Terry Pratchett once described a walking skeleton as “a zombie who has really let themselves go”. Funny, but it does raise a point: just how damaged can a “walker” be before it simply can’t hold together in one piece any more? I can’t think of an answer beyond the obvious “torn to shreds”, because with the exception of plague victim pseudo-zombies, it doesn’t make any sense that they could move or react to stimuli at all.
I always felt like until major sections started falling off they could motivate.
I suppose all the way up to turned to dust.
Since we are pretending, maybe the virus is self limiting. Stops at a certain point. Not that zombie would be cured, but not getting worse.
Not to inject too much realism into fun zombie discussion, but…zombies already violate laws of physics, So…as much or as little as you want.
I like the idea of skeletons waling around, still looking for brains but having no way to consume them. Forever stymied!
Do zombies decay? I had the notion that zombie flesh was irradiated or otherwise altered is a way that made it unappetizing to bacteria and predators.
Reminds me of the dancing/fighting skeletons in the old Clash of Titans.
Correction: ..Jason and the Argonauts
Which although it looked cool was completely unfaithful to the original Greek myth.
Incidentally most animated skeleton depictions can’t seem to resist showing the costal cartilage linking the sternum to the ribs as completely ossified, which just ain’t the case.
Ligaments and cartiledge are what hold bones together and they’re going to be tougher than either flesh or organs. So for the sake of the discussion, I’m going to say that a fleshless skeleton can continue to walk for some period of time.
They’d be covered with flies very quickly. Maggots would soon infest their flesh, and vultures, crows, and other scavengers would see a free lunch. Bacteria would also have a field day.
The flesh would quickly start to fall apart. I’ve seen people say that you could hole up in a building for a month and they’d no longer be a threat.
In Death Becomes Her, it was shown that, while you are living “forever”, damage is not fixed. So the two leads are walking around with holes in their bodies and such, unable to die.
It;s a comedy, and funny har har. Like the TZ with the immortal guy getting a life sentence in prison. What the movie fails to mention is that everyone else that got the treatment is in the same boat. Iw ant to see the follow up to Garbo and Jim Morrison and see what shape they’re in at the end of the film!
The film is in essence a zombie film, they just forgot to tell the audience.
To be fair, most of the original Greek myths were also unfaithful to the original Greek myths.
Slight tangent:
I remember a horror comic from the Seventies in which a vampire in Africa is attacked by carnivorous ants in his coffin during the daytime. He can’t leave his coffin because of the bright sunlight outside, and all of his flesh is consumed by the ants. The twist: now the skeletonized vampire can’t be killed at all, because he has no heart to be staked!
‘Walkers’ are shown to decompose. ISTM that when their eyes decompose, then no matter how long-‘lived’ the rest of them is, they cannot see to find victims. Also, ‘walkers’ freeze, which was shown in one episode of The Walking Dead. In certain regions, ridding the zombie plague seems simplified.
Of course there are other issues. What happens to the ‘food’ zombies eat?
I would imagine it would have to do with the nature of the zombification.
Rage virus (e.g., 28 Whatevers Later): probably standard human frailty. They’re just really mean.
Space probe gone awry (e.g. Some Timeframe of the Living Dead, Shaun of the Dead): Probably when the brain decays. Once the ligaments start decaying, they’re probably also done for. Even though I’m not sure what the cause was for the zombies in The Walking Dead, I would imagine they would decay similarly, as well.
Wizardy (e.g., the aforementioned Jason and the Argonauts, Army of Darkness): No real limit, since they’re more animated than anything else - they’re held together by magic, not science.
Sprinkle a little pixie dust and it all works out.
Yeah but they keep walking while their backbones were missing a huge chunk.
If they really wanted to do horror with that the person would be immobile forever. Much worse than a paralyzed person…they’d just lie there forever. Unable to move (or probably talk since lungs were mostly gone). Just conscious.
Therein lies the curse of that seemingly great drug that lets them live forever.
(To be clear, I have not seen that movie in 30+ years but I think that is about right)
It shouldn’t even matter that much, everything we do damages and wears on the body in some way. We heal back most of it, but zombies wouldn’t. They’d be blind within weeks, and not able to move in a couple months. Also assuming no body heat they would simply freeze like lamp poles anywhere cold.
My understanding of the potion in Death Becomes Her that that as long as you stay alive you have enhanced (& presumably be free of disease and cancer), but if were injured bad enough to kill you then the zombie aspects kicked in.
My understanding of the potion in Death Becomes Her was that you were basically choosing living death existing as a well-preserved animated corpse. Or did they continue to eat and drink?
Well in The Walking Dead, zombies continue to lumber around the American Southeast in large numbers a decade or more after the initial outbreak.
Zombies are kind of like the trucks and other vehicles coming to life in Maximum Overdrive. There is no simple technical or medical explanation other than “magic” because circa 1980s vehicles simply don’t have technology that can be “hacked” or “remote controlled” to operate autonomously. There’s nothing to physically move the gas/brake pedal or turn the steering wheel if no one is in the driver’s seat.
So if we must come up with a medical / scientific explanation for how zombies work, it would have to be some sort of external organism or technology (or magic) that doesn’t require the body to function as a normal human body would work at either a cellular or macro level, but still requires enough human body mass to remain to make it move around like a marionette.
Nannites! That was the go-to for a while. They seem to have fallen out of fashion. It’s time for a comeback.