Frost

Saturday 2/8/25

I'm trying to write/have finished at least eight pieces this weekend. Three film pieces, three short stories, two music pieces. Wrote and moved a sports op-ed yesterday. That will be out tomorrow for the Super Bowl. It's about three in the morning on Saturday now, and I've written two of the film pieces. This is from one of them, which is on 1962's The Brain that Wouldn't Die.

It’s a lovely day and there you are motoring with your lady on the way back to your laboratory where you keep hunks of flesh alive, when you get into a nasty wreck which slices your girl’s head clean off. A decapitation, though, is actually much more favorable than a caving-in, considering what you do and where you were headed (yes!) anyway, so you scoop up your girlfriend’s gourd—being as she is still your girlfriend, because it’s not like anyone broke up with anyone here—and you resume your car ride to the lab, where you bring her severed head back to life so that you may love some more.

This is the for-real premise of director Joseph Green’s 1962 film, The Brain that Wouldn’t Die, to whose title we could append the words, “Because some control-freak guy wouldn’t let it.” Men, right?

Brains being brought back to life has actually been something of a horror trope and tradition, believe it or not, and this film amazingly isn't the gold (mold?) standard of the bottom of the brain barrel. That honor might go to 1968’s They Saved Hitler’s Brain—which makes retaining and reanimating your steady’s head look not so bad by comparison, and that isn’t easy to do.

It’s worth noting that there’d also been this macabre trend of car crash songs around the time of The Brain that Wouldn’t Die, in which young men would even get in the coffin to be with their loves post-vehicular tragedy. Listen, as well, to radio dramas from the 1950s (Brain was completed in 1959 and then sat around like, well, a certain severed head), and you’ll hear plenty of public service advisories warning you to drive safe. Cars were cool, but also scary. Speed was seen as a taker of life.

Now, you could say that scary is one thing, and stupid is another, but The Brain that Wouldn’t Die needs to be seen, and not just to verify that such a film could exist. Schlock is part of the horror medium. There isn’t comedy schlock like there’s horror schlock. And the rub with some of that schlock, at least, is that it’s fun. Knock The Brain that Wouldn’t Die as often as you like, but you’ll be challenged to have a bad time watching it. (There may also be a potential porn genre in all of this, too; perhaps a limbless Bukkake variant for you content creators out there with a title like, say, Frost My Peepers.)