My brother and I like to debate and discuss unrealistic hypotheticals, just as an exercise in imagination. Here are the two that we’re currently discussing:
if you’re paralyzed, and you get bitten by a zombie, do you get the ability to walk again?
could a vampire cop enter a residence with a search warrant, even if the owner of the house doesn’t invite him in?
My takes:
yes, because if we’re talking about the dead getting up and moving, I fail to see why a spinal cord injury would still disrupt the electrical impulses that control motor function.
no, because the right to enter the premises isn’t granted by the owner, and human law is an artificial construct that seems to regularly be ignored in pursuit of their own interests, but vampiric dogma seems absolute.
No. There is nothing magical that allows a zombie to bypass severed nerves. If the signal can not get to the muscle then the muscle does not move. Zombies do not regenerate (that I am aware of). The zombie will instead use whatever does work to move towards you as best it can.
No. Someone in the house needs to grant entry. Of course, waving a search warrant in their face will almost certainly have the person grant the vampire entry. But, if no one is there then no.
Although this suggests a follow-up question. Who is able to grant permission for entry that allows the vampire to enter? Does it have to be the owner? Anyone who lives there? Any random person (so, if other police enter can they invite the vampire in)?
#1 I’d argue that everything about movie zombies is magical and so we’re way beyond biochemical locomotion. So I vote Yes.
#2 They would probably have to consult a vampire lawyer because local statutes may differ.
#3 Here’s a related one: what if there are 4 people in the household. Two invite in the vampire, one staunchly refuses to invite the vampire, and the last one is below the local voting age. Does a single refusal negate the invitation? Does voting age or capacity to make decisions matter on the status of the invitation? Or is it majority rules? What about a coerced invitation under duress or glamour?
As seen on Reddit; A fairy invites a vampire into xer home. Vampires have dominion over whoever invites them to their home, and fairies have dominion over anyone who violates the laws of hospitality.
A fairy’s home isn’t actually a home. It’s more like an entire planet, and the fairy population like to trick unwary visitors into getting lost in it. They can also disguise day as night, so the vampire might find himself out in the open field with the sun directly overhead. Fairies are also quick buggers, so they can avoid the vampire’s attacks while giggling at his frustration.
If the vampire knows he’s about to visit a fairy household, he could hypnotize whoever invites him in and make them lead him back out, but that might not be so simple because the fairy homeland is extradimensional. They could be miles away from the exit and he’d still have to endure the sunlight.
We see zombies shamble as they move. They shamble because they are not magical (beyond being undead) and can only move as well as their mangled corpse lets them move.
The zombies in “28 Days Later” had VERY fast zombies but they were completely physically undamaged zombies. They were humans who converted to zombies in moments and still had fully working bodies. Terrifying.
I think it must depend on the cause of the paralysis - if it’s because the spinal cord is damaged or severed, then no (for the same reason that decapitation finishes a zombie); if the paralysis has some other cause, then maybe.
Maybe we can agree that zombies’ mobility has physical limitations based on factors such as decay, loss of limbs, and amount of remaining muscle mass. There may be a lower bound. I don’t recall a lot of zombie movies in which we see animation of exclusively skeletal remains. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but skeletons with no connective tissue don’t have an obvious non-magical way of getting around except inside a large container.
I still think that some non-biomechanical mechanism would be required to support the weight of a decayed body on zombified legs. Maybe there is an upper weight limit. One doesn’t see many morbidly obese zombies outside of video games.
And I also agree that fast zombies are terrifying.
They also weren’t supernatural: the schtick, IIRC, was that it was a really nasty virus. Nothing about the virus altered the human body’s basic functionality; the virus mainly just hit behavior. So for those zombies, paralysis remains.
I also agree that paralysis would remain for zombies in Plants vs. Zombies, if only because zombies in wheelchairs seems completely on-brand.
To be clear…I completely realize this is all made up and there is no “answer.”
That said, in my D&D and fantasy reading skeletons are distinct from zombies. Skeletons are magically animated (think marionette) and zombies are the risen dead. Also, zombies can presumably make more zombies by infecting/“killing” you. Skeletons cannot make more skeletons on their own.
Zombies move at the speed of irony. They slowly stumble and stagger when pursuing prey, but when the prey finds shelter and try to secure themselves, the zombie horde immediately transports to the weakest point of their defense and breaks through.
What if Irony is the main ambulatory force behind zombies? Or at least a contributing force?
I seem to remember more than one example of a single, completely immobile zombie surprise-chomping an extraneous character. A little too ironic, I really do think.
If zombies appear wherever it happens to be the most ironic, then we might conjecture that any zombie with a spinal cord injury who appears onscreen for an attack (ie., name in the closing credits) wouldn’t be able to walk. Otherwise, it would erase the Irony and lead to a contradiction.
Warm Bodies had them although I’m not sure if anyone would consider that a canonical zombie movie; the movie did make a distinction between fleshy and skeletal zombies though:
The fleshy zombies could be cured (by love!); the bonies could not.
