Cracked Cracks the Zombie Apocalypse

[chitoryu12]

I've seen a lot of speculation on the zombie survival boards on how a virus that was like a mix of rabies and Ebola would create a similar effect to a 28 Days Later-style rage virus. Ergo, there's no "headshot only" rule because bodily damage could bring them down like a normal attacker, but they're also able to move at the same speed as humans and won't be comically confused by stairs and ladders.

[adam_grif]

I've seen a lot of speculation on the zombie survival boards on how a virus that was like a mix of rabies and Ebola would create a similar effect to a 28 Days Later-style rage virus. Ergo, there's no "headshot only" rule because bodily damage could bring them down like a normal attacker, but they're also able to move at the same speed as humans and won't be comically confused by stairs and ladders.

And they would instantly self destruct because angry people who attack people on sight are going to be the loudest, most visible targets for the OTHER angry people who attack people on sight.

And unlike 28 days later, real viruses don't have the comical 15 second incubation period.

[Oni Koneko Damien]

Idiots like Max Brooks did a great disservice when they started coming up with made-up science bullshit to explain their zombies, because now I have to deal with morons who think that it's PLAUSIBLE. Ungh.

Zombies are just magic, end of discussion.

Really? I'm fairly certain that psuedo-science zombies have been around many decades before Brooks offered his view. Hell, arguably HP Lovecraft's 'Herbert West: Reanimator' offered the first pseudo-science zombies. Besides that, Brooks really wasn't that bad. He flat out admitted in his books that many of the zombies' traits were outright inexplicable.

[chitoryu12]

Idiots like Max Brooks did a great disservice when they started coming up with made-up science bullshit to explain their zombies, because now I have to deal with morons who think that it's PLAUSIBLE. Ungh.

Zombies are just magic, end of discussion.

Really? I'm fairly certain that psuedo-science zombies have been around many decades before Brooks offered his view. Hell, arguably HP Lovecraft's 'Herbert West: Reanimator' offered the first pseudo-science zombies. Besides that, Brooks really wasn't that bad. He flat out admitted in his books that many of the zombies' traits were outright inexplicable.

I think calling the virus Solanum was a little way of indicating that he didn't really think his pseudoscience look realistic. Anyone with an internet connection would promptly end up Googling potatoes.

[Zixinus]

So.... Left for Dead huh?

No, because I did not include biology-defeing mutations or the ability to see infected as non-food. Just a virus that can suddenly turn anyone, anywhere a raging psychopath that has to be strapped down. Due to the high incubation time, you can't tell who is infected and who is not and who has how much time left or where the virus even is.

Sure, the psychopaths will attach other psychopaths but unlike zombie virus where you can usually track who is infected by looking for bites, ANYONE is a potential infected that can turn on any moment. No zombie hordes, just a town full of very paranoid people who may suddenly snap at any moment.
Add some sort of timing mechanisms or something and you will have hordes of people suddenly stopping their jobs to bash anyone or anything nearby.

[Ritterin Sophia]

Oh jeez, everyone needs to get off Brooks' ass. We know zombies aren't realisitic. He knows zombies aren't realistic. But it's a story and it can be more fun if you pile on some detail that makes it a little easier to suspend disbelief.

Having been to Fort Sill and seen what an MLRS and M109A6 Paladins can do, I can't suspend belief when shooting a zombie in the head works but using DPICM or overlapping the blast wave of HE 155mm to create overpressure sufficient to rend concrete apart doesn't. Adding 'gel' for blood does not help me suspend disbelief when something can pierce steel or shred concrete.

[SAMAS]

Oh jeez, everyone needs to get off Brooks' ass. We know zombies aren't realisitic. He knows zombies aren't realistic. But it's a story and it can be more fun if you pile on some detail that makes it a little easier to suspend disbelief.

Having been to Fort Sill and seen what an MLRS and M109A6 Paladins can do, I can't suspend belief when shooting a zombie in the head works but using DPICM or overlapping the blast wave of HE 155mm to create overpressure sufficient to rend concrete apart doesn't. Adding 'gel' for blood does not help me suspend disbelief when something can pierce steel or shred concrete.

The gist of this and similar arguments is that in providing a little realism to the situation, Brooks only highlighted the things he missed.

Provide 30% realism, and it only makes the missing 70% stand out more. Especially if you were going for 50%. Some things, explanations especially, simply cannot be, as my father would put it, half-assed.

[Anguirus]

I've read way too many straightfaced discussions around here of how lightsabers and FTL travel work to take all this "Someone applying a thin veneer of science to obvious fantasy? I'm outraged!" herfblerfing seriously.

Bra-vo.

I greatly enjoyed this article, but paradoxically it made me want to watch Zombieland again.

I always kinda thought that the best handwave to make a sci-fi zombie story (as opposed to outright fantasy) would be to say that it's an airborne virus that 1% of people are immune to. You don't even really need the zombie bites infecting people for there to be tension, although you could also slip that in by saying the concentrated dose, combined with the stress, overwhelms the immune system.

[Oni Koneko Damien]

Oh jeez, everyone needs to get off Brooks' ass. We know zombies aren't realisitic. He knows zombies aren't realistic. But it's a story and it can be more fun if you pile on some detail that makes it a little easier to suspend disbelief.

I've read way too many straightfaced discussions around here of how lightsabers and FTL travel work to take all this "Someone applying a thin veneer of science to obvious fantasy? I'm outraged!" herfblerfing seriously.

QFT

I don't agree with the generally quite retarded approach to SoD many here seem to take (everything seen on screen/written down must be actual-factual literal truth, we can't leave any quarter or understanding for author-intent, sfx limitations or scientific misunderstandings by the creators!), but it's really amusing to see the hypocritical, highly selective application of it:

Why yes, multi-juggaton hand-blasters are perfectly reasonable! We see something on screen that might be interpreted that way, so obviously it's the in-universe truth and we'll just have to accept it, along with accepting that the characters involved are also highly retarded for not using said massive power in other obvious and useful ways! What? Corpses moving around and not decaying with a vague explanation tacked on? Take that tripe away from here, that's unreasonable!

[Imperial528]

I discussed Cracked's article with a friend today, and he suggested that the virus would replace or take over the zombie's immune system, rendering it at least resistant to decay for an extended period. Of course, they'll still freeze or mummify.

Any thoughts?

[Swindle1984]

I discussed Cracked's article with a friend today, and he suggested that the virus would replace or take over the zombie's immune system, rendering it at least resistant to decay for an extended period. Of course, they'll still freeze or mummify.

Any thoughts?

In Day By Day Armageddon, the virus that creates zombies also makes toxins build up in their flesh that kills most bacteria and any animals that feed on them (the narrator observes crows and vultures eating zombies, then a day or two later notices a lot of dead birds on the ground.). The zombies close enough to the nuclear blasts that hit cities (the air force dropped loud noise generators in the city centers to attract zombies from miles around, waited a day or two, then nuked the cities to wipe out most of the zombies.) to get irradiated but not destroyed are noticably "fresher" and decaying slower than other zombies.

But the zombies do decay and their non-healing injuries do add up over time to disable them; it's just that more zombies keep getting produced to replaced the ones that are falling apart, and they're not decomposing at a normal rate.

[Bottlestein]

I discussed Cracked's article with a friend today, and he suggested that the virus would replace or take over the zombie's immune system, rendering it at least resistant to decay for an extended period. Of course, they'll still freeze or mummify.

Any thoughts?

Yes - viruses do not work the way he thinks they work.

[Imperial528]

A virus (although a bacterium would be more likely to exhibit this behavior) is quite capable of killing other cells which may threaten it (I'm not entirely sure about maggots, but I guess if the virus could infect things other than humans...). This would have to be quite a complicated virus, but it would be possible.

[chitoryu12]

I just had to deal with an idiot on another site who suggests that zombies will for a collective conscious due to the "flock mentality" and will have better problem solving in groups. There are very few things more needlessly complicated and unscientific that I've seen on that site.

[chitoryu12]

Ghetto edit: Exactly what is the basis for flocking? I don't believe there's any central coordination, merely the other animals following a few simple guidelines when moving as a group.

[Oskuro]

Hasn't everyone known this for decades?

Steel yourself, this may come as a surprise to you Stark, but the average person walking the streets is an abject moron. So no.

Actually, the average person on the street didn't give a damn about Zombies until they recently became a pop-culture phenomenon, so for most of them these articles are news.


As for the cause of zombies, I always liked Romero's non-explanation. In his universe dead people, no matter the cause of death, just reanimate as zombies. There's no infection or other explanation, the dead simply come back to life. I find that notion quite scary, it kind of reminds me of nightmare mode in good old Doom


As for Re-Animator, I always took that story as Lovecraft's take on Frankenstein, not a true Zombie scenario (understanding "zombie" as a kind of undead plague, not simply a reanimated corpse).

Sigh, I'd really like to see a movie about two rival Necromancers rising their undead armies against each other, and the protagonists being caught in between*. But no, it's stupid cheap mindless zombies. Guess I'll have to keep watching Army of Darkness over and over again.


*Yeah, I almost always play Necromancer on Heroes of Might and Magic.

[DudeGuyMan]

Am I the only one tired of hearing people who sound like they've never read the book rage about how they can't believe Max Brooks said zombies are invincible? Heavy weapons blow zombies to bits just fine. Sure the ones who are only blown into chunks, or merely maimed horribly, continue to pose a threat. Ultimately, however, that's not a deciding factor in how heavy weapons are used long-term.

The military doesn't shelve most of it's heavy artillery because zombies are magically immune to it. They shelve it because it's really difficult and expensive to operate when the infrastructure to support it is shot to hell, and it's hard to justify that operational difficulty when zombies are so goddamned easy to kill.

They save the tanks and shit for the clever well-armed living humans they're occasionally called upon to fight, and wipe out the zombies with hilariously simple tactics and an army operating barely above a Civil War technology level.

Yeah zombies are ridiculously unrealistic. Yeah the army is written really dumb at Yonkers so that it can fail and the plot can carry on. Yeah that fictional grunt they interviewed in the book seemed to have a rather specious grasp of the physics of how bombs kill people. (I don't really know if Brooks thought the stuff the guy was saying made sense, but I don't give a shit in any event. Retired grunt rambling on about his war days while watching baseball fucks up physics? Oh the horror, story ruined.) But the idea that the army had to abandon tanks and aircraft and resort to rifles because zombies were foolishly written as invincible to being vaporized is just nerd forum anti-wank.

Love the book, hate the book, be completely indifferent to the book, but if I have to hear any more "That zombie story was shamefully unrealistic! Now back to writing an essay on whether Wolverine's adamantium could withstand Darth Maul's lightsaber!" I'm gonna fuckin' barf.

[lance]

There is the case of near-human intellect zombies. But I can really only think of one source for them, City of Dead I think it was. Zombie outbreak, military cover up, zombies spread.

From my memory the zombies could fly planes, drive, and use guns.

[Bakustra]

There is the case of near-human intellect zombies. But I can really only think of one source for them, City of Dead I think it was. Zombie outbreak, military cover up, zombies spread.

From my memory the zombies could fly planes, drive, and use guns.

At that point, can you really call them zombies anymore?

There's also Stephen King's Cell, but there they were only intelligent because of a hive-mind and they all had psychic powers.

Am I the only one tired of hearing people who sound like they've never read the book rage about how they can't believe Max Brooks said zombies are invincible? Heavy weapons blow zombies to bits just fine. Sure the ones who are only blown into chunks, or merely maimed horribly, continue to pose a threat. Ultimately, however, that's not a deciding factor in how heavy weapons are used long-term.

Sociologically, you can probably track this back to one particular instance. Some dickhead fanboy decided to masturbate all over the forums about how awesome and invincible zombies are, and then things just kinda took off from there. But you are not alone in being tired of hearing uniformed bitching about World War Z, no.

[Joe Momma]

Yeah that fictional grunt they interviewed in the book seemed to have a rather specious grasp of the physics of how bombs kill people. (I don't really know if Brooks thought the stuff the guy was saying made sense, but I don't give a shit in any event. Retired grunt rambling on about his war days while watching baseball fucks up physics? Oh the horror, story ruined.)

This was lampshaded pretty blatantly as well, when the grunt said at least twice that he wasn't very clear on the details because he was neither a scientist nor a doctor.

Am I the only one tired of hearing people who sound like they've never read the book rage about how they can't believe Max Brooks said zombies are invincible?

As Bakustra notes, that was down to one dumbass fanwanking them beyond all belief and in outright contradiction to the book to boot. The other common criticism is that a lot of people would have needed to carry the idiot ball to let the zombie plague progress so far and that's also directly acknowledged in the book. They even had after-the-fact names for those stages, starting with the Great Denial in which people either refused to believe it was happening or wouldn't take the more drastic necessary steps for political reasons. That was immediately followed by the Great Panic in which things fell apart and large swaths of people died due to freaking out and doing stupid shit while the zombies largely remained off-screen (the refugees who fled north to get above the snow line without the resources or knowledge to survive in those climes nor the wherewithal to go back south when the situation became dire, the limited nuclear war in the middle east arising from tensions only indirectly related to the zombie themselves, etc.).

Don't get me wrong, as much as I enjoyed the book and thought it did enough to establish SoD I'm sure there's plenty of criticisms to be made (including some more cogent ones in another zombie thread not terribly long ago on this forum). But the more ill-informed critiques are annoying, as they would be with any subject.

[Oni Koneko Damien]

Ghetto edit: Exactly what is the basis for flocking? I don't believe there's any central coordination, merely the other animals following a few simple guidelines when moving as a group.

Brooks actually addressed it very well. Zombies have no social coordination whatsoever, they simply register as moving objects to each other, nothing more. The 'flocking' they demonstrate is really just a bunch of individual zombies all noticing the same food and all shambling after it on their own individual initiative.

[lance]

There is the case of near-human intellect zombies. But I can really only think of one source for them, City of Dead I think it was. Zombie outbreak, military cover up, zombies spread.

From my memory the zombies could fly planes, drive, and use guns.

At that point, can you really call them zombies anymore?

Maybe? Outside of being intellegent they behaved pretty much like zombies with moanings and bitings.
Do you consider Marvel Zombies zombies?

[chitoryu12]

Ghetto edit: Exactly what is the basis for flocking? I don't believe there's any central coordination, merely the other animals following a few simple guidelines when moving as a group.

Brooks actually addressed it very well. Zombies have no social coordination whatsoever, they simply register as moving objects to each other, nothing more. The 'flocking' they demonstrate is really just a bunch of individual zombies all noticing the same food and all shambling after it on their own individual initiative.

That's what I said in the thread on the other site, but if zombies had an intelligence similar to that of birds, would they ever have a reason to flock?

Of course, this is the same thread where someone suggested a form of Alzheimer's creating zombies with the mentality of 5-year-old children with the capacity to learn. The moment someone suggests Alzheimer's as allowing for them to learn and teach, I tend to sigh and say things that most moderators don't like.

[adam_grif]

Love the book, hate the book, be completely indifferent to the book, but if I have to hear any more "That zombie story was shamefully unrealistic! Now back to writing an essay on whether Wolverine's adamantium could withstand Darth Maul's lightsaber!" I'm gonna fuckin' barf.

I do believe that what people were complaining about was that he pulled some made up science out of his ass, and that people were taking it seriously. People complain when trektards think that TNG is a realistic show or that voyager was "strongly grounded in science" and shit too. Amongst non-retarded people, there's an understanding that space opera is not meant to be taken seriously and is in no sense of the word realistic. That was what Zombies were too, until idiots started writing articles like this. And now, when the stars align correctly, I get people inundating me with "No dude, if you read World War Z, you would totally understand why Zombies could take on the US Military with ease".

Just like squishy soft SciFi, the scientific underpinnings of zombies should never be explained. Because it's ridiculous and unnecessary if you're a competent writer.

[PainRack]

No, because I did not include biology-defeing mutations or the ability to see infected as non-food. Just a virus that can suddenly turn anyone, anywhere a raging psychopath that has to be strapped down. Due to the high incubation time, you can't tell who is infected and who is not and who has how much time left or where the virus even is.

Sure, the psychopaths will attach other psychopaths but unlike zombie virus where you can usually track who is infected by looking for bites, ANYONE is a potential infected that can turn on any moment. No zombie hordes, just a town full of very paranoid people who may suddenly snap at any moment.
Add some sort of timing mechanisms or something and you will have hordes of people suddenly stopping their jobs to bash anyone or anything nearby.

Touche on the mutations bit.

The L4D comic however makes it clear that the virus can infect anyone, has multiple vectors of transmission and causes people to go snap.