Zombies & their Lore

[Gben 20]

I recently finished watching World War Z - the Brad Pitt movie. I enjoyed it so much and so I read the book it was based on by Max Brooks. Excellent read.

 

But both experiences left me pondering the zombies motivations.

Why do zombies beget zombies?

 

I like to ask for some information about the general rules concerning zombies in popular culture... because I understand every rule has exceptions.

 

It seems to me that in popular culture, zombies always seem to abandon their current kill when opportunities for fresh meat present themselves.

They don't seem to kill to eat... they seem to attack for the simple purpose of creating more zombies.

 

Zombies always seem to be portrayed as having an aggressive, suicidal drive to replicate...

 

But why???

[Nmenth 290]

Zombies are usually mutated or diseased or at the very least, not right in the head. There does not need to be logic behind their actions because they possess no logic. They do not need to establish a sustainable existence as their existence is not natural.

 

You might equate zombism with rabies, animals with an advanced stage of rabies have heightened aggression and are compelled to attack anything they see. They do not attack for food, and rabies can be spread to their victim via saliva. If rabies was significantly more contagious and had a faster incubation period, it could (sort of) spread like a zombie virus, the infected biting and spreading the diseased until everyone was infected and then, eventually, died.

[Gben 20]

I'm not sure if you we understand each other when you talk about logic? I'm not looking for a zombies internal and/or rational decision making... a conscious decision to spread infection. I merely discussing the purpose or drive or animal instinct, I'm talking on a macro level?

 

BTW in the movie, makes the obvious 'virus' analogy. In the written WWZ, the media initially called the outbreak "African Rabies". However what I didn't like was the way the Zombies interacted with Water. It seemed to offer no barrier or impediment to the Zombies movement. Ironic when rabies' side effects is a 'fear of water'.

 

Something I found interesting in the book was the concept of a slow burn infection... where the bite did not break into the blood stream... and allowed infected to catch a plane and spread across continents for instance. The outbreak in the plane in the movie, was frighteningly well done.

[Nmenth 290]

I'm not sure if you we understand each other when you talk about logic? I'm not looking for a zombies internal and/or rational decision making... a conscious decision to spread infection. I merely discussing the purpose or drive or animal instinct, I'm talking on a macro level?

Maybe we don't understand each other, as I think I answered that and if I didn't, than I don't know what you're asking...

 

Disease doesn't have a 'purpose' beyond spreading, and if the infected have an altered state of mind, they also possess no purpose beyond following the whims of their altered state of mind, so I don't know what more logic you are trying to discover.

 

For my background, I have never watched or read World War Z, and for the most part, am not much of a fan of the zombie theme.

[Nyerguds 100]

Zombies can only be killed by shooting their brains out. Meaning, they need brains to function.

 

Zombies eat brains.

 

Zombies' brain-eaten victims become zombies.

 

...in conclusion, it makes no goddamn sense at all

[Guest Rabbit]

Typically in zombie movies, whether intentional or otherwise, it works as such:

 

Zombies eat brains. When they successfully eat a human brain, it kills the human (permanently, no zombie effect on the human).

 

However, if the zombie infects the human by other means (biting but the human escapes, or a zombie so much as bleeds on the human, depending on the movie or show portraying them), then they turn the human into another zombie.

[AZ-Stalker 88]

Any good reason for that need to eat a living person's brain while we're at it? I also remember Warm Bodies (movie) having somewhat sentient zombies that wanted to eat human brains to feel more alive, gain memories of the person that just lost their brain, feel feelings from those memories and so on. But the "hunger" still existed regardless, so the brain could just be "the best part" not the most important and basic motivating factor behind their human-eating agression. Why not eat other zombies (who also have brains)? Non-circulating bloodstream a problem or what?

[Sonic 295]

Switching gears here..... It has bothered me in recent years how obsessed and over saturated games/movies/TV shows have become with Zombies. Why the sudden craze?

[Gben 20]

Typically in zombie movies, whether intentional or otherwise, it works as such:

 

Zombies eat brains. When they successfully eat a human brain, it kills the human (permanently, no zombie effect on the human).

 

However, if the zombie infects the human by other means (biting but the human escapes, or a zombie so much as bleeds on the human, depending on the movie or show portraying them), then they turn the human into another zombie.

 

Yeah I think this pretty much sums up the basic/vanilla mythology of the 'zombie' universe. Where movies such as 28 Days and WWZ seem to have created a new set of zombies with unclear motivations. I'll have to watch 28 days again. (I remember thinking that the way the used the virus was clever and creative and gave an explanation for the different behaviour. I remember the running zombie was a scary thought... and the bird and blood in the eye was a cruel ending.

 

From wikipedia

 

 

George A. Romero and the modern zombie film

 

 

The modern conception of the zombie owes itself almost entirely to George A. Romero's 1968 film Night of the Living Dead.^[1][13][14] In his films, Romero "bred the zombie with the vampire, and what he got was the hybrid vigour of a ghoulish plague monster".^[15] This entailed an apocalyptic vision of monsters that have come to be known as Romero zombies.

Romero's reinvention of zombies is notable in terms of its thematics; he used zombies not just for their own sake, but as a vehicle "to criticize real-world social ills—such as government ineptitude, bioengineering, slavery, greed and exploitation—while indulging our post-apocalyptic fantasies".^[17]Night was the first of six films in Romero's Living Dead series. Its first sequel, Dawn of the Dead, was released in 1978.

Lucio Fulci's Zombi 2 was released just months after Dawn of the Dead and acted as an unofficial sequel (Dawn of the Dead was released in several other countries as Zombi or Zombie).^[1]

1980s and 1990s

The 1981 film Hell of the Living Dead referenced a mutagenic gas as a source of zombie contagion: an idea also used in Dan O'Bannon's 1985 film Return of the Living Dead. Return of the Living Dead featured zombies that hungered specifically for brains.

The mid-1980s produced few zombie films of note. Perhaps the most notable entry, The Evil Dead series, while highly influential are not technically zombie films but films about demonic possession, despite the presence of the undead. 1985's Re-Animator, loosely based on the Lovecraft story, stood out in the genre, achieving nearly unanimous critical acclaim,^[18] and becoming a modest success, nearly outstripping Romero's Day of the Dead for box office returns.

After the mid-1980s, the subgenre was mostly relegated to the underground. Notable entries include director Peter Jackson's ultra-gory film Braindead (1992) (released as Dead Alive in the U.S.), Bob Balaban's comic 1993 film My Boyfriend's Back where a self-aware high school boy returns to profess his love for a girl and his love for human flesh, and Michele Soavi's Dellamorte Dellamore (1994) (released as Cemetery Man in the U.S.). Several years later, zombies experienced a renaissance in low-budget Asian cinema, with a sudden spate of dissimilar entries including Bio Zombie (1998), Wild Zero (1999), Junk (1999), Versus (2000) and Stacy (2001).

2000s and 2010s

The turn of the millennium coincided with a decade of box-office successes in which the zombie sub-genre experienced a resurgence: the Resident Evil movies (2002, 2004, 2007, 2010, 2012); the Dawn of the Dead remake (2004),^[1] the British films 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later (2002, 2007)^[19][20] and the comedy/homage Shaun of the Dead (2004). The new interest allowed Romero to create the fourth entry in his zombie series: Land of the Dead, released in the summer of 2005. Romero returned to the series with the films Diary of the Dead (2008) and Survival of the Dead (2010).^[1]

Generally the zombies in these situations are the slow, lumbering and unintelligent kind first made popular in Night of the Living Dead.^[21] Motion pictures created within the 2000s, however, like the Dawn of the Dead remake, and House of the Dead,^[22] have featured zombies that are more agile, vicious, intelligent, and stronger than the traditional zombie.^[23] Some are not cannibals craving "brains", but instead behave as "vectors" in spreading the infection to the non-infected, (as in Helix and World War Z). In many cases, these fast-moving zombies are depicted as living humans infected with a mutagenic or mind-altering pathogen (as in 28 Days Later, Zombieland, and Left 4 Dead) as a result of an epidemic or biological agent.

And strangely no mention of MJ's Thriller...

And that's why you can't trust wiki for complete answers kids!