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The Windy City is NOT having a good day:
#ZombieBearNado vs Sharknado 2: MegaTyphoon (this one will blow you away)
cf. Terry Bisson’s Bears Discover Fire
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Thanks for all the great comments everyone. This is obviously a tongue-in-cheek post meant to highlight the work of my organization, the National Wildlife Federation (we hope you join our efforts to protect wildlife at www.nwf.org). Each week we’ll be releasing another video highlighting how a different kind of wildlife with decimate zombies and save us all!
That said, we haven’t seen any examples of animals being affected by whatever is turning people into zombies in the Walking Dead. Last season there were even dogs shown eating an immobile zombie with no ill effect. This is not the case for all zombie mythologies, but so far, it is in the Walking Dead. Here’s a lot more info on it: http://boingboing.net/2013/10/14/zombiesvsanimals.html
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You are exactly right Shuck. That’s what inspired my to write the original post and to do this video.
I’d take it you haven’t seen Jurassic Park. And are unaware of certain inaccurate theories and science factoids it (and the book) included and then had to walk/explain away in subsequent titles.
Get an agent. Now.
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You are correct, and in the Walking Dead, there’s no evidence of animal zombies.
Rotting zombies are inherently ‘magic zombies’ so their parameters are just entirely made up. No way at all to know what they can do or can be done to them except from what you are told in the story.
Living infected zombies can be kept more plausible, but I have never seen one with any good explanation of how an individual zombie could remain a threat to a human for more than a few weeks, so in reality they are basically all ‘magic zombies’ as well.
However a storyteller can still do the “one suspension of disbelief” method. Given magical zombies with properties X, Y, and Z everything else that happens is plausible.
I think the “World War Z” book does that pretty well. “The Walking Dead” TV series strays regularly (eg on how transmissible the infection is), but is probably better than most tv. I think 28 days later did it well… from what I remember.
A particularly awful example of this comes from a non-zombie movie: “The Invisible Man” with Kevin Bacon. So the invisible man. The invisible man’s super power is that he is invisible, right? Can’t see him. And that’s it. He’s a guy, you can’t see. Maybe he’s also unhappy and desperate and crazy even but his super power is the no-being-seen thing. There is a scene in the movie where he has gone crazy and somebody is fighting him. Hard to fight an invisible guy. You can’t see him after all. So the fight goes along, and there are sprinklers and so forth so that the protagonist can sort of see where the invisible guy is. And the protagonist has a crowbar. Not some wussy crowbar, a full meter long half inch thick steel fireman grade crowbar. Would weigh like 15 pounds. He manages to spot the invisible man and hits him solid on the head with a full strength swing of this crowbar. And invisible-bacon doesn’t’ just die right there. He isn’t on the ground with massive brain damage. His scalp isn’t hanging off his ear. He isn’t even hurt much… can’t remember what happened next, but who really cares. Apparently I am watching the wrong movie. It isn’t “The Invisible Man” its “The Invisible and Immune to Massive Blows to the Head Man”. And who knows what other random super-powers he might have, so why do I care about what is happening in this movie anymore? It’s all just Deus Ex Machina.
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I actually read a recent series that covers live/infected zombies pretty well. DJ Molles (sp?) was the author. I’ve meant to review it. Zombies are living humans infected that retain enough function to essentially be very angry, nasty pack animals that want to eat you. Author frequently compares them to hyena or wolves.
In the infectious-zombie model, it doesn’t matter how long an individual zombie sticks around, as long as it can infect more than one human before it gets too damaged to keep eating more brainz, because that gives you exponential growth.
Before George Romero, the traditional model was that the zombie was a human poisoned and enslaved by an evil voodoo master, and the horror was mostly about what happened to that person, not what it did to everybody else.
Yeah, all zombies, in particular all undead zombies, are inherently magic zombies, whatever the mechanism (if any) that is described as the cause, but as you say, this usually covers even the living ones, as they tend to infect others at impossible speeds and with impossible effects. A rotting zombie implies something about how zombies work, something that’s usually contradicted by other elements of the same narrative. This the the fundamental problem: most zombie narratives aren’t even internally consistent, so there’s no parameters that extend beyond a scene or two. Zombie movies have traditionally been visceral, not intellectual horror movies (and rather cheap ones at that), and the creators are counting on the audience simply not noticing or thinking about the contradictions. This is especially true of the early imitators of Romero’s films, which collectively cemented the somewhat vague set of “rules” for zombies in the popular imagination, even though the rules aren’t actually from any one movie (and they tend to be especially inconsistent with the rules they themselves present in the films).
When I say that “Most zombie narratives don’t even consider or care about [the implications of a rotting zombie],” I don’t just mean they haven’t considered what decay and carrion-eaters would do to zombies (which they haven’t), but that the filmmakers haven’t considered or cared that a rotting zombie contradicts the rest of the film. Generally the movies explicitly show us that zombies are preserved over the long-term - i.e, that they don’t rot or get eaten by animals. They then show us a rotting zombie purely for the shock value, often contradicting their own rules established in other parts of the narrative. The rotting zombie becomes an inexplicable anomaly, given what they’ve shown us. (The worst offender being the film Zombie, aka Zombi 2, which has a voodoo curse cause the dead to rise up. Some of them are absolutely rotten, dripping with maggots - inexplicably including a couple of recently risen conquistadors, dead for some centuries. Apparently the curse restored flesh to their fragmented bones, but it was rotting flesh…)
Yeah, Romero even originally called his undead “ghouls,” since they have absolutely nothing to do with the Voudun/West African zombi(e), but “zombie” got used in talking about them and he quickly adopted the label in subsequent films.
There was an early 20th century zombie movie craze based on then-recent anthropological work coming out of Haiti (e.g. “White Zombie,” 1932). That, in turn, put the zombie in the popular consciousness as a person turned into a mindless slave, which in turn inspired the creation of mid-20th century sci-fi movies where generally a mad scientist or aliens turn (usually living) people into their mindless “zombie” slaves (e.g. “Teenage Zombies,” 1959) or where the term was just used to refer to a generic monster (e.g. “Zombies of the Stratosphere,” 1952). Even though the “zombies” were quite different from Romero’s ghouls, the staggering, mindless dead of “Night of the Living Dead” reminded people of those earlier films.
Well I prefer my zombies truly dead and shuffling. The over-caffeinated ghouls of “28 Days Later” were infected rather than dead, and then we got into the absurd parkour ghouls of Will Smith’s “I Am Legend” which clearly weren’t dead either. In WWZ it was never clear WTF was going on since people became zombies without a resurrection scene but they suddenly had the agility of acrobats.
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Well, if a voodoo curse (magic!) brought them back, I don’t think one need worry about the logic too much.
I like how they did “zombies” in The Last of Us. They never actually call them zombies ingame. Always “infected” “sick” “turned” or “monsters”. The zombies in TLoU never actually die. They’re infected by fungal spores that grow in their brain and take over the host. It’s even referred to as a Cordyceps infection, which exists in real life, and some species of Cordyceps infect insects and mind control them (the zombie ant fungi belong to this genus).
The infected initially don’t get superhuman abilities, but do exercise extreme behaviors when roused to action by prey. As the infection progresses over months to years, the fungus grows chitin plates around the face and head of the victim which makes them armored and enhances fungal control. Eventually, the chitin plates grow all over the victim until they’re practically impervious to small arms fire. They also grow specialized spore-bearing structures they can rip off and throw at prey or attackers to infect or kill.
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Even magic has to have some measure of internal consistency. When the exact same cause has a different effect in some situations, and effects are happening beyond what’s been established for the cause, that’s a writing problem.
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