“Civilian arms”
Just rip them off the bodies, people!
My problem is that they’re caled “zombies” when they’re obviously ghouls.
Not saying it would be perfect, but given the choice of some protection vs no protection, I’ll take some protection. If a couple of layers will keep the teeh from penetrating for an extra couple of seconds, that may make the difference between survival and zombification.
As for being attacked by packs, that’s usually stuck me as being the result of poor planning. Especially if you’re talking about the original slow Romero zombies, just stay the hell away from them. Take them out from a distance.
Only if you’re being attacked by leaded figure zombis. 
Why I don’t understand is that they always seem to have some kind of medically trained person in the group, but no one ever seems to suggest that the doctor/nurse/medic/whatever performs a full medical exam on everyone to verify that they’ve not been bitten. Sure, it takes a long time, but when you’re dealing with the survival of the whole human race, it makes sense to take that extra time, just to be sure.
Also, someone always makes the, “Okay, we’d better split up” suggestion. Haven’t these folks ever watched a zombi flick? Don’t they know that’s the absolute last thing you should do?
Disclaimer- Though I keep meaning to, I’ve never seen the original Day Of The Dead. Due to continued fiduciary problems, I haven’t seen the new Dawn or the new Day.
Shooting a shambler (GURPS Horror uses this term to refer to Romero zombies), any where but the head is a waste of ammo. They do not feel pain. They will not stop coming after you. Unless a shot completely destroys a joint, all you’ve done is slow the shambler down. So it has no kneecap. The leg will perform more slowly and with less strength, but it can be made to walk. Take out the other kneecap and all you have is a shambler who is either walking very slowly, or is now crawling after you.
Re Santcuary’s
The classic Dawn has one. But as soon as a small gang of humans puts up barricades to keep out new shamblers and clears the interior of all existing shamblers, their next priority isn’t to go out and lead other humans to the safe area. It’s keeping any other people from finding the mall and trying to take it for themselves. One of the basic premises of Romero’s world is that civilization is almost entirely gone. Packs of humans are busy trying to survive and view other survivors as threats.
Re Animals
It was either classic Dawn or Day which had large alligators walking through the streets of some southern city. Forget additional food, without humans hunting and restricting them, many species would increase and spread to the cities.
Re Decay
Clive Barker has a character mention this in Night Of The Living Dead- London (AFAIK, the various comic series are canonical). A member of the royal family asks ‘They are dead aren’t they? Shouldn’t they eventually rot away?’ ‘Yes. I imagine that they’ll all have decayed to immobility with a year.’ ‘Ah good. Then we Anglicans shall have England to ourselves. As it should be.’
I still don’t get why they just don’t get a bunch of front end loaders and dumptrucks with cages welded around the cabs.
Shit, I would have spent a good couple of hours running down zombies with those trucks in the original DayotD.
That’s interesting, but game rules are designed to make games playable and fun, not to accurately reflect what weapons do. With typical softpoint ammunition that one might buy at Wal-Mart, a weapon as unexotic as the .30-30 is easily capable of blowing a limb off at “typical” zombie-attack range as seen in the movies. Pain doesn’t enter into it.
I was about to start a thread on a similar topic. Fortunately, I did a search…
I just saw 28 Days Later (liked it, didn’t love it) yesterday and read Volumes 1-3 of the comic series The Walking Dead last weekend (it gets mixed reviews based on the writer’s thin characterization and mediocre dialogue).
What bothers me, is that with the slow moving zombie, the characters have to generally perform an act of cliche, horror-movie stupidity to get killed.
Unless the hero is making a bold effort to get food or help someone, there is no reason a zombie should be able to bite them. They are way too slow and stupid.
But because zombie flicks need gore, the writer makes the character temporarliy more stupid than the undead so they can get bitten.
An example of this is when the heroes need to get past an area that is infested with zombies. They generally go into the room, GI JOE style and one of them ineviatbly gets surrounded. Why not open the door and let them come to you? Zombies swarm. That’s what they do. Use the doorway as a choke zone. Deal with them a few at a time, and prevent them from getting behind the group.
I also find it dubious that there would be no secure bunkers. Wouldn’t the US have aircraft carriers at sea that would become one heck of a good command center? Eventually they’d have to port, but with the weaponery on an Aircraft Carrier, they could keep the zombies at bay until they re-supplied?
(Now THAT would make a good zombie movie! Carrier of the Dead)
Also, since I have a zombie crowd assembled, a hijack/question about 28 Days Later:
So, there were no real attacks in Paris or NY, right? That was all a ruse. What about Ireland. Do you think they were there, too? I’d doubt it because the whole thought was they couldn’t cross the seas (unless the birds spread it, as was implied by the death of Hannah’s dad. But wouldn’t you be able to pick up radio broadcasts from Ireland at night in London? I know that when I lived in Lubbock, TX, I could hear bigger stations from San Antonio at night. Do you think they were scrambling signals to keep them quarantined?
Well, it is true that zombies, historically have just been dead people, magically induced to working for free, while ghouls are creature who eat the living. However, film zombies bear as much resemblance to these as Irish elves to the work of J.R.R. Tolkein. I gather the zombies don’t eat just any flesh, but the brains, for some kind of biological reason.
The drop of blood was actually from the infected corpse, not from the bird, so it could be argued that birds are immune to the infection. Perhaps it only infects primates?
The interpretation of zombies in horror movies can be divided into pre-Night of the Living Dead and post-Night of the Living Dead eras. Before the original Night of the Living Dead, zombies traditionally were, as you said, people who were “magically [or drug] induced to working for free” by some evil master like a voodoo priest or mad scientist. They didn’t necessarily have to be dead (a living person could also fall under the evil master’s spell) and usually weren’t cannibalistic. I believe the whole business about zombies being animated dead beings who eat humans became common with Night of the Living Dead (which also likely mixed in lore about ghouls).
Also, I think brain-eating is post-Night of the Living Dead. The zombies in NOTLD weren’t that picky about what body part or organ they wanted to munch on. Brain-eating came in with Return of the Living Dead which is an unrelated ironic off-shoot of the George Romero films.
I should probably note that in the remake of Dawn of the Dead, it was indicated that the Zombie plague had apparently struck worldwide, within a matter of hours.
That, and sources seem to vary as to whether or not anyone who dies after the plague starts rises as a zombie, or only people who died from a zombie bite.
And about wild animals, the Zombie Survival Guide claims that A) animals (including many bacteria) naturaly stay away from zombies, because they can somehow sense the zombie-infected flesh, which is completely toxic to non-humans, and B) zombies will kill and eat animals, too, although they prefer human meat.
Though this is contradicted in the Dawn remake, where animals didn’t seem to fear zombies, and zombies were uninterested in animals.
Best episode of Full Metal Alchemist ever.
If the humans are intelligent and prepared at all, even fast zombies (as in 28 Days Later and the Dawn of the Dead remake) aren’t much of a threat. All you need is a hardened fallback point, hardened vehicles (speed is good, but ideally it should be able to run over a few zombies without conking out), and a large pantry of food and ammo.
That is why in zombie movies, humans are the biggest threat to human surivial. The Strong Black Man can’t hold out against the Biker Gang or Crazed General or Kill-Happy Rednecks because there is no support network or law beyond ‘Nature Red in Tooth and Claw’. This is a Hobbsean Dystopia, the kind of place politicians drag out to justify Divine Right of Kings, or in more modern times fascism or state communism.
If you look at it from a real-world perspective it is not realistic. Humans survived perfectly fine without state coercion and the species didn’t beat itself to death without a functional police state. In the real world, the survivors would band together and we’d go from the Dark Ages to the High Middle Ages pretty damned quick, and the Zombie Plague would eventually become a bad memory and a boon to the cremator’s trade.
I love zombie movies. I even enjoy imagining myself blasting zombie heads like rotten watermelons. Name me a geek who doesn’t. Some of Romero’s films even stand up pretty well as social commentary, if you want to take it that far. But as realistic depictions of the End of Humanity? Not on your life.
Here’s the problem though. Everything eventually dies. Say you are holed up and have wiped out all the local infestation. Eventually you will join their ranks. Whether it be from accident or natural causes once you die you get up and join them.
What Romero touched on and what probably kept the containment of the flesh eaters from happeneing was simple human nature. Most of us would have a hard time putting a bullet through a loved one’s head. When death comes to a friend or family member the first though usually would not be to destroy the brain. If dear old Aunt Jinny had a cardiac arrest in her sleep and rose a few hours later we might not be so prepared for it.
So long as there is another person around you there is a potential Zombie waiting to munch on you. So you hole up with your girl for forty years, sooner or later one will turn over and start feasting on the other.
I wouldn’t be so sure, I have put down my own pets before, and if mrAru were dead, I woulld have no qualms about both plugging him in the head with a gun and cremating the body. If it was possible to pre-set things, I would even have a kiln on the farm set up that it could not just do a large run of pottery but be useful for cremation as well…we have a lovely clay bank and could make ourselves useful after the apocalypse making pottery and bartering it for other goods=) and the same nice hot 24 hour wood fire can bake a body pretty good as well=)
I saw at least one guy wearing chainmaille in LotD (just saw it yesterday), so at least some people thought of it. As someone who wears chain and plate on a regular basis, though, I would like to mention that you can’t wear armour all the time, and that even the best armour is only as strong as its weakest component…in the case of my plate, the leather straps would fail first, and I’m sure a few zombies ripping at it could manage the task. I think that, with creatures like zombies, its far better to have maneuverability.
I got the impression that the zombies in Romero’s world eat any living flesh…hence the “pit fight” dialogue, where they mention using cats and dogs to entice zombies to fight each other for food.
Lots of others have mentioned the problem with using fire, so I’ll skip that. Explosives have the problem of often being just as dangerous to the user as to the target, plus they make a lot of noise which would likely draw more of the things to your area. In LotD, they obviously did clear the area in which they live, but there comes a time when you need to sleep, you need to take downtime…and in that time, zombies, who need no such rest, come back again.
I agree…but that’s why most zombie movies take place shortly after whatever caused the dead to rise in the first place strikes. Even LotD was clearly meant to be set not too long after the events of Night of the Living Dead, hence the “a short time ago” intro sequence.
In response to others, I actually find the “Shambling” zoms more frightening than the speedy zoms, because of their overwhelming nature. Sure, anyone can outrun them, out manuever them, and out think them…but they never stop. They never sleep. And eventually, you’re going to let your guard down, and they’ll be there. God, I love zombie movies 
I’d think there would still be that lingering doubt for a few minutes. Are they really dead now? I mean the early zombie won’t look like a rotting corpse it will look just as yopur loved one did before death. The first mental hurdle is to register that this person who looks ithe same is no longer there.
Now if you can still plug a loved one, well you’d be the exception rather than the rule. You’d be one of the few survivors wondering how the hell mankind got out numbered by a bunch of stupid slow corpses.
Most folks have to go to someone else to put down the family pet. Most forget exactly what meat used to be or how it got into those nice clean packets. Most would even become vegans rather than slaughter an animal to eat. I highly doubt those folks will have it in them to plug a family member in the head.
We all talk tough but most of have been so far removed from the dirty realities of life and death I doubt many would survive the first wave of Zombies.
Even if tehre is martial law and full military sweeps there will be more and more waves to come eventually wearing away the civilized world.