Way creepier in real life

Zombies are, in short, awesome entertainment and people have loved to be frightened by them and watch the human element develop under their pressure since George Romero’s original “Dawn of the Dead.”

The living dead just aren’t a serious threat, unless they’re in a massive swarm. But how would it even get to that point? In typical zombie lore you can only be infected by a bite and a zombie’s purpose in biting isn’t to methodically infect, but to eat you. So how many of the people bitten right off, especially if in a major artery, are going to get away and join the horde and not perish completely into zombie stomachs as food? Which also makes me wonder if zombies poop. I mean what do they do with all that human flesh they consume? Do they somehow retrieve nutrients and starve without it? If so, how, exactly do they extract nutrients from said flesh considering many an animate cadaver has internal organs -including parts of the digestive tract- falling out of them? Or sometimes they’re stuck, legless, missing their bottom half. What then?

Let’s say, for argument, everyone’s infected like in “The Walking Dead” and you turn when you die no matter what. This makes hordes a bit more likely and the biggest problem would be when it starts off with people not recognizing what they are until the zombie literally tells them by sinking its teeth deep into their neck. Also, I see trouble with regular folks like us, even when we see what’s really going on, being able to put down our own family and friends, except maybe a bitchy aunt, or that friend who’s never invited and shows up anyway. Also, if everyone’s infected, why does it take a bite to kill you? How does that virus work?

Now we have a hypothetical horde. Too bad the military, and lots of citizens, have enough fire power to lay an entire horde low without needing a headshot. With enough bullets and bombs those missing legs are going to be a big problem for any zombie’s mobility, at which point they’re just as dangerous as a crippled, rabid snapping turtle like Mitch McConnell. No big deal. Walk through the dismembered heard and put something though the surviving brains and we’re done. At worst it’s like a really bad flu season with more cannibalism, but not end of civilization type stuff reducing us to scavengers and roving biker gangs. Humans are way to good at killing things and have been since we first began making species extinct like possibly the mammoth – which is way harder to kill with spears than a zombie.

The actual scary part is the becoming a zombie. An unthinking murder machine. We lose who we are, our humanity. All of our thoughts and memories are gone, but we hobble onward to our next meal. It’s like alzheimer’s and rabies combined and we’re all probably more afraid of alzheimer’s than rabies because we all know someone, or know someone who knows someone, whose seen the slow and horrific deterioration of a loved one into a person who can’t remember their own name. We’re afraid of losing ourselves and our individuality and becoming part of an unthinking horde like we consider everybody who isn’t us in society. Zombies are just the flesh eating versions of the dreaded sheeple. No one wants to be a sheeple. So just imagine if mass, mindless conformity became a disease that could be spread through some kind of mass media infecting people en masse and making them obsessed with only the most basic, mindless things. For zombies it’s eating. For sheeple it’s a celebrity sex tape, or one of those crappy singing contest shows.

~David T. Kukulkan~