Ok, so in the new DotD it’s established that Zombie-itis is contracted through bites, and can also be passed on from mother to child. If zombies suddenly turned their desire to eat to desire for sex, could you catch “zombie” as a sexually transmitted disease? Seems like exchange of bodily fluids would do it, and not just saliva.
I would imagine that zombie sex involves a lot of biting.
What if you just visited a zombie glory hole?
Oh dear god, I’m gonna burn for that one…
- Bolding mine
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I’ve always wanted to be the first to do that in a thread. 
It was brought up how inconcievable society would break down overnight due to zombie-ism.
When Louis was bitten by the little girl, he bled out, died, and zombie-fied in one minute flat. When he couldn’t get his wife, he took after a neighbor at a full sprint.
If we are in a densly populated urban area and use a turnover rate of one minute from healthy, live, normal human to zombie who kills, within 20 minutes there are 1,048,576 zombies! (under ideal conditions 
)
True, a bite may not cause immediate death, nor would a zombie immediately catch one human per minute, but the growth rate would undoubtedly be phenomenal.
It’s not the growth rate so much as the transferance from America (I’m just going to assume this is the source) to the likes of Saudi Arabia, Japan, England, and all over the world within the time span of a single day. If it broke out in America (and most likely in one place seeing as how it takes a zombie to make a zombie in this mythos), there’s no way in one day the epidemic could spread worldwide. IF someone was bitten on the way to the airport, most likely they’d be too sick to be allowed on the plane and tossed into quarantine, zombifying before the plane took off. Even if they did get on, they’d die before a long travelling plane got halfway threw it’s flight, thus causing a zombie break out on board, and most likely leading to a crash. All these questions were brought up during 28 Days Later, which answered these questions by saying “It never got off the main island”. Aside from the Americas, the rest of the world would be spared (again, that’s assuming that it takes a zombie to make a zombie, a scenario that tends to lead itself to the belief that it all started with one zombie and not multiple zombies worldwide).
Until knowing what caused the creation of the first zombie(s), the question can’t really be answered.
Rage, probably. Fucking no-talent ripoff merchants.
I’m surprised more people haven’t addressed the ending.
I was quite pleased at their brilliant plot to fortify the bus, get to the boat and “ride off into the sunset.” But all the ingenuity didn’t amount to a hill of beans because they didn’t take the basic precaution of making sure the island was safe. Totally lame.
First, I’ve gotta disagree with the “People act intelligently” part of the OP. I was thinking after the movie that the biggest flaw was that many of the major problems stem from an “idiot plot” (a plot in which most problems would be resolved quickly if the characters didn’t act like idiots).
Idiot Plot elements:
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C. J. taking the visitors prisoner. Hello, dimwit, a dozen armed people would better be able to hold off an attack than three.
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Mekhi and the baby. Luda is dying or dead. Dad knows this, is rational enough to hide her, strap her down for his protection, avoid her bite and muzzle her, yet still seems to think he can save her and/or the baby.
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Teenage girl chases dog into the zombie filled streets.
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Playing sport with shooting zombies instead of methodically thinning them enough for a rescue mission.
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Leaving a heavily fortified safe place because not to would be to die slowly. I gotta go for Matt Frewer, you fight for every second. Stay in the mall and make raids on close by grocery and gun stores, and systematically kill all of the zombies in the area. Build your own little society there in the mall–an island of sorts within the city–while waiting for the zombies to ultimately decay.
As for the problem of the worldwide spread in a day, I had no problem with that. We don’t know the cause of the initial infection, so to assume that there was a single original zombie, or even a single place where the zombies originated would be unfounded. Working backwards from the world-wide spread, we should assume the opposite, that the original infection was worldwide, but affected a relatively small portion of the population.
Even a single individual could easily create roaming hoards in a large city in a day. Remember that the infection would spread exponentially, with each new generation being twice the size of the previous one. A single zombie becomes a million in less than thirty generation. A city the size of Milwaukee being reduced to roaming hoards of zombies and a few enclaves of survivors in a day or two is certainly plausible.
Hey, I’m still wondering why I’d leave a defensible, fortified, decently equipped mall for some idiot’s boat, much less a completely unknown island somewhere in the Great Lakes.
My thought would have been, “Nice knowing you people. Let’s try and rig things so that when you leave, the zombies won’t come swarming into where you exited from; I don’t want to have to risk my neck cleaning out the mall all over again after you guys go out there to die somewhere.”
The idea that zombies could just shuffle around for YEARS terrifies me all over again. Six months living in a mall or an underground military base is bad enough. The idea that I might have to risk my neck for supplies, even years after the fact… jeez.
Which kind of reinforces my original point: one of the horror factors of these movies is the THOUGHT and DISCUSSION they generate, you know? I mean, this thread has been bobbing around on page one of its section ever since the movie came out! Now how many of us have gone to see horror movies where, two weeks later, we couldn’t even give a coherent description of the plot?
Kind of defines “forgettable,” doesn’t it?
Maybe they saw The Road Warrior, but forgot about using misdirection.
In this version of DotD, was it ever established that the zombies are trying to eat human flesh? It looks like they savagely attack (which includes lots of biting), but the state of the zombies does not look like much eating has gone on. It looks like everyone who was bitten, somehow escaped somewhere to die before being consumed. I can’t figure out how the little girl at the beginning managed to escape a crazed attack with only some lip bites.
The rate of spreading does seem too fast. How long would it take for sprinting zombies to cross the country, not counting the wasted time to bite a few people along the way. And why would they keep sprinting when they reach an uninhabited area. Even if spread through airports, people in lightly populated areas (not having to deal with undead rising from cemetaries) would know what is going on through the media before it reached them.
If they were running out of food at the mall, why not use some of the fresh meat roaming the parking lot. What was that dog eating to survive before being found? They just need to cook it long enough to kill the germs. Or do zombie germs also rise from the dead.
In the original DotD, as the swat guys enter the mall a zombie manages to take away one of the assault rifles.
Later, as in weeks to months later, the bikers break in, letting in some zombies…including the same zombie who is STILL holding onto the assault rifle…and gives THAT up for the hunting rifle. And he’s still in pretty good shape for being undead so long.
“The only one who could miss with this is the sucker with the bread to buy it.”
Cannibalism is tough enough for people even under the most harrowing of circumstances. Pulling possibly diseased chunks of meat off a strangely animated corpse is not going to be high on my list of things. In fact I’d probably try to eat leather products and books before I went for the animated corpses.
Marc
Actually, one relatively graphic scene comes to mind when Michael was in the sporting goods store. He hears a noise, trades his tire-iron for a mallet and opens the back-room door. A zombie is eating the torso of a mall security guard who, if I recall correctly, has not died yet.
I also think, when Melkhi’s character is at the doors, the first zombie to smack up against the glass certainly appeared to be a victim of more than “assault wounds”. I thought he looked fairly chewed up. Granted, this one is subject to interpretation but the previous mentioned scene is not.
MeanJoe
Not if one of the newcomers should turn into a cannibalistic psycho all of a sudden. CJ doesn’t know what causes people to zombie out at that point; for all he knows, one of them might have it. He may also have seen desperate people hammering at the doors to get in, then zombies doing the same - maybe even the same people. Last but not least, he also knows that the food supplies in the mall will last longer if there’s just the three of them.
He has no reason to think he can’t save the baby right up until the moment it comes out, unless one of the others shoots the zombie Luda before the birth. Once the baby comes out, then he cracks completely.
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3. Teenage girl chases dog into the zombie filled streets.
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I’ll concede that one.
There are hundreds, if not thousands of zombies in the car park. They have about three dozen bullets.
You’re not in their situation. They know that the first mistake they make will be the last. Also, the front doors are made out of glass. I wouldn’t call that heavily fortified.
It was established that the cause was a virus transmitted by bite, and all viral infections have a single point of origin.
Did they have a scene where some guy in a lab managed to isolate a virus or bacteria that caused zombification? I only remember a government official at a press conference saying he “didn’t know” what was causing it. Seeing as how the first zombie couldn’t have been bitten by another zombie maybe it all started some other way?
Marc
I thought a bit about that as well. The one guy who’s pressed up against the glass and the legless zombie had me wondering that as well…niether of these people looked like they would be capable enough to get away from a zombie in their condition. The only thing I can guess is that while they were being eaten, they became zombies themselves, and now their attacker was a new best friend. I mean, if it only takes 30 seconds for someone to become a zombie, how much could one zombie eat in that time? But we do see that if there are enough of them acting at once, they don’t seem to leave much else. Not nearly as graphic as the original, but we do see the poor sap of a security guard get dragged down and made a meal of in the garage and never see his zombified self later. My assumption is the eight or so zombies that got to him tore him apart beyond zombiehood and ate him whole.
They don’t run when in unihabited areas. If you remember, when the survivors were standing on top of the mall looking down, the zombies were just kinda walking threw the parking lot. Even when they were just in the street, they don’t go frenzied till they see food. They just kinda stand around like our good ol’ fashion slow zombies and look zombie-ish till some nummins comes along.
Hmmmm…I don’t know about you, but I’d starve to death before I ate a zombie corpse. Plus, not really knowing how zombification spread, there’s no telling that cooking the meat would kill whatever it is that causes it. Like having sex with a zombie, it’s just a risk better not taken.
I believe he was referring to Andy’s gun store filled with an arsenal of ammo. Plus, there have been several mentions in this thread regarding ways to create molotov cocktails or other incindiary devices to use.
Pretty much everything can be resolved with “the mind breaks under severe stress and situations.” This particular part, I didn’t really have a problem with. I would expect them to try harder at wiping out the denizens bellow, but after a while, you have to admit, you’d be looking for some way of making the procedure less monotonous. My thing was that Andy first off a couple shots to get their attention, and shoots into the air…why not put those two bullets to use and shoot downwards? And has been pointed out, the few in the mall didn’t have enough amo to do any good, Andy was the only one who could waste time shooting zombies all day, and who’s to say he didn’t while the movie was too busy focusing on everyone else?
f course, they could have dropped heavy shit on the zombies from the roof…a ten pound wieght from thirty feet up can do some pretty intense damage on the human skull.
But see, without the explaination, it doesn’t really make sense. The original stated that dead bodies everywhere were popping up and attacking people. According to this movie’s mythos, though, it seems only living people can become zombies. If that’s the case, it’s highly unlikely that hundreds of people around the world spontaneously developed this never before seen illness at exactly the same time in different locals.
Were I among the survivors, I’d probably argue against the use of fire. To me, there’s too much chance of a flaming zombie stumbling around and starting large-scale fires that would grow rapidly out of control. There wouldn’t be any effective way to fight a building-sized fire, at all.