MVPs of Horror: Sherman Howard Recalls Playing Bub the Zombie in 'Day of the Dead'
All week, Yahoo Movies will be catching up with some of the supporting stars of our favorite horror films. Today: The actor who played the Beethoven-loving zombie in George Romero's 1985 undead classic
The veteran stage actor gave Bub an almost childlike innocence
Any ordinary zombie can rip open a person’s chest and feast on the intestines, but it takes a special kind of undead man-eater to appreciate the beauty of a classic Beethoven track. A love for Ludwig Van is one of the many things that separates Bub from the rest of the zombie rabble that stumble and snack their way through 1985’s Day of the Dead, the oft-underrated third entry in George Romero’s pioneering horror franchise. With events unfolding in a military bunker deep beneath a zombie-ravaged Earth where a shrinking band of survivors turn on each other as the horror of their predicament sets in, Day suggests that mankind has become so warped, the most human person inhabiting this setting is actually one of the walking dead.
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Veteran stage actor Sherman Howard (credited onscreen by his birth name, Howard Sherman) nabbed the plum role of Bub, who is nothing less than the Frankenstein’s monster of the Dead movies. Their origin stories are strikingly similar: like the creature dreamed up by Mary Shelley and later popularized by Boris Karloff, Bub is the post-mortem “son” of a death-obsessed mad scientist, Dr. Logan (Richard Liberty), who has kept this surprisingly tame zombie chained up for observation. (Cementing the connection further, Logan is even gifted with the nickname “Frankenstein.”)
Also like Karloff’s monster, Bub is essentially a child at heart, finding pleasure in simple things like leafing through a tattered paperback copy of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, playing with a rotary telephone and listening to a cassette tape recording of one of Beethoven’s majestic symphonies through a pair of beat-up headphones. (All examples of retro-technology that make Day of the Dead a vivid depiction of a post-apocalyptic past, as opposed to a post-apocalyptic future.) “I had a unique opportunity with Bub,” Howard tells Yahoo Movies. “Unlike virtually any other zombie in the genre, I actually had something to do other than lumber around. The great majority of zombies are basically extras with only one function: to try and eat people. In Day of the Dead, Bub actually has some interesting tasks to perform, which gave me a lot more latitude to create a specific character rather than a generic one—which is always the goal as an actor.”
Howard recognized the “unique opportunity” his role presented early on, even before Romero did. As the now 65-year-old actor remembers it, Bub was a barely-defined presence in the original script with only one notable scene: A moment where he attempts to shave himself and ends up cutting his chalky skin to ribbons. When he turned up on set for his first day of shooting, Romero presented him with the aforementioned Stephen King book and telephone, as well as a gun, and had him handle the various items in character. “The most instructive thing George said is that he wanted Bub to have a kind of innocence about him. So in the actual doing of that scene, [I emphasized] the tentativeness and vagueness by which he clumsily attempts these mundane tasks. It’s like watching a dog trying to open a latch on a gate—there’s something inherently endearing about it and that brings a kind of innocence.” When shooting wrapped for the day, Howard recalls Romero pulling him aside and saying something that every supporting actor wants to hear. “He told me, ‘I want more of this character in the movie. If you have any ideas, let me know.’”
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That invitation paved the way for the Beethoven scene, a personal favorite for Howard and one that he had a significant role in shaping. The sequence itself was shot without any tunes blasting through Bub’s headphones requiring Howard to act in concert with the music playing in his own head; afterwards, Romero suggested dubbing Led Zeppelin onto the soundtrack, but the actor recommended going classical instead of classic rock. “I recommended either Beethoven or Mahler and he wisely went with Beethoven. That scene is a genuinely personal moment, because it’s pretty much my own real-life reaction to music. It’s the closest thing I have to a hobby. Bub’s response to music is my response to music. I think I even floated the idea that somehow the music fulfilled his ravenous hunger [for human flesh], but George didn’t go for that.”
If Bub’s encounter with Beethoven remains Howard’s favorite scene, Dead-heads would probably pick the crowd-pleasing climactic moment where his alter-ego kills the bunker’s power-mad despot Captain Rhodes (Joseph Pilato)—one of the rare occasions where audiences actively root for the zombies instead of the humans. It helps that Pilato’s Rhodes is as scummy and hateful as Bub is strangely sweet. Howard, for one, sees echoes of classic Westerns in that final standoff and even imagines a future for Bub in which he becomes a zombified version of the stalwart gunslinger Alan Ladd portrayed in the 1953 Western Shane. “I think Bub does the same thing Shane does at the end of that movie—he walks off into the sunset to do good deeds and kill more bad guys.”
Howard suggested to Romero that Bub’s ravenous hunger for human flesh could be satisfied via music — the director nixed that idea
Despite his significant contributions to cinematic zombie lore, Howard says that the only contemporary zombies he keeps up with are those on AMC’s The Walking Dead. “Life is too short to waste my time watching crap, and, frankly, most movies in this genre are not good movies. But The Walking Dead is well-written, well-acted, well-shot, and is about something. It has all the elements of great cinematic storytelling, and I think that’s why it’s hugely popular.” As far as he’s concerned though, nothing comes close to equaling Romero’s original Night of the Living Dead…not even Day of the Dead. “The first time I saw Night, it just blew my mind. You didn’t expect to see that kind of dimensionality in a horror movie. Every once in awhile, the muse takes hold and somebody stumbles onto something where the result is greater than the sum of its parts. There’s a purity about that first one that I especially appreciate.”
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Howard’s not such a Puritan that he rejects the idea of revisiting Romero’s universe, though. Informed that the director’s son, George Cameron, has recently launched an Indiegogo campaign to fund a Night of the Living Dead prequel, he enthusiastically lobbies for a cameo appearance. “That would be a kick! I’d love to play Bub before he became a zombie.” He even has a backstory all worked out: “I’ve always thought of him as a kind of beat poet or something like that. Maybe a defrocked priest or a soldier who had a dishonorable discharge, probably for fragging an incompetent commanding officer.”
Photos: @Everett Collection
