A couple months ago I watched “Night of the Living Dead” for the first time, curious about it since I like horror movies and had heard that this movie was the beginning of the modern idea of “zombies,” even though they were never called that in the movie.
I was thinking about the movie today and something just occurred to me. I haven’t seen that many zombie movies / tv shows, but from what I remember, they say that if a zombie bites you, you’ll become one too - like it’s a transmitted disease. This was definitely the case in “Shaun of the Dead.”
Did that idea come from Night of the Living Dead? Because the people who get bitten definitely become zombies too, but I was just thinking that this could be open to interpretation. The news reports in the movie simply say something about the “recently deceased” coming back to life, and a possible theory is radiation. Couldn’t it also be that the people attacked by the zombies are simply killed, and therefore because they are now “recently deceased” the radiation revives them too? What I’m saying is the zombie bite didn’t transmit the condition, it simply killed the person, allowing the original cause of the zombies to affect them too.
What do you think? I’m sure someone else has written about this but my google-fu failed me. Or is it just widely assumed that the zombie bite transmits the condition?
George Romero deliberately left it ambiguous. The little girl’s father died from gunshot wound but re-animated, the mother was killed by the little girl but re-animated, which would reinforce the radiation theory. Actually, the only one re-animated after a bite was the little girl, herself. Helpful, huh?
BTW, in the original NOTLD, they were called “ghouls,” but a ghoul is a monster who chomps on the dead not the living. Helpful, huh?
You have opened a can of worms, and now you must pay: there will probably be 300 posts before this has run out of steam.
In Walking Dead…did millions of people die of a plague and THEN turn into zombies, or is it a Romero Situation where the zombies and resulting social upheaval killed millions?
And how could 4 seasons pass without the cast talking about it?
In the original Night of the Living Dead, it’s pretty clear that anyone who dies will come back as a zombie, whether they’ve been bitten or not. That’s why the graveyard is full of them.
The idea of the infectious zombie bite probably goes back to NotLD, and the little girl in the basement, but there’s no particular reason, in that film, to think that a zombie’s mouth contains anything more dangerous than would be found in the mouth of any month-old corpse. The little girl could have died of a mundane infection, and then been resurrected by the same agent that’s been bringing back all the other dead people. I’m not sure what movie first explicitly described the zombie bite as the primary mode of transmission.
I’m pretty sure my impression that the bite caused the victim to turn zombie came from Day of the Dead, in which there is some debate about whether a person who amputated his arm just after a bite would turn. But it seems the whole culture had the same impression, and I’ve never heard that scene cited as the reason before.
In one zombie series I’ve read, the zombie bite itself isn’t lethal. All it does is infect you with the zombie virus, which then incubates in your body. From that point on, when you die you’re going to reanimate as a zombie regardless of the cause of your death. So you have a lot of people who are walking around normally who are potential zombies. Even if you managed to kill every existing zombie, you’d have new zombies cropping up for decades afterwards as the infected people died.
(Actually in the book, a lot of people do die from zombie bites. But that’s because having somebody bite chunks out of your body is major trauma. And the mouths of somebody who’s dead and eats corpses is full of all other kinds of germs besides the zombie virus. So the people in the book assumed for a long time that a zombie infection was lethal - and that anyone who didn’t die must not have been infected.)
Night of the Living Dead: The recently deceased are reanimated as hungry, mindless monsters, so anyone who dies is resurrected, no matter the cause of death, except … if the brain is destroyed. I gather the girl died of a bad infection.
The first movie in this sub-genre I recall suggesting that the “zombie/ghoul” condition is spread by a bite, rather than just death, was Dawn of the Dead. That movie still left the real cause of the syndrome vague. The reanimated corpses could have simply died of blood loss or infection. In that 1978 movie, the character Roger (a policeman) is bitten on the leg and his condition deteriorates so quickly, it suggests to the audience that the bite of the risen dead is itself fatal (quicker than even a massive infection), killing the victim in a matter of a few hours, and leading to inescapable zombification.
I haven’t seen the movie in 35 years … but, as I recall, he died the night he was bitten, or at latest, the morning thereafter. If you watch it and can point out a longer timeframe, I’d be fascinated … one of may favorite horror flics.
No, he was still able to help clear the mall of zombies(although he couldn’t walk at that point). He still had a day or two in bed, before dying and turning a short time later.
Romero pretty much set the standard and invented the modern zombie. Before NoTLD, zombies were actually hypnotized people who were forced to work in plantations. If they were black (and the plantation was in Jamaica,) they would also be dipped in flour. Romero’s zombies were actually, at the time, what we would call “ghouls.” Interestingly, ghouls used to be the living dead, while zombies were technically alive. After NoTLD, it switched and ghouls became humans who took a liking to human flesh (see C.H.U.D. or The Hills Have Eyes) and zombies became reanimated corpses. Also, at the time, the book “I am Legend” was also a huge influence on horror and sci-fi, where a pseudo-scientific theory (viruses) were applied to supernatural phenomena (vampirism.)
Then, to complicate matters, Romero and his partner, Dan O’Bannon, split the franchise and each one developed a separate mythology. Romero’s zombies appear to be based on germ theory, while O’Bannon’s sort of continued the radiation idea with the Trioxin chemical, where exposure, not blood contact, could also trigger zombification.
Virtually all zombies today use either one of these mythologies. But, to answer the OP, there is no clear “rule” from NoTLD. It’s more likely that zombification occurs at the plot’s convenience.
I’ve not watched this movie in quite awhile so my memory isn’t the best. He got bit while moving the trucks to block the doors. Later, he is immobile and in a wheelbarrow-of-sorts with his leg bandaged and is helping clear the inside of the mall. During said clearing, another zombie does manage to grab his leg and re-open the wound but I don’t think gets a bite in. As you mentioned, later he is shown in bed and rapidly deteriorating and eventually dies and turns.
It isn’t clear exactly how much time passed, I don’t remember scenes indicating much passage of time but again - foggy memory. My impression now trying to think back was that it was less than 24 hours. (Why would you wait a day or two to clear the inside of the mall once you blocked the doors with the trucks?)
It’s vague (I think on purpose since it plays into the entropy of living in the mall for so long), but I always got the impression that Roger lingered for days if not weeks. Definitely not a single day.
When Siskel & Ebert reviewed Day of the Dead in 1985 they referred to the monsters as ghouls rather than zombies. It’s been so long since I’ve seen either Dawn of the Dead or Day of the Dead that I can’t remember if either one of those movies used the word zombie in dialogue.
Maybe I am wrong but like some other posters have said, he did help clear out the mall and wasn’t he playing video games too? It’s also been awhile since I’ve seen it too but I can’t imagine after being bit, that he could actually do all of that within a matter of hours and then turn.
