Although Sherman Howard has navigated his way through the Star Trek universe on The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager, plus some of the most popular television series' of all time, Howard has one credit in his acting resume that has made him a legend in the cult horror circles. When master zombie filmmaker George Romero cast Sherman Howard as the chosen test subject Bub, the zombie in the original Day of the Dead, it was a role that allowed Howard to claim a spot among some of the greatest horror villains in the history of the genre.

In the spirit of giving thanks by eating flesh from the bones of a turkey, November 27 is also a special day for horror fans as Sherman Howard can be seen once again in George Romero's Day of the Dead as part of Monster HD's "Thanksgiving Day of the Dead" 24 hour marathon, which shambles its way into a broadcast line-up that includes The Rage, Resident Evil, Pet Semetary 1 and 2, Bride of Re-Animator, and all three Return of the Living Dead movies.

It's not often that you get the chance to break flesh with one of the most identifiable and memorable zombies in the Romero universe. So when we caught up with Bub the zombie's alter-ego Sherman Howard for an exclusive one-on-one to celebrate "Thanksgiving Day of the Dead", there was so much bloody horror history to cover that we just dove right into his thoughts on Day of the Dead, playing one of the coolest zombies in history, his thoughts on newer zombie movies like 28 Days/Weeks Later, and the reasons why we're all still so scared of being devoured alive.

THE DEADBOLT: What was it like working with George Romero?

SHERMAN HOWARD: It was a great pleasure. He’s really a lovely human being. He’s just a pleasure to be around, which is not always the case in the entertainment industry. He’s a very lovely guy, very generous, and one of the things I appreciated about him is he really had a very kind of open-minded collaborative spirit to the whole process. He was open to any ideas that actors came up with. So I had a real sense that it was a partnership, rather than some - You know, some directors approach it like they’re the puppeteer and you’re just supposed to hang there on your strings and just shut up and do what you’re told. He couldn’t have more of the opposite of that in approach.

THE DEADBOLT: Did you have any idea at the time that the zombie movies would still be as popular, or even more, twenty years later?

HOWARD: [laughs] No. I mean, I was sort of ignorant of the genre. I had seen Night of the Living Dead, I had not seen Dawn of the Dead, and it just kind of came up as a role I auditioned for like many of a lot of different things. And I got the job and showed up at the set and started doing it. But I wasn’t really conscious of the fan base. So yeah, the whole thing is kind of surprising to me.

THE DEADBOLT: What were some of the challenges of playing Bub?

HOWARD: Well, first of all, just the kind of the pain in the ass factor of getting into the make-up - three and a half hours of sitting there having lots of various things glued onto your skin. However, once that was achieved, I remember the very first time they completed the make-up. I stood in front of the mirror and started moving my face. It was really just astonishing to me how much that foam latex behaves exactly like skin. I mean, it was really just like having a new face. Happily, a temporary one. So I spent some time in front of the mirror sort of experimenting and seeing how different impulses I had would project to the make-up.

As far as the basic problems from an actors point of view, my basic philosophy of acting is to try to recreate reality. In other words, whatever the circumstances are in the script, the first question that you ask yourself, from the question that you ask yourself over and over a thousand different ways, moment by moment every time you go through, is what would really happen? If these circumstances were real, what would really happen? Well, when you’re playing a zombie, the reality is that your flesh is dead yet on some sort of primitive level it’s still working. So the question is, what behavior would that really engender?

THE DEADBOLT: And where did that take you?

HOWARD: Well, there have been thousands of extras where they just kind of grab street people and put them in blue make-up and they all kind of walk with this sort of stiff-armed, open-mouthed gate, which always kind of struck me as a little - Well, not a very accurate. Who knows what accurate is? But, in any event, not a terribly imaginative answer to the question of what would really happen.

So that’s basically what I tried to do is to try to create a [behavior]. Actually, a suggestion that George had was really what put me on the [right track]. You know, Bub has a unique way of moving, a sort of an almost spastic-like quality, which I would describe as "a thousand little impulses a second of overcorrection and under" where you reach for something and you reach too far or you don’t reach far enough, or just the apparatus of eye-hand coordination that properly functioning humans take for granted doesn’t quite work for him.

The thing that George had suggested was that he wanted a quality for Bub that is sort of like an infant. And I had a friend at the time who had just had a baby and I spent some time looking at the baby. It made perfect sense, because they don’t know how all the stuff works yet. They have to learn how to manipulate their fingers. So I just watched that sort of semi-involuntary behavior, the dynamics of semi involuntary movement, and incorporated that into Bub’s way of walking and talking.

THE DEADBOLT: So Tom Savini's make-up must have helped to get you into the proper frame of mind?

HOWARD: Oh, definitely.

THE DEADBOLT: What do you think of the new zombie films like Fido and 28 Days Later, or even the remake of Dawn of the Dead?

HOWARD: Well, the only one I’ve seen is 28 Days Later, which, in the classic sense, I hardly think of as a zombie film. I mean, it’s really an epidemic film. [laughs].

THE DEADBOLT: What threw me off was how they could run so fast.

HOWARD: Well, that’s the thing - they’re not really dead. They’re people that have been infected with a virus that turns people into homicidal maniacs, which is zombie-like in a way. But the thing that I loved about that film is that it was - I mean, the thing that I look for, really, in any film in any genre, is if the world is consistent. You know, if all of the laws of how that imaginary reality, of whatever world that is, really makes sense, which includes the way the characters behave, the way they think, the decisions they make, the way they talk, and the way they walk. You know, does the world feel like a real world? As opposed to the great majority of films.

And again, all genres to start very carefully and thought through, there very often isn’t a very high level of work ethic or imagination. So you just see a lot of things, some which is in the script and some of which is just in the acting and the direction. It just doesn’t make sense. If somebody was in that situation, a car chase, you’re thinking, "What the hell are they running from?" Suddenly, "Oh, there’s a car chase now. Somebody drove fast and the next guy decided to drive fast and doesn’t really have a reason to get away." You know, crap like that. But in 28 Days the rather extreme circumstances of the story didn’t really seem to make sense. There was an internal logic that was pretty consistent, but...

THE DEADBOLT: So why do you think so many people are attracted to zombie movies?

HOWARD: That is a really profound question. Well, I imagine it has something to do with the paradox of mortality. Unlike all other animals, we’re conscious of our eventual demise. And there’s something essentially horrifying and catastrophic in that realization yet we walk around and live our lives in a sort of normal work-a-day mode. I mean, in order to get up and make the coffee and go to work and get your kids to do their homework, you can’t be in a hysterical frame of mind, which basically means we have to live in a state of denial to pretend that we’re immortal [laughs]. And yet the lie in that nagging reality, that indeed the end is nigh, I suppose the whole zombie thing just brings it into focus in a very peculiar way because people are both dead and alive at the same time. And there’s the added thrill factor that they’re trying to eat you.

THE DEADBOLT: Aside from zombie characters, you also do a lot of voice work in video games and animation. What do to you like about that side of the industry?

HOWARD: Well, the great thing about that is that you can just dress the way you dress. You don’t have to shave. You know, it’s fun.

THE DEADBOLT: I've talked to other actors that have said voicing video games can be a pain at times because you have to do so many sound bites that the player might never hear.

HOWARD: Yeah. I remember this one video game, I can’t remember which one, but I had to die about eighty five different ways and I essentially spent a couple of hours screaming and groaning and bellowing and growling. What noise would you make when you’re being disemboweled? What noise do you make when your throat is cut? And with your throat cut, then you’re disemboweled. [laughs] By the end of that particular session I was pretty hoarse.