system, Killian crashes into the headquarters of the game company, blowing it up and killing himself.

  Moral of the book

  A prescient message about the ghoulish nature of reality TV and more generally about human nature’s love of spectator sports.

  The Hollywood ending

  Arnold Schwarzenegger straps Killian to a rocket sled and catapults him through a giant neon sign. He makes a bad pun, gets the girl, and walks away into the futuristic sunset as the audience cheers. Nothing is said about whether the company continues to make reality shows where people are killed, but why wouldn’t they? That shit was amazing!

  Moral of the movie

  Reality shows are like regular game shows multiplied by awesome.

  1. BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA , ALLEGEDLY BASED ON THE BOOK BY BRAM STOKER

  The vampire Dracula comes to London, where he kills people and turns the innocent Lucy Westenra into a vampire. A ragtag team including Lucy’s best friend Mina and Dr. Van Helsing are forced to kill the now vampirized Lucy and then turn their attention toward finishing off Dracula …

  The book ending

  … which they do, through teamwork and courage.

  Moral of the book

  The ancient and unknown things of this world are scary, dark, and powerful. Once unleashed, you will have to do horrific things to make anything right again, such as murdering your own best friend.

  The Hollywood ending

  After the count trades mortal blows with one of the vampire hunters, Mina saves him. It turns out she’s the reincarnation of his dead wife and needs to take him to the castle chapel to kiss him, so she can redeem his soul and allow him to ascend to heaven in a beautiful scene. While she’s doing that, another one of her friends dies from Dracula wounds, but he wasn’t in love with anybody so it’s not important. The important thing is that the guy who killed him and turned her best friend into a monster gets to be with his dead wife in heaven.

  Moral of the movie

  Love never dies and also doesn’t sweat the small stuff like killing innocent people. Good thing Hollywood got that one out of its system.

  Oh, right.

  THE TEN MOST INSANE MEDICAL PRACTICES IN HISTORY

  DOCTORS have a long, storied background of not knowing what the hell they’re doing. History is filled with stories of medical ineptitude, and in all likeliness today’s medical practices will be similarly snorted at a hundred years down the road. So if you’re looking to rationalize not getting that lump on your neck checked out, you’re in the right place.

  10. CHILDREN’S SOOTHING SYRUPS

  In the nineteenth century, people were simply too busy churning butter and waxing their mustaches to be bothered with disobedient children. To remedy this, a series of “soothing syrups,” lozenges, and powders were created, all of which were carefully formulated to ensure they were safe for use by those most vulnerable members of the family. Oh, wait, no. Actually, they pumped each bottle full of as many narcotics as it could hold.

  For instance, each ounce of Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup contained sixty-five milligrams of pure morphine.

  Based on our experiences experimenting with pure morphine, that seems like a lot. Drug manufacturers finally slowed their roll a bit in 1910, when the New York Times decided t
he whole narcotic babysitter concept was probably bad and ran an article pointing out that these syrups contained, “morphine sulphate, chloroform, morphine hydrochloride, codeine, heroin, powdered opium, cannabis indica,” and sometimes several of them in combination.

  You can’t say the syrups weren’t effective, as long as you didn’t mind your toddler being strung out on the midnight oil. Or dead. The terrible twos weren’t just a cutesy euphemism back then. Kids were not only at their brattiest but also often died, in many cases after their parents tried to cure the aforementioned brattiness with narcotic concoctions in accordance with the doctor’s orders.

  9. CALM YOUR COUGH WITH HEROIN

  Hard drugs weren’t just for infants. In the late nineteenth century, people apparently took cough suppression seriously. We’re talking, “I’m going to take me some heroin to calm this cough” level serious, here. We know Victorians were sticklers for social etiquette and wheezing your head off was probably considered frightfully rude, but we can’t imagine tying off and shooting some horse in the middle of a dinner party would go over terribly well, either.

  You probably don’t need us to tell you how addictive and destructive heroin is, but just in case: Heroin? Might want to avoid that stuff. On the upside, it actually does suppress coughs, so if you do become a junkie at least you’ll save on buying Halls.

  Heroin, by the way, was originally developed by Bayer. You know, those friendly folks behind harmless old aspirin. How is that not at the center of every single Tylenol ad campaign? Tylenol: The fast-acting pain reliever that didn’t invent heroin.

  8. THE CURATIVE POWERS OF MERCURY

  For centuries, mercury was used to treat pretty much everything. Scraped your knee? Just rub a little mercury on it. Having some problems with regularity? Forget fiber, get some mercury up in there! If you lived more than a hundred years ago, you simply weren’t considered healthy if you weren’t leaking silver from at least one orifice.

  Mercury, as we know, is toxic as hell. Symptoms of mercury poisoning include chest pains, heart and lung problems, coughing, tremors, violent muscle spasms, psychotic reactions, delirium, hallucinations, suicidal tendencies, restless spleen syndrome, penis knotting, and anal implosion. OK, we just made the last few up, but they barely looked out of place in that horror show of symptoms, right?

  7. ELECTRICAL IMPOTENCE CURES

  Men have been desperately trying to fix their malfunctioning members since well before the late nineteenth century, but that’s when impotent men discovered the wonders of electricity.

  Electrified beds, elaborate cock-shocking electric belts, and other devices were advertised as being able to return “male power” and prowess by making your penis rise to electrified attention like a six-inch-tall Frankenstein’s monster.

  What’s fascinating is that you can find ads for more than one brand of electric dick-shock belt, which seems to indicate that the dick-shock belt industry somehow survived the negative word of mouth from the first dick-shock belt. It would also suggest that the following conversation took place on a regular basis, “What’s it do, Doc? Actually, don’t answer that, I’m puttin’ it on my junk.”

  6. LOBOTOMIES

  You’re sitting on your psychiatrist’s couch, pouring your tortured heart out about how depressed you are. “I think I have the solution to your depression,” he says, producing a ten-inch-long ice pick. “I’m going to jam this into your eye socket, then put it into your brain using this mallet. Then I’ll wiggle it around so that it shreds part of your brain. Then you won’t be depressed anymore. I’m a doctor.”

  Congratulations hypothetical 1940s version of yourself, you’ve just been lobotomized! Lobotomies were a popular fad for the first half of the twentieth century and were floated as a “cure” for pretty much any mental issue you can name, from anxiety to schizophrenia.

  The inventor of the lobotomy was given a Nobel Prize for it in 1949. Doctors claimed the ice-pick-to-the-freaking-eye method of lobotomy would be as quick and easy as a trip to the dentist. By 1960, parents were getting them for their moody teenage children.

  “As you can see, gentlemen, we now know everything there is to know about the human body. I am, like, 95% sure.”

  In 2005, NPR profiled Howard Dully, a grown man who’d had the procedure performed in 1960, when he was just twelve. Medical records indicate that his stepmother’s psychiatrist recommended a lobotomy after she’d complained that he was “defiant,” “didn’t respond well to punishment,” and “objects to going to bed,” or as it’s known to modern doctors, being a normal freaking twelve-year-old boy.

  Some seventy thousand people were lobotomized before somebody figured out that driving a spike into the brain probably was not the answer to all of life’s problems.

  5. TREPANATION

  Like the lobotomy’s old, senile grandfather, trepanation is basically a fancy word for drilling holes in your head. It’s also the oldest surgical procedure known to man. Trepanation holes were found in 40 of 120 human skulls discovered at a prehistoric burial site in France estimated to be eight thousand years old.

  Most commonly used as a treatment for seizures and migraines in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, it was also used as an extreme form of cosmetic/experimental body modification amongst several pre-Columbian American societies. Nobody’s quite sure why the French cavemen did it. Probably because they’d just invented tools and nobody’d invented any furniture for them to put together yet.

  4. URINE THERAPY

  You can tell by the title of this entry that we’re not heading anywhere good. Throughout history there have been those who believed the key to good health was wallowing in one’s own excretions. Urine was said to cure an endless list of ailments and to promote good health if consumed, was applied to the skin and, yes, some even used it to give themselves (turn away now weak of heart) a nice bracing urine enema.

  Perhaps the best part of this is that, unlike the other practices listed here, urine therapy lives on today. Of all the crack-pot theories listed here, the one that endured is the one where people drink and bathe in piss.

  There’s absolutely no evidence that urine therapy can cure a damn thing, though there is conclusive evidence proving that it can absolutely make you smell like old people.

  3. BLOODLETTING

  Bloodletting was one of the most enduring and popular medical practices in history, originated by the Greeks and used up until the nineteenth century for, well, basically everything. If you were feeling under the weather back in the day, there’s a good chance it was because you just had too much blood.

  A person having too much blood may sound absurd, but that’s just because you don’t know about the four humors. The theory was that the body was filled with blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile and that an imbalance of the four fluids was the root of all illness. Apparently, blood could be a bit of a space hog, and thus patients were bled to make room for more fun stuff like black bile (diarrhea).

  If you’re wondering what made people think this worked for so long, the next time you’re at death’s door with the flu go out and give up to four quarts of blood. We can assure you your flu won’t be cured, but you’ll probably feel a lot better as you take a delirious blood-loss-inspired trip through the clouds!

  2. HARD-CORE DIET REMEDIES

  While fuller figures have been popular for most of history, during the twentieth—or “no fat chicks”—century, thin was in for women. This need to be slim led to the creation of countless so-called diet pills.

  While a lot of the pills actually did help with weight loss, they also caused fevers, heart troubles, blindness, death, and birth defects. In the 1950s and 1960s, women liked diet pills so darn much that they just couldn’t seem to stop taking them. This was because the diet pills of the ‘50s and ‘60s were in actuality bottles of pure crank. But hey, what’s being a nervous, amphetamine-addicted wreck when being ready for bathing suit season hangs in the balance?

  1. FEMALE HYSTERI
A CURES

  Women and their mood swings—right, guys? Now, if you happen to be female don’t be offended, there’s no shame in admitting to the occasional bit of moodiness (or irritability or anxiousness or a ton of other things) as according to nineteenth-century doctors it’s a symptom of a deadly serious medical condition.

  So how do you cure a “condition” that coincidentally was diagnosed almost entirely in women who dared disobey their Victorian husbands? The prescription for female hysteria was usually a good spot of doctor-administered vaginal massage until the woman achieved “hysterical paroxysm.”

  Yes. The cure for female hysteria was a doctor’s hand down your bloomers until you were screaming his name. Is it any wonder the list of symptoms for female hysteria was so long? Doctors, astonishingly enough, grew tired of “curing” all these women. According to Rachel P. Maines’s The Technology of Orgasm, the hand strain led doctors to invent the vibrator, and thus this section comes to a happy ending.

  FOUR GREAT WOMEN BURIED BY THEIR BOOBS

  WHILE modern women still deal with entirely too much job discrimination, domestic abuse, and sex with Gene Simmons, that’s nothing compared to the old days. Back when feminist was a homophobic adjective and suffrage was what women got when dinner was cold, some ingenious voices were never heard because they just happened to be attached to a pair of breasts.