Zombie CSU (63 page)

S
LOW
Z
OMBIES
R
ISING AS A
R
ESULT OF
U
NEXPLAINED
R
ADIATION

This results in all the recently deceased coming back to life. This is the classic Romero
Night of the Living Dead
scenario. These zombies are the slow shufflers. They have very little brain function; they have poor balance; they fear fire; it takes a head shot to bring them done.

 


Potential for Global Pandemic: Absolute.


 


 


Limits to Disease Spread: None.


 


 


Likelihood of Successful Human Opposition: Zero, except in isolated pockets.


 


 


Likelihood That We’re All Toast: Virtually 100 percent. For storytellers interested in spinning a truly apocalyptic zombie story, the classic
Night
scenario is the way to go. But it’s so completely unwinnable as to almost inspire a “who cares?” response. In the later Romero films, he subtly backed off from this stance. It may still have been part of his mythology, but he didn’t belabor the point, or even raise it again as it negates the point of all resistance. Everyone dies, therefore, everyone will become a zombie…whether now or in forty years, so what’s the point of fighting for survival? It would be the same as taking a week’s worth of food and locking yourself in a radiation-proof room during a worldwide nuclear war: sure, you’d survive for a week, but so what? The futility of this was eloquently explored in Richard Matheson’s
I Am Legend
; but even here the author relents from total fatalism by providing a new “humanity” to inherit the earth once the original tenants have all been evicted. When writing the script for
Night
, Romero was undoubtedly not thinking of launching either a franchise or a genre, and from a creative standpoint the “all recent dead rise” mythology painted him into a corner. In the following films he concentrated more on the spread-through-bite theme, which allows for a great deal of creative freedom and flexibility.


 

F
AST
Z
OMBIES
R
ISING
B
ECAUSE OF A
P
LAGUE

This is the premise of the remake of
Dawn of the Dead
. Something starts the plague and it spreads very, very fast. Victims who die as a result of bites reanimate within seconds.

 


Potential for Global Pandemic: Less likely than shown in the movie unless a lot of folks with bites suddenly hop onto airplanes to visit foreign countries. Once the disease becomes known in one country, the governments of neighboring countries would immediately start pointing missiles and very likely pressing buttons. If things got out of hand, it would be a race to see whether the plague or radioactive fallout would claim the most lives.


 


 


Limits to Disease Spread: Most likely it would become an overwhelming disaster within the confines of connected continents. North and South America would fall within days or weeks if the infection starts there. Same with Australia. Since Europe and Asia are connected by shared borders, any plague that starts there would consume that land mass.


 


 


Likelihood of Successful Human Opposition: Slim to none. The disease spreads too fast to allow reaction, study, preparation, and response. It’s the same nihilistic view as the radiation raising all the dead, and from the storytelling point of view, there is one story to tell. At best you can try for episodic survivor tales, but that’s it.


 


 


Likelihood That We’re All Toast: There are two views on this. If you stick to the mythology as shown in the
Dawn
remake, then yeah, we’re toast; but since the disease in that film doesn’t operate the way any disease is likely to act, then we probably have a shot. No matter how virulent and aggressive a disease is, there has to be time for it to spread through the bloodstream. The thought that an infected person reanimates after hours or days is plausible; and the fact that they reanimate quickly makes some degree of sense, especially in justifying why they are fast and more coordinated: They are not in rigor yet and they’ve suffered significantly less damage to the brain. Fewer brain cells have died and, therefore, more of their motor cortex is working even if cognition is diminished. But the thought that a person who is bitten to death
immediately
reanimates and is a completely infectious vector is less likely. If they die from a bite to the throat (as does Ana’s husband in
Dawn
) and bleeds out from a torn artery, there won’t have been time for the disease to have taken hold throughout the entire body. The mouth won’t yet contain a sufficient (if any) amount of the pathogen to make them an instant carrier for the disease. So, the whole scenario where the disease spreads out of control and
everyone
immediately becomes a murderous zombie doesn’t hold up to close scrutiny. Makes a helluva movie, though.


 

F
AST
, T
HINKING
Z
OMBIES
R
ISING
B
ECAUSE OF A
G
OVERNMENT
E
XPERIMENT
G
ONE
W
RONG

This is the
Return of the Living Dead
model, and it has other tweaks on the model. The infected die over a period of a few hours and then reanimate as fully cognizant zombies. They can think, talk, strategize, and work cooperatively. They also have a desire to eat only human brains, and their own bodies are remarkably difficult to kill. Even severed limbs are active, as if every cell in the body has become a separate being. How this works with an arm detached from the central nervous system, not to mention the supportive and cooperative structures of the rest of the shoulder’s tendons and bones, is a bit hard to explain (which is why even as a kid I always thought that films like
The Crawling Hand
were just plain silly).