The Walking Dead - questions with OPEN SPOILERS

It’s especially problematic in 28 Days Later, in which supposedly the virus causes hyper-rage. That doesn’t make sense if the victims don’t tear each other apart. The problem should largely take care of itself. But again, it’s not as though the genre makes sense otherwise. Yet, I can’t help but puzzle over such details.

Like almost everything else in zombie films this can be traced back to George Romero and Night of the Living Dead. His zombies somehow have an innate ability to tell eachother apart from the living. Hell, for the most part they aren’t even aware of the existance of other zombies standing right next to them unless they’re fighting over food. Every director/writer since then has basically copied his zombies while putting their own spin on them.

The smell thing is odd because it suggests the zombies are still breathing, they’d have to be drawing air though their noses in order for their olfactory senses to still function. Ditto for any moans or growls. Personally I think zombie are much creepier when they’re completely silent (apart from sounds caused by their bodily movement). I always imagined that Romero zombies could somehow tell the living apart from the undead by body temp. By the time reanimation occurs (granted this is never consistant) the body has cooled enought that other zombies don’t recognize it as food. This is also one possible explanation as why all the zombies were ignoring the aligator in Day of the Dead (the other being that they all learned to be afraid of it, gators like their meat on the ripe side).

It’s possible that some zombies retain slightly higher brain functions than others. They do retain alot of learned behaviors from life. For example they still know how to walk, crawl, climb, bite, chew, swallow, they can recognize closed doors & boarded up windows as potential entry points, and can apparently lie in wait for prey. Some of them can also remember how to carry and hold objects (like the little girl w/ her teddy bear) they often used in life.

But do they poop?

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=247269&highlight=zombies+poop