Man, in such a world, my biggest fear would be getting gunned down before I’ve had my first coffee of the day.
You don’t even need to do that. You can just get on a wall with a screwdriver taped to a stick and poke 'em in the head!
Super easy. Barely an inconvenience.
Or indeed set up traps.
In most movies just the visual appearance of a moving human is sufficient bait*, so just some kind of waving mannequin above a pit or trap door.
You could even include an exit, such that any zombies that are still mobile after the first fall will walk round and do the same thing again until their limbs are all fubar.
- Most movies are a little ambiguous on this though. Zombies never confuse other zombies for potential prey, but on the other hand, the slightest noise or glimpse of a real human sends them into a fury. So what exactly is the detection mechanism?
Do zombies maintain a human body temperature? Can they see in infrared? (I’ve never watched any of the zombie movies/shows.)
I think they can sense plot.
I thought the Governor in The Walking Dead set up a brilliant system. A windmill was set up to make noise and attract the zombies so they would fall into a pit. Each morning you could come around and clear the pit.
If each community set up a ring of zombie traps they would soon eliminate them from the area. Ok, if there was a herd they would fill up the pit and could keep on coming, but if this system had been deployed in the early days it would have thinned the zombies out enough so large herds would never assemble.
The thing is, whenever they would develop some efficient zombie elimination strategy in TWD they would immediately forget it a few episodes later.
The point of the zombie trope isn’t whether they win or lose. The point of the story is the world is post-apocalyptic and forever changed. Like the survivors of a nuclear war, even if they ‘win’ they’ve already ‘lost.’
Wiping it out or not depends on how contagious it is. If everyone is already infected and become zombies when they die that makes it harder. If not it becomes doable. World War Z (the book, not the horrible Brad Pitt movie) explores this at length.
Right. Like I say, it’s a kind of frontier fantasy; the modern equivalent of the brave white man having to survive among “savages”. With the added appeal of all the complexity and concerns of the 21st century world just evaporated.
It doesn’t make sense how virtually all humans were wiped out, how the heroes survived (at the start of most zombie movies there is nothing special about the heroes’ proximal environment that would explain why they were the one in a million who survived), how the zombies function and why there are no genuine safe havens…
Luckily it’s easy to suspend disbelief while you’re alternating between tense moments and jump scares. I love zombie movies 
If I’m remembering right, World War Z (the book) showed a few people who tried to escape by pretending to be zombies–shambling around and moaning–but by some means that nobody could ever figure out, the real zombies could always tell the difference.
That sounds to be to be about as effective as trying to persuade mosquitoes not to bite your skin by emitting a “buzzzz, buzzzz, ninnnng niinnnng ninnng” sound. It wouldn’t even occur to the mosquito that you weren’t one of them; not fooled in the least.
This seems like one of the less implausible aspects. For most animals, sense of smell is key in finding food, at least as important as vision. Zombies having little reasoning capacity but a highly attuned sense of smell for normal brain tissue works fine for me.
My recollection is that it wasn’t a conscious attempt to fool the zombies; it was people acting like zombies because they’d snapped under the strain.
In the second or third episode (I think) they figured out how to become pretty much invisible to the dead, and then for 90% of the rest of the series they never used it. It later became a major plot point, as one group of people lived their lives hiding among them (and using them as a really slow-moving army they could subtly guide) but aside from that it was barely ever brought up.
I thought about smell, but that doesn’t really work in context, because:
- Zombies are often shown in a dormant state prior to actually seeing the protagonists. They never seem to be “activated” by smell.
- Wouldn’t a zombie that has just fed carry a human smell?
- How good can their sense of smell actually be? Even if they are more instinctive than normal humans, we know human noses have comparatively few receptors and very little of the human brain is dedicated to processing smells. Correctly identifying a human while standing among a crowd of zombies seems unlikely given these limitations.
Yes, we could argue that the zombie transformation process also beefs up the human sense of smell, but in that case, we may as well just say it adds a whole new sense that applies a green tick in their visual field when a living human is seen.
That actually almost makes sense.
If the universe is a simulation, then becoming a zombie breaks them through the 4th wall.
On rare occasions they used it again, but it was like an afterthought, not a standard way to avoid detection. They also never used Michonne’s trick from early seasons of dragging around a couple of incapacitated zombies for cover. Seems like a good way to disguise your refuge would be to surround it with a screen of incapacitated zombies. Negan lined the fence of the Sanctuary with captive zombies, but that was as a defense against other humans, not zombies.
Yeah, I’m up to that season. But while the Governor, Negan, and even the cannibals were plausible villains, I just can’t believe that any significant group of people would adopt such a disgusting strategy. I mean, what does the inside of a zombie mask smell like?
As shown during the time of COVID, all zombie stories were missing one thing: people demonstrating for their right to become zombies.
Well, for some people it’s an upgrade to a better OS.