The Return of the Living Dead (1985): The Night Zombies Learned to Run

October Horror Movie Retrospective — Day 2

By Thomas L. Vaultonburg

In the summer of 1985, I drove my ivory-white 1976 Pontiac Grand Prix to CherryVale Mall outside Rockford, Illinois, to see a movie called The Return of the Living Dead. It was the first movie I had ever driven myself to see alone, which probably tells you something about the importance I placed on seeing it. I don't remember the exact date, but I remember the heat. It was one of those rare Northern Illinois summer days when the temperature approached 100 degrees. Inside the theater, the air conditioning was running so aggressively that I was freezing. There were six other people in the audience. Seven of us, sitting in the dark, about to witness a significant mutation in the history of the American horror film.

Return of the Living Dead 1985

I had already become something of a zombie movie fanatic. Growing up in Byron, Illinois, I had rented George A. Romero's original three zombie films from the tiny video department at Cacciatore's Food Mart. There was no internet, no streaming service, and certainly no comprehensive library of obscure horror films available at the touch of a button. You watched what you could find. Sometimes that meant renting the same movies repeatedly, studying their details, and imagining what else might be out there. Romero's films had established the rules of the genre for me, and I had come to understand the living dead as slow, relentless creatures whose greatest advantage was their sheer numbers.

Then Dan O'Bannon came along and changed the rules.

The zombies in The Return of the Living Dead didn't merely shuffle toward their victims. They ran. They lunged. They demonstrated intelligence, coordination, and an alarming capacity for problem-solving. You couldn't simply walk around them or barricade yourself somewhere and wait for them to lose interest. These things could catch you. Worse, they seemed to enjoy doing it. I later learned that Umberto Lenzi's Nightmare City (1980) had already featured fast-moving infected attackers, although whether those creatures qualify as traditional zombies remains debatable. But I hadn't seen that movie in 1985. For me, this was the first time the dead had demonstrated that they could outrun the living.

Nightmare City 1980 is probably the first time zombies moved fast

And it was terrifying.

Today, The Return of the Living Dead is generally remembered as a horror comedy, a delirious combination of punk rock, grotesque practical effects, black humor, and adolescent rebellion. All of those descriptions are accurate. But they can obscure something essential about the experience of seeing the movie when it was new. It was legitimately frightening. The comedy didn't cancel out the horror. If anything, it made the horror more disturbing, because the movie refused to maintain a comfortable distinction between what was funny and what was dreadful.

The Other Living Dead

To understand why The Return of the Living Dead was such a radical departure, it's worth examining its peculiar relationship to George Romero's original Night of the Living Dead (1968). John A. Russo, who co-wrote the original film with Romero, was involved in developing the project that eventually became Return. Following the division of creative interests between Romero and Russo, Romero continued making his own Dead films, while Russo pursued the Living Dead name. The result was not a conventional sequel but an entirely different branch of zombie cinema.

The project underwent a lengthy development process before Dan O'Bannon, already known for his work on Alien (1979) and Dark Star (1974), wrote and directed the finished film. Released by Orion Pictures on August 16, 1985, it arrived just weeks after Romero's Day of the Dead. Two remarkably different visions of the zombie apocalypse appeared in American theaters during the same summer.

O'Bannon's cleverest narrative decision was to acknowledge Romero's original movie within the fictional universe of Return. The characters know about Night of the Living Dead. They've seen it. They believe it was based on an actual incident that the government subsequently concealed. Unfortunately, the movie got certain details wrong.

This conceit accomplishes several things simultaneously. It pays tribute to Romero, gives the audience a familiar reference point, and establishes that everything we think we know about zombies may be dangerously inaccurate. Shooting them in the head doesn't work. Dismemberment doesn't work. Burning the bodies creates an even larger problem by spreading the chemical contamination through the atmosphere.

In Romero's universe, the living dead are nearly impossible to stop because there are so many of them. In O'Bannon's universe, they're nearly impossible to stop because practically nothing kills them.

That's a significant escalation.

Punk Rock Comes to the Cemetery

Another thing I remember vividly about that first viewing was the punk rockers. Growing up in Byron, Illinois, I had never encountered people who looked or behaved like the characters in The Return of the Living Dead. Their clothing, hairstyles, music, language, and general disregard for conventional behavior seemed to come from another planet. They represented a subculture that might as well have been science fiction to a teenager living in a small Midwestern town.

There were no punks in Byron, Illinois in 1985

The characters gather in a cemetery near a medical supply warehouse, where an unfortunate industrial accident has released a military chemical known as 2-4-5 Trioxin. Among the group are Suicide, Trash, Spider, Scuz, Casey, Chuck, and Tina, a collection of young people who look as though they wandered into the film from a Los Angeles punk club. Their presence transforms what might otherwise have been a relatively conventional monster movie into a collision between several different American subcultures.

The adults are warehouse workers, businessmen, and mortuary employees. They represent employment, responsibility, property, and the institutional world. The young people represent music, sexuality, rebellion, and the refusal to take any of those institutions seriously. Neither group is particularly well equipped to handle the arrival of the living dead.

One of the movie's great achievements is that it doesn't treat the punk characters simply as disposable victims, even though some of them eventually become exactly that. They have personalities, loyalties, disagreements, and recognizable human vulnerabilities. Suicide, played by Mark Venturini, initially appears to be an intimidating caricature, but he also demonstrates a desire to protect his friends. Spider, played by Miguel A. Núñez Jr., becomes one of the film's most resourceful survivors. And Linnea Quigley's Trash has become one of the most recognizable figures in 1980s horror cinema.

For someone encountering punk culture for the first time, the movie was an introduction to an entirely unfamiliar aesthetic. The music was aggressive, the clothing deliberately confrontational, and the characters seemed almost as alien to me as the zombies themselves. Looking back, that collision of cultural worlds was one of the reasons the movie made such a lasting impression.

The Soundtrack of the Apocalypse

The soundtrack deserves special attention because it isn't simply background music. It's part of the movie's identity. The Cramps, 45 Grave, T.S.O.L., The Damned, The Flesh Eaters, and Roky Erickson contributed to a musical landscape that was considerably different from the orchestral scores or synthesizer soundtracks generally associated with horror movies of the period.

The Cramps' "Surfin' Dead" captures the film's combination of rock-and-roll absurdity and morbid fascination. 45 Grave's "Partytime" accompanies one of the movie's most memorable sequences, while Roky Erickson's "Burn the Flames" provides an unexpectedly haunting atmosphere. The soundtrack moves between punk, deathrock, psychobilly, and horror-inflected rock without ever sounding like a random collection of licensed songs.

The Cramps Surfin' Dead

This was one of the earliest horror movies I encountered in which the music and the monsters seemed to belong to the same cultural universe. The soundtrack wasn't there merely to frighten the audience. It was there to establish an attitude toward death, authority, and the absurdity of human existence.

It was music for people who already suspected that civilization was a joke.

Send More Paramedics

One of the film's most famous sequences involves a zombie using a police radio to request additional officers after the first responders have been killed. The same principle applies to the unfortunate paramedics who arrive expecting to treat an ordinary medical emergency. The zombies aren't simply hungry animals reacting to movement. They understand how human institutions function and can manipulate those institutions to obtain more victims.

Send more cops.

This is one of the movie's genuinely disturbing innovations. The living dead retain enough intelligence to exploit the habits and assumptions of the living. They know that when someone calls for help, help will probably arrive. And they know that the people who respond will be relatively easy to ambush.

The joke is funny because it's so grotesquely inappropriate. The horror is effective because it reveals that the zombies are capable of planning.

The film repeatedly uses comedy in this fashion. James Karen's Frank and Thom Mathews's Freddy begin the disaster through an act of workplace foolishness, accidentally releasing Trioxin while showing off a supposedly secure military container. Their escalating panic provides some of the movie's funniest moments, but their predicament gradually becomes one of its most disturbing elements.

They aren't heroic survivors trying to rescue humanity. They're two ordinary working men who made a terrible mistake and have absolutely no idea how to correct it.

As their exposure to the chemical begins transforming them, the movie shifts from slapstick toward body horror. Their bodies deteriorate, their vital signs disappear, and they gradually confront the possibility that they are already dead. The sequence in which Freddy realizes what is happening to him is particularly effective because it turns the familiar zombie transformation into a conscious experience.

He knows what's happening.

And he can't stop it.

The Most Frightening Zombie in the Movie

For all the movie's punk-rock excesses and dark humor, its most enduring monster may be the creature generally known as Tarman. Emerging from a contaminated military container, Tarman appears to be a decomposing human body held together by little more than black sludge, tendons, and malicious determination.

Unlike the relatively fresh corpses that populated many earlier zombie films, Tarman looks as though death has been working on him for a very long time. His skin hangs from his bones, his movements are grotesquely exaggerated, and his exposed teeth seem permanently fixed in an expression of predatory excitement.

The character was performed by Allan Trautman, and his appearance remains a remarkable example of the effectiveness of practical creature effects. William Stout's production design and the film's makeup-effects artists, including William Munns and Tony Gardner, helped establish a physical world that feels appropriately filthy, decayed, and unpleasant.

Tarman is frightening partly because he seems almost playful. There is something horribly enthusiastic about his pursuit of the living. He doesn't behave like a suffering victim or a mindless organism. He behaves like a creature delighted to have discovered something edible.

And what he wants, of course, is brains.

Why the Zombies Eat Brains

Perhaps the film's most enduring contribution to popular culture is the idea that zombies specifically crave human brains. Although the living dead had been eating human flesh in earlier films, the brain-specific appetite became so closely associated with zombies that many people now assume it was always part of the mythology.

It wasn't.

O'Bannon's movie helped establish the convention, and its explanation is more disturbing than the joke that eventually grew around it. When the surviving characters interrogate a captured female zombie, they discover that the dead remain conscious of their own decomposition. They experience the agony of being dead, and consuming living brains temporarily relieves that pain.

Think about the implications.

These creatures aren't simply monsters driven by appetite. They're suffering beings attempting to escape an unbearable condition. Their violence is motivated by a desire for relief. They kill because existence has become intolerable, and the only available anesthetic is the destruction of someone else's life.

That is a remarkably bleak philosophical proposition for a movie often remembered primarily for its jokes and punk-rock soundtrack.

Romero's zombies can be interpreted as embodiments of consumerism, social conformity, and humanity's inability to escape its own destructive instincts. O'Bannon's zombies are something different. They are conscious sufferers trapped in bodies that will not stop decaying.

Death has not liberated them from pain.

It has made pain permanent.

The movie's comedy becomes considerably darker when viewed through that interpretation. The zombies are not particularly interested in conquering the world or establishing some new social order. They simply want the suffering to stop.

And they will do absolutely anything to make that happen.

The End of the World Is Not a Happy Ending

One of the reasons The Return of the Living Dead has endured is its refusal to provide the audience with a reassuring conclusion. In most conventional horror movies, the survivors eventually discover some weakness in the monster, defeat the immediate threat, and escape to tell the story. Even Romero's bleakest films generally leave open the possibility that humanity might survive somewhere.

O'Bannon offers considerably less encouragement.

As the outbreak escalates, local authorities prove incapable of containing it. The military, which bears responsibility for the original chemical contamination, eventually intervenes with overwhelming force. The solution is essentially to destroy the infected area, eliminating the immediate problem without addressing the larger implications of what has happened.

The ending is both horrifying and absurd. The institutions responsible for creating the disaster respond by making it worse, while treating the resulting destruction as a successful exercise in crisis management.

There is a distinctly Romero-like element of social criticism here, but O'Bannon delivers it through a different sensibility. Romero's institutional failures are often the products of racism, militarism, consumerism, or ordinary human selfishness. O'Bannon's institutions seem incapable of doing anything without accidentally creating a catastrophe.

The government can't contain its chemicals. The warehouse employees can't safely store their inventory. The mortuary can't dispose of the bodies. The emergency responders can't rescue anyone. And the military's ultimate solution only perpetuates the cycle.

It's a world in which every attempt to solve a problem produces a larger problem.

The dead, meanwhile, keep getting hungrier.

Before Zombies Became Everybody's Favorite Monster

It's difficult to communicate to younger viewers just how different the cultural position of zombies was in 1985. Today, the living dead are a familiar component of mainstream entertainment. They've appeared in blockbuster movies, television series, video games, advertising campaigns, Halloween decorations, and practically every conceivable form of merchandise.

In 1985, being a zombie movie enthusiast was a considerably more specialized interest. The genre had its devoted followers, but it had not yet become the enormous cultural industry it would eventually become. Finding obscure titles required effort. Horror magazines, video-store shelves, late-night television broadcasts, and conversations with other fans were important sources of information.

I didn't know anyone in Byron who shared my level of enthusiasm for the genre. I had discovered Romero's movies through that little rental department at Cacciatore's Food Mart, and those films had already convinced me that zombies were capable of expressing ideas considerably more interesting than their reputation suggested.

Romero understood that the living dead were frightening partly because they represented something recognizable about the living. They were consumers, conformists, and creatures of appetite, wandering through a world they no longer understood. They were us, stripped of our pretensions and reduced to our most basic impulses.

O'Bannon took that premise and introduced a new possibility. What if the dead weren't simply mindless reflections of the living? What if they retained consciousness, intelligence, and the capacity to suffer? What if death didn't eliminate the human condition but intensified its worst qualities?

That is a more disturbing idea than the film's reputation for comedy might suggest.

The movie also anticipated changes that would become increasingly important to the genre. Fast-moving zombie-like creatures would eventually become familiar through films such as 28 Days Later (2002) and Zack Snyder's remake of Dawn of the Dead (2004). O'Bannon wasn't the first filmmaker to experiment with speed; Umberto Lenzi's Nightmare City had already introduced fast, violent, contaminated humans in 1980. But Return demonstrated how frightening mobile, intelligent, apparently indestructible undead creatures could be within an American horror comedy.

It also demonstrated that a zombie movie could be funny without surrendering its capacity to frighten.

That may be its greatest accomplishment.

Seven People in a Freezing Theater

More than forty years later, what I remember most clearly about seeing The Return of the Living Dead isn't any particular line of dialogue or special effect. It's the experience of sitting in that freezing theater at CherryVale Mall, surrounded by six strangers, watching something that seemed to have arrived from a completely different cultural universe.

Outside, Northern Illinois was enduring one of those punishing summer days when the pavement seems to radiate heat. My ivory-white Grand Prix was waiting in the parking lot. I had driven myself to the movies for the first time, alone, because seeing this particular film mattered enough to make the trip.

Inside, punk rockers were running around a cemetery, corpses were climbing out of their graves, and everything I thought I knew about zombies was being cheerfully demolished.

I had no idea that the film would eventually become a cult classic, that its characters would appear on T-shirts and posters, or that its innovations would influence decades of zombie entertainment. I didn't know that the punk-rock subculture it depicted would become such an important part of my own understanding of American underground culture.

I only knew that I was watching something I had never seen before.

There is a tendency, when discussing older horror films, to judge them entirely by how they play to contemporary audiences. We remember the jokes, the outrageous costumes, the dated fashions, and the special effects that have become familiar through repeated viewings. We forget the circumstances in which those films first appeared and the impact they could have on someone encountering them without decades of accumulated cultural references.

The Return of the Living Dead is funny. It was funny in 1985, and it remains funny today. Its camp sensibility, grotesque humor, and punk-rock exuberance are essential parts of its appeal.

But I want to make one thing clear.

The first time I saw those zombies run, I wasn't laughing.

And somewhere in the middle of that nearly empty theater, a teenage zombie fanatic from Byron, Illinois, discovered that the living dead still had a few surprises left.

Pin It

 

Zombiethon (1986): When Finding a Zombie Movie Was Half the Fun

Halloween Countdown to Two Million — Day 1

By Thomas L. Vaultonburg

Sometime around 1993, when I was attending Rockford College in Rockford, Illinois, there was a video rental store near campus that I remember as Cinema Centre Video. I believe it was on or near Morsay Drive, although thirty-three years later I'm not going to swear to the precise location. What I remember considerably better is the experience of going there, looking through the horror section, and occasionally finding something I had never seen before.

One of those discoveries was a movie called Zombiethon.

Zombiethon 1986

To appreciate why this mattered, you have to understand that being a zombie movie enthusiast in 1993 was considerably different from being one today. There was no The Walking Dead on AMC. No enormous zombie merchandising industry. No endless streaming catalogues full of films about the living dead. The zombie apocalypse had not yet become a familiar setting for television dramas, video games, comic books, and practically every other form of entertainment.

In fact, people thought it was a little strange that I liked zombie movies so much. They were genuinely curious about what I saw in them. I would try to explain the social commentary in George Romero's films, the consumerism in Dawn of the Dead, the collapse of institutions, the way the living dead represented something uncomfortably familiar about human behavior. Usually, somewhere during this explanation, I could see their eyes beginning to glaze over.

The essential observation about zombies was simple enough: They are us, that's all.

Human appetite stripped of reflection. Creatures moving through the world consuming things without much understanding of why they want them. They have desires but little comprehension of those desires. They are endlessly hungry and never satisfied.

People didn't particularly enjoy hearing that interpretation. In fact, most of them didn't really hear it. They tuned it out.

But Romero understood something important. The zombies weren't necessarily the most frightening things in his movies. The surviving humans, with their territorial disputes, greed, violence, and inability to cooperate, were often considerably worse. The living dead simply made the underlying problem impossible to ignore.

By 1993, I had already been fascinated with the genre for years. But finding new zombie movies wasn't easy.

Every reasonably well-stocked video store had the classics. Night of the Living Dead. Dawn of the Dead. Lucio Fulci's Zombie. Maybe Day of the Dead and a few other familiar titles. But each store might have one or two oddities that nobody else carried. Some obscure Italian production. A cheaply dubbed European horror film. Something with a lurid cover promising unspeakable atrocities that the movie itself could barely afford to deliver.

And occasionally you found something like Zombiethon.

Before the internet, you couldn't simply type the title of a movie into a search engine and locate seventeen places to watch it. If the local video store didn't have it, there wasn't always a practical way to see it. You might encounter a title in a horror magazine, hear someone mention it, or stare at a photograph in a book for years before actually finding a copy.

So the video store became a kind of treasure hunt.

Friday night was the expedition. Get some snacks, pick up some beverages, wander through the aisles, and bring home five or six movies hoping that at least a couple of them would be entertaining. This was a perfectly respectable weekend for a college student. That and coursework, naturally.

There was something wonderful about the uncertainty. You didn't know what you were going to find, and sometimes you didn't even know what you were looking for until you saw the box.

Zombiethon was exactly the sort of movie that rewarded this peculiar method of exploration.

Released in 1986 and directed by Ken Dixon, Zombiethon wasn't really a conventional zombie movie at all. It was a compilation of scenes from other horror films, packaged as a feature-length celebration of the living dead. The project came from the world of Charles Band's Wizard Video, a company that understood the importance of an outrageous title and an even more outrageous VHS box.

The concept was wonderfully economical. Take footage from a collection of existing horror movies, film some new connecting sequences, and sell the resulting compilation as another movie. It was simultaneously entertainment, advertising, and a way to get additional mileage out of films already in the distributor's catalogue.

And somehow, for someone like me, that made perfect sense.

The framing story involves women fleeing assorted monsters and finding themselves inside Los Angeles's El Rey Theatre, where the audience is composed largely of zombies. The undead have apparently decided that the best way to spend an evening is to sit in a movie theater watching other undead creatures terrorize the living.

I have always appreciated this premise. Even after death, people still want to go to the movies.

The featured attractions include substantial excerpts from Fulci's Zombie (1979), Jean Rollin's Zombie Lake (1981), and Jess Franco's Oasis of the Zombies (1982). There are also selections from The Invisible Dead, A Virgin Among the Living Dead, Fear, and Ted V. Mikels's The Astro-Zombies.

If that sounds like a wildly uneven program, it is.

Fulci's Zombie is a genuinely memorable horror film, full of decaying tropical atmosphere, gruesome special effects, and some of the most notorious sequences in Italian horror cinema. Zombiethon includes the famous underwater encounter between a zombie and a shark, as well as the unforgettable scene involving a wooden splinter and a human eyeball.

These are not scenes anyone who has watched them is likely to forget.

Zombie Lake, on the other hand, concerns Nazi zombies emerging from a lake, frequently painted an alarming shade of green. The movie is notorious for its threadbare production and liberal use of nudity. It isn't exactly Citizen Kane, although I suppose Citizen Kane would have been improved considerably by the sudden appearance of several green Nazi zombies.

Oasis of the Zombies offers another variation on the Nazi undead, this time in a desert setting. Its combination of wartime treasure, shambling corpses, and bargain-basement production values is representative of the sort of European exploitation cinema that circulated through American video stores during the 1980s.

And then there's The Astro-Zombies, a 1968 Ted V. Mikels production involving artificial killers and mad science, which stretches the definition of a zombie movie considerably. Other selections are similarly loose in their interpretation of the genre. Evidently, the producers were less interested in establishing a rigorous taxonomy of the living dead than in assembling as much blood, nudity, and general weirdness as possible.

Which, under the circumstances, was probably the correct commercial decision.

The new material connecting the excerpts is just as peculiar as the films themselves. Women wander through strange locations, encounter monsters, and eventually make their way to the theater. At one point, a zombie projectionist has trouble operating the equipment. The undead audience becomes impatient. There is an almost dreamlike quality to the whole production, as though someone had assembled a late-night television horror program after being deprived of sleep for several days.

It isn't particularly coherent. It doesn't need to be.

Modern viewers approaching Zombiethon as a standalone feature might reasonably wonder what the point is. Why watch disconnected excerpts from several movies when you could simply watch the movies themselves?

But that question overlooks the historical circumstances in which something like Zombiethon was useful.

In 1993, I couldn't necessarily watch those movies themselves. Not unless somebody in Rockford happened to have a copy.

A compilation like Zombiethon was a sampler, a catalogue, and a glimpse into a larger world of obscure horror cinema. It introduced viewers to films they might otherwise never encounter. You could see a few minutes of something completely ridiculous and spend the next several years hoping to find the whole movie.

The clips weren't merely substitutes for the original films. They were invitations to go looking for them.

And that was one of the great pleasures of the video store era. The limitations of availability created an entirely different relationship with movies. You couldn't have everything immediately, so finding something felt like an accomplishment. A movie could exist for years as a rumor, a photograph, or a tantalizing title before you finally got to watch it.

Sometimes the movie turned out to be terrible.

That was part of the adventure, too.

I don't want to romanticize every aspect of the old video rental experience. There were plenty of disappointing Friday nights, plenty of movies that couldn't possibly live up to their cover art, and plenty of rental fees spent on productions that probably shouldn't have been made in the first place.

But I miss the treasure hunt.

I miss wandering through an unfamiliar video store and discovering that it had three horror movies I'd never heard of. I miss taking chances on strange titles because there wasn't a website containing thousands of reviews telling me exactly what to expect. I miss the possibility of being genuinely surprised.

Zombiethon was a minor, opportunistic, frequently ridiculous piece of 1980s horror entertainment. It was also precisely the sort of thing that made those Friday nights memorable.

The living dead were never particularly good at explaining their motivations. They just kept wandering around, looking for something that might satisfy them.

Come to think of it, that wasn't so different from me wandering the aisles of Cinema Centre Video on a Friday night in 1993.

Except I usually came home with six movies and a bag of snacks.

And I had to return the movies by Monday.

Pin It

Wild Cogs: Haiku by Thomas L. Vaultonburg and Tré

 

Wild Cogs: Haiku by Thomas L. Vaultonburg and Tré

Wild Cogs is a small book that came out of SECOND NATURE, our October 2026 Fall ArtScene exhibition at Rockford Art Deli.

For SECOND NATURE, Rockford artist Michael Zant created sculptures of animals and other forms from salvaged metal—the discarded mechanical stuff of human life reassembled into birds, bears, frogs, turtles, insects, and other creatures.

Tré and I wrote haiku to accompany Michael’s sculptures.

We approached the poems the same way we approached our earlier book Moonscape: Haiku Phase I: two poets looking at the same world from slightly different places. The haiku alternate between us, sometimes answering one another, sometimes wandering off in different directions.

Those poems became Wild Cogs, a 40-page pocket-sized collection published by Wolf Twin Books.

Here are a few of the conversations from the book.

Pawpaw

pawpaw season—
the road home
sweet on our hands

Thomas L. Vaultonburg

our mouths travel
over wild custard—
picaresque

Tré

pairings

Frog, turtle, salamander

Plum Blossom

first plum blossom—
I almost tell you
everything again

Thomas L. Vaultonburg

not letting go
ice over
plum petals

Tré

Bear claw, lotus flower, dragonfly

The idea behind SECOND NATURE was simple: take what we've discarded and return it to the living world.

Michael did that with metal. Tré and I tried to do it with words.

The result is Wild Cogs—a little handmade record of the strange intersection between machinery, animals, poetry, friendship, and the natural world.

Wild Cogs
Thomas L. Vaultonburg & Tré
Wolf Twin Books, 2026
40 pages
$10

Pin It

 

Why Did America Stop Being Weird?

There was a time when every American city seemed to contain at least one store that made no economic sense. It might sell used records, military surplus, incense, old magazines, model trains, taxidermy, comic books, pornography, fishing equipment and three objects nobody could identify. The owner was usually behind the counter, and the owner was also usually the reason you went there. There were local television personalities who were famous within a radius of perhaps forty miles, radio DJs who chose their own records, restaurants decorated by somebody who had apparently never encountered the concept of interior design, and newspapers that ran columns written by genuine eccentrics. Every town had buildings modified so many times that nobody could remember what they originally looked like. You could encounter a hand-painted sign advertising a business whose purpose remained mysterious even after you had read it.

Uncle Don's Terror Theater Rockford, Illinois

America was weird, and I don't mean that nostalgically in the usual sense. Plenty of things were worse. Downtowns could be filthy. Local newspapers could be terrible. Weird little stores often smelled weird for perfectly good reasons. Television offered three channels, two of which might be showing golf. If you wanted a particular book or record and nobody in town carried it, you might simply never find it. But American life once possessed an enormous amount of unintentional regional variation. Rockford didn't quite look like Milwaukee. Milwaukee didn't quite look like Madison. Madison didn't quite look like Des Moines. The differences weren't planned by tourism bureaus. Nobody had hired a consultant to develop an "authentic local identity." They happened because places were partially isolated from one another, and strange things flourish in isolation.

The Great Flattening

The obvious suspect is the internet, but blaming the internet is too easy. The flattening had begun long before most of us got online. Interstate highways moved commercial life toward exits. Shopping malls pulled stores away from downtown. National chains learned how to reproduce exactly the same environment hundreds and eventually thousands of times. Consolidation transformed radio. Local newspapers weakened. Walmart and other giant retailers replaced thousands of peculiar little stores with extremely efficient enormous ones. The internet finished a job already underway.

In the 1980's TNT had a night of TV called 100% weird

That is one of the great ironies of the digital age, because the internet was supposed to produce exactly the opposite result. Suddenly everyone could publish. Everyone could broadcast. Everyone could find everyone else. A kid in Rockford interested in an obscure Japanese noise band no longer had to hope that one battered cassette somehow reached northern Illinois. The entire history of recorded music was becoming available to everybody. This should have caused an explosion of weirdness. Instead, we eventually built a handful of enormous machines that became remarkably good at showing millions of people the same things. The old gatekeepers disappeared, and then we discovered algorithms.

Part of the old weirdness came from inefficiency. Consider local television. Stations needed hours of inexpensive programming, so somebody might be hired to host old horror movies on Saturday night. The budget was approximately eleven dollars. The set looked like something constructed backstage during a high-school play. The host invented a character, told jokes, interviewed a local wrestler, showed a terrible movie and became a celebrity in three counties. Nobody in New York had approved this, and that was important. The same thing happened in radio. A DJ could decide that some peculiar song deserved to be played. A record-store employee could put something unfamiliar near the register because he liked it. An alternative newspaper could devote 1,500 words to a local performance artist because the editor happened to think the person was interesting.

Most of these decisions went nowhere. That's the part nostalgia edits out. For every strange local institution people still remember fondly, there were dozens of lousy ideas, incompetent businesses and boring programs. But failure was inexpensive enough that weird things could survive. Modern culture is much better at measuring attention. That sounds like progress until you consider what measurement does to behavior. If every article, photograph, song and video immediately produces numbers telling you whether people liked it, the temptation to make the next thing resemble the thing that produced the best numbers becomes enormous. Eventually the audience isn't merely consuming culture. It is training it.

When Weirdness Becomes a Format

The algorithm doesn't hate weirdness. That's almost worse. It loves weirdness that performs. A genuinely strange person can become enormously successful online. An obscure hobby can suddenly acquire millions of viewers. Something made in a basement in Rockford can reach Tokyo before dinner. None of that was possible in the world I am describing. But once something succeeds, the machinery surrounding it immediately begins manufacturing versions of it. One person restores an abandoned cabin and soon there are ten thousand abandoned-cabin channels. Somebody films himself silently cooking beside a river and suddenly half the internet is silently cooking beside rivers. A peculiar visual style catches people's attention and within weeks it has become an aesthetic category.

The strange thing becomes a format, and formats are the natural enemy of weirdness because real weirdness doesn't know what category it belongs in yet. I miss stores that operated on this principle, particularly stores that appeared to have no business model. You could walk into one and immediately wonder how the rent was being paid. There might be six customers all afternoon. The inventory looked as though it had accumulated geologically. Nothing matched. Prices were written in pencil. Somewhere in the back was an object that had probably been there since the Carter administration.

Amazon is infinitely better at selling you the thing you already know you want. The weird store was better at showing you something you didn't know existed. That difference is larger than it appears. Recommendation systems are extraordinarily sophisticated, but they are still recommendations. They begin with information about you: what you searched for, what you watched, what people similar to you bought. The dusty store had no idea who you were. Neither did the garage sale. Neither did the library shelf. Neither did the box of records somebody put on the curb. Discovery used to involve more collision. You went looking for one thing and came home with another.

The Geography of Weirdness

Walking around Rockford for years has made me increasingly interested in the physical remnants of this older America, and not necessarily the grand buildings. The small evidence is often better: a faded sign painted on brick, a storefront whose shape reveals the business that occupied it forty years ago, a staircase leading to an apartment that no longer exists, a little building sitting at an angle because it predates everything surrounding it, an abandoned chair beside the road, a bicycle pulled from the river. It is the accumulated archaeology of people improvising their lives.

These things interest me partly because they haven't been optimized. Nobody placed the chair there to improve my experience. It is simply there. That may be why walking has become one of my favorite ways of encountering a city. A car turns geography into destinations. The internet does something similar to information. You announce where you want to go, and a machine efficiently takes you there. Walking is inefficient because you have to pass everything in between, and the in-between is where the weird stuff lives.

Something else changed when everybody acquired a camera and an audience: we became more aware of how things look from outside. Restaurants now know customers will photograph the food. Businesses know their interiors will appear online. Artists know the opening will be documented. People know almost any public moment can become content. Even places trying to look weird frequently possess the same professionally designed version of weirdness: mural here, exposed brick there, Edison bulbs overhead, ironic object attached to wall. We have become extraordinarily good at signaling authenticity.

Actual authenticity was usually less photogenic. The old neighborhood tavern wasn't trying to resemble an old neighborhood tavern. It just hadn't been remodeled since 1974. The eccentric shopkeeper wasn't cultivating a personal brand. He was a man who wanted to talk about Civil War bayonets for forty-five minutes even though you had clearly indicated several times that you needed to leave. Nobody called him a creator. He was just Bob.

Maybe America Is Still Weird

There is a danger in arguments like this. Every generation eventually decides the world of its youth was richer, stranger and more authentic than the world that replaced it. The people who grew up before television probably thought television destroyed something. They were right about some things and wrong about others. America has not actually stopped being weird. I've walked enough streets to know better. People are still making inexplicable things in garages. They're still painting strange signs, collecting objects nobody else values, opening businesses everyone tells them will fail, writing poems nobody requested, playing music nobody knows how to categorize and constructing elaborate private worlds that may never attract more than twelve participants.

Maybe weirdness hasn't disappeared. Maybe it has become harder to see because the normal world has become so much louder. The strange little store now competes visually with a thousand corporate signs. The local musician competes with every musician who ever recorded anything. The neighborhood eccentric competes with professional eccentrics whose job is being eccentric for millions of followers. And yet the real thing persists.

This may be another reason I keep returning to the same streets. Online, somebody is always trying to show me something. Outside, most things don't care whether I notice them. A weed comes through a crack in the sidewalk without developing a content strategy. Somebody leaves a freezer in an alley. A blackbird pulls something from the mud. An old industrial building loses another window. A hand-painted sign fades one summer further toward illegibility. None of it has been selected for me, and that increasingly feels luxurious.

Perhaps America didn't stop being weird. Perhaps we built systems that became extremely efficient at directing our attention toward whatever everybody else was already looking at. The weird America is still underneath that layer: in alleys, basements, garages, small presses, old buildings, flea markets, independent stores, forgotten websites and conversations with people who have never considered whether what they're saying might perform well. You can still find it. The trick may be to stop asking the machine where to look.

Pin It

 

SECOND NATURE: Salvaged Metal Sculpture and Haiku at Rockford Art Deli

Michael Zant + Tré + Thomas L. Vaultonburg
A benefit for Wild Roots

On October 2 and 3, Rockford Art Deli will host SECOND NATURE, an exhibition bringing together the salvaged-metal animal sculptures of Michael Zant and the haiku of Tré and Thomas L. Vaultonburg of Wolf Twin Books.

Created from reclaimed and repurposed materials, each of Michael’s sculptures will be accompanied by two original haiku—one written by Tré and one by Vaultonburg—inspired by the animal or wild creature it depicts. The exhibition celebrates the wild lives around us, the possibilities hidden within discarded things, and the idea that everything deserves a second nature.

Michael builds his animals from metal objects that have already lived one life. Chains become tentacles. Old tools become claws, wings, legs, and bones. Parts once designed for work or machinery are rearranged until they begin to resemble something living. The finished sculptures retain the history of their materials while acquiring personalities of their own.

The haiku approach the same animals from two different directions. Tré and Vaultonburg have collaborated before, most notably on Moonscape: Haiku Phase I, but SECOND NATURE gives that collaboration a new structure. Each poet responds independently to the same sculpture, creating a small conversation beside it. Sometimes the two poems occupy the same landscape. Sometimes they wander into entirely different worlds.

For Michael’s bear sculpture, Vaultonburg imagines a mother recording her family in the forest:

with one paw Mama Bear
carves in pine the names of
all five of her cubs

—Thomas L. Vaultonburg

Tré finds another bear who has become perhaps a little too comfortable around people:

veteran camper—
a black bear sitting
at the picnic table

—Tré

A sculpture with chains for tentacles inspired a pairing that moves from the history of the material into the strange physical presence of an octopus:

old chains
remembering how
to be tentacles

—Thomas L. Vaultonburg

tasting the shape
of my face
all eight arms

—Tré

These poems will not be presented as conventional framed pieces hanging at a safe distance from the art. They will appear on small, simple displays beside the sculptures. The presentation is intentionally modest and low-tech, allowing the salvaged metal, the animals, and the words to remain the center of attention.

The project grew naturally from the shared interests of the three artists. Michael Zant transforms discarded materials into representations of living creatures. Tré and Vaultonburg write poems grounded in animals, seasons, observation, and the Midwestern landscape. Together, the sculptures and haiku ask viewers to look again—not only at things that have been thrown away, but at the wild lives that continue around us whether we notice them or not.

SECOND NATURE is also a benefit for Wild Roots. Copies of Vaultonburg’s 2026 haiku collection, Vanished Roads, will be available at Rockford Art Deli, with $10 from every copy sold there donated to Wild Roots.

The exhibition is part of Rockford’s Fall ArtScene and is free to attend.

SECOND NATURE
Salvaged Metal Sculpture & Haiku
Michael Zant + Tré + Thomas L. Vaultonburg

Friday, October 2, 2026: 5–9 p.m.
Saturday, October 3, 2026: 4–9 p.m.

Rockford Art Deli
402 E. State St.
Rockford, Illinois

Admission is free.

More information: Rockford Art Deli

Pin It

 

Hike You!: The Office Chair on Broadway

There are certain streets in Rockford you only really get to know by walking them.

Broadway is one of those streets. It isn’t part of every walk we take, but when we stretch things out and make a longer circuit through the city, Broadway often becomes part of the route. Walking it is different from driving it. At thirty miles an hour, storefronts become scenery. On foot, individual windows begin to announce themselves.

One of those windows belonged to the old Zant Office Equipment building.

Inside was a unique office chair.

Not an especially dramatic discovery. Not a monument, historic building, mural, or spectacular piece of architecture. Just an unusual chair sitting behind glass in a former office-equipment store. But after passing it enough times, the chair began to seem less like inventory and more like a survivor from another era.

That is essentially how Hike You! works.

The project grew out of six years of walking Rockford and paying attention to things that would ordinarily be passed without a second thought. Ryan Davis photographs what we encounter. I write haiku from those encounters. Sometimes the subject is beautiful in the conventional sense. Sometimes it is strange, neglected, funny, accidental, or so ordinary that noticing it at all becomes the point.

The chair in the Zant window had a particularly strong personality.

Something about it immediately suggested the American office of the 1980s: fluorescent lights, beige walls, wood-grain desks, metal filing cabinets, shoulder pads, coffee that had been sitting on a burner since 7:15 in the morning. It seemed to belong to a world of interoffice memos, Rolodexes, landlines, carbon copies, and people being summoned into somebody’s office.

And once that atmosphere appeared, the haiku followed.

The typography became part of the joke. Rather than treating the poem as something floating serenely over the photograph, the lettering participates in the period. The font belongs to the same imagined office world as the chair. Image, poem, and design all lean toward the same slightly absurd memory of corporate America.

That combination is important to Hike You!. These pieces aren’t intended simply as photographs with poems printed on them. The photograph provides one way of seeing the object. The haiku provides another. Sometimes the design itself becomes a third voice.

And then, occasionally, the city adds another layer long after the walk is over.

The Zant name has recently wandered back into my life in an entirely different context. I’m currently collaborating with Michael Zant, a member of the Zant family, on a salvaged-metal opossum sculpture for another Fall ArtScene exhibition at the Rockford Public Library. Michael constructs animals from discarded and reclaimed metal; I’m contributing the accompanying haiku.

There was no grand plan connecting these things.

Years ago, we walked down Broadway. We noticed a strange office chair in the window of Zant Office Equipment. Ryan photographed it. I wrote a haiku. It became one of the pieces in Hike You!

Now I’m working with a Zant on an opossum made out of salvaged metal.

That is Rockford.

Walk around it long enough and the city begins folding back on itself. A name on an old storefront becomes a person you work with years later. An obsolete office chair becomes art. Scrap metal becomes an animal. A street you have traveled hundreds of times produces something you had never noticed before.

None of this requires going very far.

It only requires going slowly enough to see it.

Hike You!
Thomas L. Vaultonburg + Ryan Davis
Fall ArtScene 2026
Rockford, Illinois

Pin It

My Absolutely True Alice's Restaurant Story

I grew up with Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant Massacree." I knew the song. I knew the movie. I knew about Alice and Ray living in the old church and Arlo getting himself into trouble because of a large quantity of garbage.

This becomes relevant.

I met Jenny at Castaways, a dive bar in Rockford that my brother and I owned. She came in with a group of women who were organizing the Rockford Rage Roller Derby, and I believe she was something like the fifth woman to join the league. Castaways became their unofficial headquarters for a while, and Jenny was one of the people who started turning up regularly.

I didn't know it then, but our orbits were on a collision course for the next fourteen years.

After Castaways closed its doors, I was between lives. Jenny had done some posters for the Rage, and I remembered liking them, so one day I contacted her on MySpace.

This was when contacting someone on MySpace was a perfectly reasonable thing for an adult to do.

I told her I was working on a children's book called Atrocious Poems A to Z and asked if she might be interested in illustrating it. "Working on" is probably generous. I had an idea for a children's book called Atrocious Poems A to Z, which is not exactly the same thing as having a children's book called Atrocious Poems A to Z.

Less than a week later, Jenny sent me an illustration for the first poem.

"A is for Asparagus."

It was perfect.

This presented me with an immediate problem because now I actually had to write the book.

So I did.

Jenny and I began spending more time together, and eventually I learned that she and her husband Dan lived in an old Lutheran church in Pecatonica, Illinois.

The first time I walked into the place, I knew immediately that I had entered Alice's Restaurant.

Not metaphorically. I mean there was the church.

It still had its stained-glass windows. It still had a stage at the front where sermons, performances, announcements and whatever else Lutheran congregations do from stages had once emanated. The building was enormous, but Jenny and Dan essentially lived in only two areas of it. Most of the rest of the building was still just this cavernous old church surrounding the relatively small portion where two people were actually conducting their lives.

And I had seen this movie.

I knew where this kind of thing could lead.

At first the similarities were amusing. Arlo had Alice and Ray living in a church. I had Jenny and Dan living in a church. There were artists and unconventional people involved. There was a general feeling that ordinary residential architecture had somehow been rejected as insufficient for the situation.

Then I learned another little detail.

Arlo Guthrie and Alice Brock had written a children's book together, Mooses Come Walking.

Jenny and I were writing a children's book together.

Now, I am willing to tolerate a certain amount of coincidence from the universe. You have to. Otherwise you start becoming the kind of person who finds messages intended specifically for you in the license plates of passing automobiles.

So I let that one go.

Eventually Jenny invited me over to mow the lawn.

This is one of those sentences that doesn't sound particularly important when you say it, but in retrospect there aren't that many people in your life whose lawn you begin mowing at an abandoned Lutheran church.

Shortly after Jenny and I had become very close, Dan, who had been the city manager of Pecatonica, got a job in the oil industry in Houston. They were moving to Texas, and they were moving fast.

So fast, in fact, that they hired me to clean out the church.

This is where anyone familiar with "Alice's Restaurant" should begin experiencing some concern on my behalf.

There was a lot of stuff in that church.

Some of it had apparently been sitting in the basement for decades. There were books. There was paperwork. There was glassware. There were assorted objects whose usefulness had expired so long ago that nobody was quite sure what their usefulness had originally been. Much of it was already moldy and unpleasant before I ever touched it.

I hauled it out.

And hauled it out.

And hauled it out.

Eventually I had everything that needed to go outside, bagged and ready for the city to collect.

Jenny and Dan were headed for Houston. The church was cleaned out. My work was finished.

Except it wasn't.

Because a thunderstorm came through.

The rain soaked the garbage.

Now, garbage that has been sitting in the basement of an old Lutheran church for several decades is not improved by the addition of water. Nobody has ever opened a bag containing moldy paperwork, old books and miscellaneous church debris, poured several gallons of rainwater into it and said, "There. Much better."

The city of Pecatonica took one look at the situation and declined to take the garbage.

It would have to be rebagged.

And this was the moment when the universe stopped being subtle.

I had grown up listening to "Alice's Restaurant." I knew exactly what happened when Arlo Guthrie had to get rid of the garbage from Alice's church. I had been aware of the parallels from the first time I walked into Jenny's church.

But up until this point, they had been cute.

Now I was being sent back to a church to deal with a municipal garbage problem.

There are billions of people on Earth. Most of them will live their entire lives without having this experience.

I drove back to Pecatonica.

I bought industrial garbage bags.

And I spent about half a day taking decades worth of rain-soaked, moldy Lutheran garbage and putting it into new bags so the city would agree to haul it away.

No police officers arrived.

I was not arrested.

There were no aerial photographs.

There were no twenty-seven eight-by-ten color glossy photographs with circles and arrows.

Nobody asked me whether I had rehabilitated myself.

I just rebagged the garbage.

Eventually the city took it away.

As far as I know, this leaves Arlo Guthrie and me as two of the very few people in American history who have found themselves involved in a complicated garbage-disposal situation arising from an old church occupied by unconventional people, with the added coincidence that both situations somehow involved children's books.

Arlo got a song and a movie out of his.

I got Atrocious Poems A to Z.

Jenny spent the next two years in Houston. When she returned, we began our life together. So unlike the movie, this wasn't the end of anything. It was the beginning.

But before any of that could happen, the garbage had to be picked up.

And apparently, if you live in an old church, there's only one kind of person you should call when that happens.

Arlo Guthrie wasn't available. 

Pin It

Flesh Wounds by Thomas L. Vaultonburg | Zombie Logic Press

Flesh Wounds may be Thomas L. Vaultonburg's most autobiographical collection. Written between 1997 and 2004, the poems emerge directly from the years following his mother's death, a period spent working behind bars, in restaurants, strip clubs, country clubs, sports bars, warehouses, and eventually in a tavern he owned with his brother.

Unlike many collections that spend years being revised and refined, Flesh Wounds feels immediate. These poems were not excavated from decades of notebooks and polished into literary artifacts. They were written close to the experiences that inspired them, preserving their rough edges, contradictions, and emotional honesty.

The collection takes its title seriously. The wounds described here are rarely fatal. Instead, they are the daily injuries of ordinary life: failed relationships, dead-end jobs, bad judgment, loneliness, humiliation, lust, disappointment, and self-inflicted damage. Yet the poems refuse tragedy in its conventional form. Again and again, humor appears where despair ought to be. The speaker is frequently reckless, often cynical, occasionally self-destructive, but almost never self-pitying.

Bukowski's influence is evident, particularly in the attention paid to working-class life, bars, sex, and failure. Yet Flesh Wounds is ultimately less interested in romanticizing excess than documenting it. The bartenders, waitresses, drunks, lovers, managers, hustlers, and dreamers who populate these pages are not literary archetypes. They are people observed at close range during long nights spent serving drinks and watching human beings unravel.

What distinguishes the collection is its dual perspective. The narrator is both participant and witness. He is drinking with the crowd while simultaneously taking notes on it. He is implicated in the chaos he describes, but also detached enough to recognize its absurdity. The result is a voice that can be savage one moment and unexpectedly tender the next.

Viewed alongside later books such as Submerged Structure, Flesh Wounds captures an earlier version of the author: angrier, less guarded, more reckless, and more willing to place himself directly at the center of the story. If Submerged Structure often observes the world from a distance, Flesh Wounds lives inside the collision.

The lasting achievement of the collection is its refusal to separate beauty from damage. The poems recognize that some of the funniest stories, strongest attachments, and most revealing moments emerge from periods of profound disorder. Flesh Wounds is not a celebration of self-destruction, nor is it a warning against it. It is a record of survival written by someone who spent years standing close enough to the fire to know exactly how hot it was.

Buy Flesh Wounds By Thomas L. Vaultonburg At Zombie Logic Press

Pin It