I’m home sick from work today, so in addition to ODing on OJ and crumpling a rainforest’s worth of Kleenex, I’ve been pondering my mortality. Naturally, this segued into pondering the unmortality of certain shambling swarms.
It seems like every zombie movie shows both the ravenous hordes of the undead and the result of any human who strays into their path. But the two scenarios don’t make sense together. Once you get a group of a few dozen zombies together, their victim is completely devoured.
So where are all these walking corpses coming from?
Depends on which zombies you mean. In the Romeroverse, the freshly dead arise to feast on the living. It didn’t seem to be limited only to those who died from zombie bites. So, all the victims of prosaic deats served to swell the ranks of the undead.
In other zombie movies I’ve seen, all the dead were clawing their way out of the grave. In some cemeteries I’ve seen, that’d be thousands of zombies.
I think that this depends on your specific type of zombie. If we’re talking about Night of the Living Dead style weak and slow zombies I can’t see too many of them happening about. Most would be locked inside of a morgue, trapped inside a burial vault etc. Really we’d be dealing with those who died, intact, within a very short time period.
If we’re going with the super speedy, strength of 10 men style zombies, they’re simply breaking out of the structures that are holding the other kind in.
But the events of the movie contradict that. In the beginning, the zombie apartment building is full of zombies who are chewing on little bits of people. Whoever’s arm that was is not 95% intact.
A few of the main characters manage to get bitten and still escape, but about 20 bikers get ripped apart.
Almost universally zombies attack any living human, but maybe they only EAT when they are hungry/have room in their tum tums for flesh.
SO someone who gets trapped and completely devoured by a bunch of zombies, makes it so the next person who comes across them only gets attacked and killed…and then comes back as a zombie.
Let’s see. We have the sombraro guy who loses an arm, but that’s all we see. We have one guy gutted, once again he can get up if he wishes (See Day of the dead for an example of a gutted zombie)
There is a swarming of the guy with the Tommy Gun but we don’t see anything of that.
Then there is Blades who shows up as a zombie in Land of the dead.
Also there are likely folks who don’t get swarmed leaving a much more intact zombie. Swarming only happens when you are in one place for a long time or in a place that they “Just know they want to be”
If someone is on the move or in an isolated area they may come across only one or two and get away with a bite.
The two characters who get bitten turn into zombies.
Michael the Pilot gets attacked and bitten while escaping into the elevator… that’s why he isn’t devoured or torn apart.
The cop, gets bit and then shoots the zombie who bit him.
I think a ‘new’ zombie, needs to eat about 20% of a human to fill up. But then, they only go about taking the occasional bite here and there. So that’s why you see 5 zombies eat one whole person occasionally but that keeps them going a good long time.
Of course they only eat people who are alive, so if one zombie falls on one human, then that human becomes a zombie and the hungry Zombies won’t touch it. Only a group of hungry zombies will fully eat a live person.
(The first thing I pictured on reading the thread title was a horde of shambling, naked, uncircumcised zombies - these are the dangers of having one foot in the earthy-crunchy natural-birth, attachment parenting world, and one foot in the sci-fi-fantasy-horror world.)
If it’s not a Romero situation, and you have to be infected, I guess I would argue that victims who are bitten/scratched and somehow escape or kill the attacking zombie would account for it.
Also, don’t forget that zombies have a magical ability to move and otherwise function with very little intact flesh. Hell, maybe dismembered victims’ body parts schlurp back together upon zombification (See, e.g., Dead Alive). Hey, maybe zombies don’t digest (a la The Zombie Survival Guide), and once the devoured flesh gets pushed out the digestive tract, it reassembles!
Marvel Comics has a series out now, Marvel Zombies, wherein all of the heroes have turned into zombies, and ravaged the world. In one panel, the zombie Hulk eats Magneto’s leg (he was immune to the virus for some reason), and when he reverts to Bruce Banner, the leg bones tear through his stomach and pop out of his side. Pretty weird all around.
Also, for those of you that follow the comics, this zombie world is the only Marvel universe in which Hank Pym is not a total fuckup.
I’ve always wondered at what exact point a person who’s being devoured becomes a zombie. A human is attacked, a zombie’s chomping her arm as she screams, she passes out, then is revived, zombiefied. Awkwarrrd.
Is there any antagonism between zombies (in any of the aforementioned 'verses)? I can’t think of any.
