Yep. Vultures don’t attack normal humans so why are the going to attach large packs of aggressive live-flesh-eating humans immune to pain or injury?
I guess this should have been obvious to anyone who’s read As I Lay Dying.
I’m not sure I’d quite call it a non-literary horror monster, as the concept of zombies originated from Haitian folklore.
4 Likes
If vultures would feast on zombie flesh, then all the pet dogs out there would do the same. “Smithers, release the hounds!”
To add on to brainflakes comment, the novel “The Magic Island” appeared earlier than the earliest Zombie film, which would add to its literary roots. Godzilla, on the other hand, originated in film.
Because they smell yummy.
I dunno all these “Zombies wouldn’t work cause NATURE” things lately seem to be making some rather odd assumptions and missing a few obvious points. For one is any given carrion eater going to eat carrion that is moving and capable of fighting back? They aren’t really carrion in the regular sense, more similar to a wounded animal (that happens to be rotting to some extent). So I don’t think something like a vulture is going to go after them when there are easier options. The bears might, or any other predator or animal that does at least occasionally hunt. But that kind of ignores the major point of zombies. A zombie isn’t particularly threatening in and of itself. Provided you’re not penned in you can just sort walk away from them slightly faster than you usually would. The threat from zombies comes from two things, persistence and massed numbers. So the bear might very well take down and eat one or even a few zombies. But is it going to take down 200 zombies? Massed in close quarters? Zombies that keep grabbing on it after they’ve been bearvicerated?
The whole train of thought also ignores that a lot of zombie fiction actually deals with this directly. Positing a particular smell, or other outward sign of disease, or behaviors by the zombies (like moving) that would ward off animals and scavengers. As well as some feature of the disease that impedes decay, either halting or slowing it. Even when that’s not necessarily stated out right we can assume its the case in most zombie stories. So basically zombies do rot, but not necessarily at the rate a normal corpse would. And they some how avoid predators/scavengers to enough of an extent to maintain their numbers. We can assume that’s the case, even if the mechanisms aren’t directly addressed, because that’s what we’re seeing on screen.
The idea also seems to assume that the zombie apocalypse happens and there are at that point a fixed number of zombies to deal with. It ignores that, especially where the previously dead or all new dead rise, there’s pretty much a continual introduction of new zombies to the mix. So the zombie population might taper off after the initial pandemic due to decay, scavengers, or human action. But there’s going to be a certain number of new zombies added for the foreseeable future. Which is another thing worth pointing out, most of the zombie fiction we see deals pretty much with the time frame immediately after the pandemic reaches its peak. So basically the point in time where there are the most zombies. Often in a time frame shorter than would be required for decay to knock back their numbers. Whether normal decay, or zombie slower than usual decay. Any one remember a few years back when the similar trend was for statisticians and epidemiologists or whoever to do the math on how quickly the disease would spread and overwhelm the living population? Those guys made a lot of assumptions and neglected a lot of things too, like decay, scavengers, or human efforts to survive. But they often pointed out that the zombies would completely overwhelm or destroy us in just weeks or months. That’s a bit boring narratively, and I don’t necessarily think its realistic. But the take away is a whole lot of zombies to deal with in the short term, with new zombies popping up continually.
3 Likes
That’s why they bite others, to make fresh zombies. And I don’t know if anyone’s noticed, but modern zombies are pretty fucken quick on their feet nowadays. It was pre-90s zombies that were sluggish.
Any vulture that has so much as a nibble on a zombie is going to become zombified. Then regular eating habits don’t even come into it, regardless of what your predilection was. It’s just BRRAAAIIINZZZ all the way.
1 Like
I was, i guess, being more general/philosphical… Indeed of course the concept of zombies comes from folklore and has been used in literature, and also there are some precursors in cinema before Romero, but what he came up with is really something else entirely in my opinion. The horror of it is cinematic and visual rather than the ghost story/gothic literature basis of many other monsters. And to my tastes a zombie movie doesn’t really have to make any sense to be good, since it’s basically a nightmare. The science or magic behind the dead rising can be wildly inconsistant or just unexplained, the zombies can be realistically decaying or they can be some extra with porridge on his face and it can still work 
Ugh, what kind of woolly-headed superstitionist would bring the supernatural into a discussion of the dead rising from their graves with an unholy hunger for human flesh?
4 Likes
Well, many recent zombie stories try to take a purely “scientific/biological infection” route for the mechanics.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
