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One problem with zombie apocalypse scenarios is that it's hard to imagine how you get from patient zero to 99+ percent of humankind infected. After the first few victims, a national health emergency would be declared, and men in bite-proof suits would round up and quarantine all the infected people. There would also be many pockets of non-infected people, such as military bases, cruise ships, prisons, etc. And how does the traditional zombie virus even cross oceans? Are there people who would board a plane right after being bitten, like nothing happened?

I think we have to rethink the zombie plague. For example, the disease could be in two phases. The first phase is asymptomatic and transmitted by touch. Over a week or two, the virus infects most of society, on all continents, with no one the wiser. Then, the virus mutates and turns its hosts into zombies. This means that surviving the apocalypse is as much a matter of luck as it is a matter of resourcefulness, preparedness or ability to defend yourself. It would conveniently help explain why your plucky, relatable protagonist who works as a cashier at Target is somehow among the survivors of an apocalypse that decimated armies and heads of state.

Any other ideas?

.

Well. In Walking Dead its posited that everyone is already infected and they become walkers upon death.

Sometimes zombies are proposed to infect all dead, even long dead. Currently the total recorded history of the dead far outnumbers the current total of alive. So living people would be immediately outnumbered.

The availability and ease of travel is the thing that is often shown to be the downfall. If one person can get infected in Asia, and then catch a plane flight to anywhere else then, immediately you have two outbreaks, followed by wherever those infected may then travel.

The wierd thing about a zombie plague is that its premise contradicts some pretty basic facts about our existence. Sick people don't get up and walk around attacking other people, and dead people are notable for not doing anything at all.

Take the supposition, for example, that the undead would freeze in the winter. Why would they freeze? Being dead clearly isn't working to slow them down. It's logically explosive, in that anything follows.

Depends on the vector.

Traditionally, the cause is never really revealed. Zombies just start happening.

But, such as with Return of the Living Dead, we see military stupidity help the spread. They nuke the town to contain it, and it’s made clear all that did was create a Zombie Plague rain town.

Human sentimentalism can also bugger things up. In Dawn of the Dead, we see some of the living protecting Undead relatives.

So the spread can be explained. But how it goes from ‘oh there’s quite a lot of them now, and they’re everywhere’ to total and utter societal collapse?

My money is on simple human nature. We miss a few meals, and we get pretty selfish and stupid. It’s likely efforts to contain things would slow down supply chains. From there you’ll get looting and other bad behaviour, further stretching law and military resources to contain that.

Another commonality in Zombie scenarios is that survivors tend to be pretty pragmatic people. Not those given to too much introspection in the heat of the moment. The sort to take out bite victims before they turn, recognising the risk. The best example of this I can provide is Carol in WD and ‘Look at the Flowers’. It’s a pretty wrenching scene, but had to be done. The girl had lost her mind, and was a clear threat to others. But not every human can be that ruthless/pragmatic about things.

Zombies in particular are a genuine horror. Whilst things are still new, they’re just people with bites out of them, eating other people. Whilst most people in the pinch would kill a pet or other animal to survive, they’re far more squeamish about putting down other Humans. Instead, you either hole up, or make a break for it.

Typically for speed and distance, that means jumping in the car and getting out of dodge. That leads to traffic jams, and idiot drivers causing crashes which block parts of, or indeed whole, carriageways. Now, imagine that whilst Zombies are actively attacking in the area?

It also takes time to not only recognise the threat, but to get troops and that deployed. That leaves time for the mess to get worse before people are in the position to start de-escalating.

Then when you’ve roadblocks and check points in place, scared and hungry civvies make stupid decisions out of frustration, not to mention whack jobs who love to escalate any situation.

It all boils down to the vector of infection.

Human only? Becomes easier to contain.
Incubation time: how long until symptoms show themselves? (I am fine! I feel great, er... brains!!!!).
By bite only? Assuming someone knows this, then they may make steps (though in the shows they hide it where possible).
Heck, think what kind of unholy bacteria / virus mix those guys would incubate? They could be worse carriers than rats.
I could see secondary infection being as bad as the primary.

Then there is a fabulous lack of knowledge of their motivations and how active and for how long they operate.
Lurking in a pond/lake/ocean?
In a cargo container / ship hold?
Just wanders off into a forest, desert, Antarctica?

There is rarely any mention of the smell.
They would probably catch you due to vomiting horribly.

Picture what a zombie in the water supply could do.

"Guys in suits" would have to thin the infected a fair bit with conventional weaponry and the blown up bits may still be a contaminant, "killing them with fire" is sounding the way to go.

Look how our "normal" modern day virus outbreak lately in the news is hard to contain that only attacks lung tissue and only transferred from cough and contaminated surfaces.

Just imagine a virus that creates a host actively trying to infect people could do!

Honestly zombies are hard to get to world wipeout in the modern world. I think that the Resident Evil films and 28Days later at least try and make modern zombies that have a means and vector to allow them to rise up to become a threat.

28days later had running zombies who basically had, for their lifespan, an increased sense of strength and speed as well as a general awareness. This meant that they could pose an actual threat and spread very quickly through a population. The film also put the UK on lockdown; blocking people leaving.

The second film did show one major weakness though; which is that zombies VS an organised modern military had VERY little chance of success. Provided your military isn't heavily emotionally attached to those they are shooting; you can keep zombies at bay unless you're dealing with millions at once. Even then you can likely block their attack routes with their own dead.


Resident Evil threw zombies in with a mutating virus and lots of other monsters that basically escalated the complexity of the attack up multiple notches. Then they threw in a nuts computer and organised military wing and company. So layers within layers and a group with a vested interest in the spread and infection as well as the weaponisation and invasion of other nations.




Honestly whilst zombies in modern day is popular, so many zombie films basically rely heavily on the military not being present; on stupid choices and also on that one mad character who lets a zombie in/gets pregnant with a zombie or otherwise basically breaches the walls from the inside and lets the zombies "sneak" in until the defended point is overrun from the inside.


I think that fantasy and ancient times are when zombies are more "interesting". When you perhaps have no ranged weapons except bows and arrows. When you have walls that can be scaled; when you've got people with reduced levels of mobility and freedom etc. Swap the car for a cart and suddenly zombies are WAY more scary!

Another way is nuclear zombies - basically nuclear war followed by zombies. Again it cuts out mass organisation; lots of resources; bullets being common; ammunition; etc....

The Furious Abyss is a terrible book, but one of the things it did right was the boarding attack wherein a warp entity was puppeting the zombie-crew of one ship to attack another, and bogs them down in zombie-flesh until the resident sorcerer thinks to attack it directly using mind-bullets.

Nurglitch wrote:
The wierd thing about a zombie plague is that its premise contradicts some pretty basic facts about our existence. Sick people don't get up and walk around attacking other people, and dead people are notable for not doing anything at all.

Sick people don't, but we have a real world example in the cordyceps fungus of an organism that takes control of its host in order to further its own propagation. There's also evidence that toxic plasmosis infected rodents are influenced to become less risk averse in order to increase their chance of being eaten by a cat (which the organism needs as part of its life cycle) and there's also another one that makes snails climb to obvious perches to make them more likely to be eaten by birds.

So it's an actual matter of fact that microorganisms can drive more complex animals to act against their will/good sense, so the only aspect of the typical zombie that's not supported by science is an organism that can continue to do so once its host is dead.

-Guardsman- wrote:
One problem with zombie apocalypse scenarios is that it's hard to imagine how you get from patient zero to 99+ percent of humankind infected. After the first few victims, a national health emergency would be declared, and men in bite-proof suits would round up and quarantine all the infected people. There would also be many pockets of non-infected people, such as military bases, cruise ships, prisons, etc. And how does the traditional zombie virus even cross oceans? Are there people who would board a plane right after being bitten, like nothing happened?

I think we have to rethink the zombie plague. For example, the disease could be in two phases. The first phase is asymptomatic and transmitted by touch. Over a week or two, the virus infects most of society, on all continents, with no one the wiser. Then, the virus mutates and turns its hosts into zombies. This means that surviving the apocalypse is as much a matter of luck as it is a matter of resourcefulness, preparedness or ability to defend yourself. It would conveniently help explain why your plucky, relatable protagonist who works as a cashier at Target is somehow among the survivors of an apocalypse that decimated armies and heads of state.

Any other ideas?

.

Nothing fixes the zombie plague idea- its just inherently dumb and unrealistic. It requires everyone to be as stupid as possible, have multiple other apocalypses going on to tie up resources and the very laws of reality itself be written.

The best 'rethinking' of the zombie plague is to bury the tired old trope.

Realistically, a Zombie plague could never wipe out humanity. Collapse of society on the other hand would not be that terribly difficult. And it would be caused by human paranoia and not the zombies themselves.


I've actually been mulling over how a real zombie virus would work and came up with some basic parameters.

The virus directly attacks the central nervous system and causes some very specific types of brain damage. Specifically it causes massive damage to the cerebrum eliminating or severely damaging the ability to process emotions. The virus also causes aggression and hunger to become uncontrollable urges. The result is a human with no rational thought, whose only response to danger is aggression and uncontrollable hunger. An aggressive animal really. The virus would be a very basic body fluid transfer method of infection.

These zombies would still probably be able to form social groups and would hunt in packs. Packs of zombies would be just as likely to attack each other as normal humans. On some level, the zombies are still people. They're just incurably brain damaged even if the virus can be eliminated. A zombie couldn't be cured, it could however have its ability to transfer the virus eliminated with some sort of anti-viral medication. A human who was bit could also be saved if the cure was administered before the infection was complete. You could also have people who were partially immune to the disease who show some symptoms but not others. Or you could have carriers of the virus who are immune to the brain damage.

The latter types of people would be the really dangerous ones. Carriers who are asymptomatic would spread the disease to anybody they came in direct contact with.

The outbreak would probably initially be contained till a few people who were asymptomatic spread the virus among the general population. This would lead to massive paranoia as people became distrustful of each other and strangers.

Its this paranoia that would destroy human society. The ability to exterminate the zombies would be hampered by people not willing to work with each other. You'd have small groups of people who band together and don't trust anybody outside their own group. Killing anybody on sight, be they zombie or human.

If the groups of asymptomatic people are large enough, they might form their own separate communities from uninfected people. This would essentially split humanity into 3 groups. Uninfected. The infected but immune. And the zombies. If and when a cure was developed, the asymptomatic people could be cured of their infection and merge back together with uninfected humans.

The zombies would not be a long term threat themselves. Eventually they would run out of food and starve/eat each other till their numbers became negligible and they could no longer infect humans to make more zombies. So eventually society could rebuild. Zombies would probably never be fully eradicated though.. The disease would probably just become another disease that crops up from time to time as a non-immune human gets infected. But humanity would stomp it out, either by killing the people about to turn or administering a cure.

These zombies would also be no more difficult to kill than a normal human. They might be immune to pain and fear, but a bullet through the vitals will stop them as good as a normal human. So really no more difficult to shoot down than a guy hopped up on drugs. If you don't care about sentimentality, a battalion of soldiers could easily hold off thousands of zombies.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Haasbioroid wrote:
Well. In Walking Dead its posited that everyone is already infected and they become walkers upon death.

Which I always found stupid because if that is the case why does getting bit turn you? If the virus is something that everybody is already infected with, a zombie bite should be no worse than a normal human bite. Which granted are fairly nasty, but it shouldn't necessarily be fatal. The first season has many cases of people getting very much non-fatal bite injuries but dying anyway and turning.

Frankly, its my main issue with zombie shows/movies. They don't put enough effort into the disease itself to make it believable. How the disease ends up working is never good enough to directly cause the massive infection that we are shown.

I think a zombie show would be much more interesting if the main reason behind the collapse of society was not that 90% of people became zombies, but that it only got maybe 20-30% of people and the remaining 70-80% of people destroyed society through paranoia and mistrust. The slow zombie plague is more plausible.

Sounds a lot like the Rage Virus from 28 Days Later.

Raises the metabolism, floods the body with Adrenalin. Rots the rational parts of the brain, leaving a speedy, hungry, fearless beast constantly needing to feed.

In order for it to be a real threat it would have to be something airborne, and well beyond "typical" zombies.

The zombie genre itself is popular because of how easy it is to survive and kill zombies. It's a family-friendly disaster. A motivated child or scrawny female character can still outwit zombies, and beat them or shoot them in the head, etc. You can be out of shape, heck, you could be in a wheelchair and still "partake" in the zombie outbreak. You don't need to be a squared away soldier or trained individual to cope with the average zombie stereotype.

28 Days Later style would be a much more serious issue, but probably shorter lived. Hyper-metabolized/motivated zombie like creatures would burn out fast, and could be easily attracted to killing zones once people figured it out. A well run fortified military post would have very little trouble with any of this until the contagion became airborne.

Zombie films/shows also get the logistical aspect completely backwards. In a modern country, if a zombie outbreak suddenly crashed everything in the span of 60-90 days and only 15-20% of the population was left there would be an overabundance of resources. Not stuff like milk of course, but ammo, dried and canned foods, fuel, etc...would all be in large supply, even if you needed to travel to find it. Sure some people would horde the stuff they needed, but the "we're fighting for every scrap of food!" is way overblown.

You'd have more trouble with things like water supply with the shutdown of basic services though I' agree many of those pumping stations and such would likely keep going for a while before breaking down. Clean drinking water would be an issue, and yet its actually rarely focused on compared to physical food. Which I agree is somewhat odd since tinned food can last for a generation.

Plus all the alcholic drinks we've got in supermarkets could be watered down and drunk and last a good long time as well.


Food supply would eventually be an issue, however by the time it would be I'd wager that any survivors should, in theory, have managed to set up basic farming. Even if you shut down the internet there's still MASSES of books and reference material out there - hit up a library or school or even university and you could easily find resources on how to propagate and grow your basic foods.

 Azreal13 wrote:

Nurglitch wrote:
The wierd thing about a zombie plague is that its premise contradicts some pretty basic facts about our existence. Sick people don't get up and walk around attacking other people, and dead people are notable for not doing anything at all.

Sick people don't, but we have a real world example in the cordyceps fungus of an organism that takes control of its host in order to further its own propagation. There's also evidence that toxic plasmosis infected rodents are influenced to become less risk averse in order to increase their chance of being eaten by a cat (which the organism needs as part of its life cycle) and there's also another one that makes snails climb to obvious perches to make them more likely to be eaten by birds.

So it's an actual matter of fact that microorganisms can drive more complex animals to act against their will/good sense, so the only aspect of the typical zombie that's not supported by science is an organism that can continue to do so once its host is dead.

Wow I didn't know about that fungus - really interesting thanks

There's also the fungus that does the same with ants. Infects them and makes them climb up onto long plant stems to get eaten up so that it can get back into the gut of a herbivore. I believe I'm right that it was actually able to not just do this trick once, but would use set times (daylight influenced) to take the ant up and down the stem so that it could maximise its chances of getting eaten whilst keeping the host alive.

That would be cordyceps.

 Mr Morden wrote:
Wow I didn't know about that fungus - really interesting thanks

There are also many species of insects that can control hosts and then make them do things the hosts would definitely prefer not to do (ex Emerald cockroach wasp, hairworms).

Nurglitch wrote:
The wierd thing about a zombie plague is that its premise contradicts some pretty basic facts about our existence. Sick people don't get up and walk around attacking other people, and dead people are notable for not doing anything at all.

Take the supposition, for example, that the undead would freeze in the winter. Why would they freeze? Being dead clearly isn't working to slow them down. It's logically explosive, in that anything follows.

Undead would still have body moisture (a required fact if they are to remain pliable enough to be mobile at all), so at temps below freezing they would eventually freeze solid. Depending on the pseudoscience/supernatural powers involved, they might thaw out in the spring, but the science is still impossible to circumvent that everything freezes without the production of heat to counteract the temperature.

Bonus points to the fact that a mindless ignorance of damage to their body means that as they start to freeze, they would tear themselves apart when moving when they get to the point where they were starting to get brittle, but still slightly flexible. They'd just flake to pieces from the outside inwards.

One would think they’d also be devoured by insects pretty quickly.

That in itself is another issue for survivors, due to flies and that being known disease vectors.

 Elbows wrote:
The zombie genre itself is popular because of how easy it is to survive and kill zombies. It's a family-friendly disaster. A motivated child or scrawny female character can still outwit zombies, and beat them or shoot them in the head, etc. You can be out of shape, heck, you could be in a wheelchair and still "partake" in the zombie outbreak. You don't need to be a squared away soldier or trained individual to cope with the average zombie stereotype.

I think you nailed the appeal of the zombie pandemic in this paragraph. I would also like to point out that such a scenario allows for anybody to help defeat the pandemic by simply killing the zombies. You don't need to be a doctor, a researcher or a nurse to be on the frontline of a pandemic, anybody can. You can also acquire skills and become good at surviving a zombie pandemic unlike surviving a real disease which implies chance, strong immune system and general health which are often outside of one's control.

The traditionnal method of transmission of the zombie plague makes it a relatively harmless disease in the grand scheme of things. Such disease is so spectacular and difficult to contract that very little of the population would be infected by such a thing even if zombies are given the ability to run and given enhanced strength.

The thing that most zombie apocalyses and other apocalypse scenarios assume is that society rapidly breaks down into Mad Max style feral gangs, because it makes good cinema.

In reality, humans are very good at co-operating and organising, and that is one of our great advantages as a species. It's how our ancestors survived the plains of Africa, and the ice age in Europe, and so on.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
The thing that most zombie apocalyses and other apocalypse scenarios assume is that society rapidly breaks down into Mad Max style feral gangs, because it makes good cinema.

In reality, humans are very good at co-operating and organising, and that is one of our great advantages as a species. It's how our ancestors survived the plains of Africa, and the ice age in Europe, and so on.

I think there is a middle ground as to what would actually happen. And I think this applies to any situation which causes modern society to break down such as nuclear war, famine, or something else.

We don't go full Mad Max, but the vast majority of nations as we know them today would cease to exist. If we lose modern infrastructure we would revert back to feudal societies. We would have many small regions each controlled by the direct military might of a local leader who manages to organize the survivors in the area. These groups would probably form around whatever preexisting cultural identities exist in that area.

We are very good at cooperating with each other, but we are also programmed to be insular and distrustful of other groups. This becomes even stronger if basic stuff like food and water are in short supply, which they would be if modern infrastructure collapses. Its hard to get more than a small group of people to work together if they are all starving. Each additional body is more competition for food, more so if the new body is a stranger.

What ultimately would destroy modern society would not be the disease, nuclear war, etc... It would be the famine that arises because nobody is transporting food from farms to the grocery stores anymore. Most people in cities would either starve to death or be killed by other starving people, either fighting over the small amount of available food OR through cannibalism. If there is a zombie plague(or just regular plague) involved we might also see people killing each other because they think the other people are infected and don't want to come in contact with them.

Society would rebuild again of course. It would just be completely different.

I dunno.

I think more, shall we say, and I am genuinely trying to put this delicately, the more.....politically enthusiastic would prove the main, initial problem. Less likely, arguably able, to pull together with whoever else remains, marking themselves more hindrance than help.

Those understandably concerned with getting safe and staying safe would be less tolerant of obvious firebrands of any stripe. So they may find themselves on their own.

 Overread wrote:
You'd have more trouble with things like water supply with the shutdown of basic services though I' agree many of those pumping stations and such would likely keep going for a while before breaking down. Clean drinking water would be an issue, and yet its actually rarely focused on compared to physical food. Which I agree is somewhat odd since tinned food can last for a generation.

Plus all the alcholic drinks we've got in supermarkets could be watered down and drunk and last a good long time as well.


Food supply would eventually be an issue, however by the time it would be I'd wager that any survivors should, in theory, have managed to set up basic farming. Even if you shut down the internet there's still MASSES of books and reference material out there - hit up a library or school or even university and you could easily find resources on how to propagate and grow your basic foods.

This is where basic rednecks would thrive, and I don't mean that in a disparaging way. I mean honest rednecks/country folk. Unless the infection made hunting and fishing obsolete - that's essentially unlimited food, particularly with a decreased human population. Stuff like deer would over-populate very quickly...heck we're already overpopulated with deer here as it is.

Water is easier to purify from dirty to clean for drinking - now if you're trying to remove a crazy virus or something from it, that's another consideration. But water can be sifted through layers of charcoal and sand and then boiled to be pretty safe...and can be done in large quantities, easily enough to satisfy the drinking needs of people.

PS: Extra tangent

Another thing that is rarely considered is the motivation of zombies to move long distances....there are loads of places in the US and abroad where you can very quickly be 50-100-150 miles from the next living being. Drive into the middle of nowhere and build a defensible location with a reasonable stockpile of rifles and weapons and it's entirely likely you'd never even see a zombie. If you did run into a couple of zombies...shoot them and carry on. It'd be exceptionally easy to build a couple of defensible barricades or fences to catch/snag/protect from random zombies....when located, swiftly execute them, burn the bodies.

There would have to be a hive mind situation which would even motivate a zombie(s) to walk 100 miles into the middle of nowhere to find a survivor, etc.

Now, people who live in places which are not suitable for human life (but have been made so, by technology) would suffer and have to move. Big cities would collapse and could be terrible, arid environments might lose water being pumped in, etc. But living anywhere with a reasonable climate/rainfall would be fine. Hunting/fishing/minimal farming and water purification would be easy - it's something we did for hundreds (really thousands) of years as humans. Now if the infection is in the air or animals then all of this kind of goes out the window.

Indeed. Cities would be total death traps, but the countryside would be largely safe. Assuming that the survivor actually had basic survival skills, which many people do not. Specifically people living in cities usually do not. Those living in the countryside would as a group be much better suited to surviving.

Now you can learn survival skills on the fly, but can you learn them before you starve to death is the real kicker.

Depends on the countryside, really.

In the UK, it’s very tame. No bears, wolves etc to worry about. And the buildings tend to be old, and therefore solid. Many in my area are still walled in, giving further protection.

If the current owner/occupants let you in, board up the windows, head upstairs and stay quiet when a herd approaches. Sorted.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Depends on the countryside, really.

In the UK, it’s very tame. No bears, wolves etc to worry about. And the buildings tend to be old, and therefore solid. Many in my area are still walled in, giving further protection.

If the current owner/occupants let you in, board up the windows, head upstairs and stay quiet when a herd approaches. Sorted.

“Get to the Winchester, lock the doors, have a pint and wait for the whole thing to blow over.”

While it was reality television, if anyone has access to..."The Colony"(?) it's worth a watch. It was a two-season show that took modern people and put them into a controlled post-apocalyptic situation. The "environment" was controlled and role-players acted as roving bands and thieves, etc.

Materials were scattered around a large scale area (in the second season they actually used an abandoned large housing development which was wrecked by Hurricane Katrina) - enough for people to eventually decide how to evacuate. Food drops etc. were sporadic. Over the maybe 6-8 weeks, the cast all lost 10-15-30 pounds in body weight, etc.

The cast was scattered around various disciplines and types of people....and unsurprisingly the good ole boy handymen were the only valuable contributing members. Almost every single project or issue was handled/build/fixed/designed by the handful of blue-collar handymen in each show. The other cast were more or less useless, some of them being middle aged women who were yoga instructors, etc. A few math types pulled their weight (building a radio, etc.).

Some people lose their sh_t (or at least appear to), with a bible-thumping youth pastor screaming and trying to stab role-players when they try to take some of their food...lol. Overall though, a pretty good psychological study, depending on how valid it was.

Looks like they have the whole shebang on YouTube - might be available elsewhere in a better quality though.

 Jadenim wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Depends on the countryside, really.

In the UK, it’s very tame. No bears, wolves etc to worry about. And the buildings tend to be old, and therefore solid. Many in my area are still walled in, giving further protection.

If the current owner/occupants let you in, board up the windows, head upstairs and stay quiet when a herd approaches. Sorted.

“Get to the Winchester, lock the doors, have a pint and wait for the whole thing to blow over.”

Seriously not far off.

Panic is the biggest enemy against the initial incident. Once people have had a chance to come to terms with it, and know how to take them down, Zombies aren’t a particular threat.

UK in particular has quite a lot of hedgerows out in the country, and from what I’ve seen on tv, fences a good bit more solid that the USA. Just a cultural thing, no judgement.

Consider up North, where Drystone Walling is more prevalent. It’s usually at least waist high, and fairly thick. Most humans can be up and over one in no time. Zombie? Not so much. Yes a serious herd could probably bulldoze one through weight of numbers. But in the meantime, you’ve either plenty opportunity to leg it, or use it as a defensive position to start stabbing bonces.

Heck, if you’re really organised, a group of 20 could probably shred a horde using shifts. Say five on at a time, ten in reserve, five resting up. Stab and spread. Thin out the pack. You’ve got time.

And you’ll notice the wall starting to give before the Zombies, allowing for an orderly retreat to the next Bumpkin Bulwark.

Lovely!

 Elbows wrote:

The zombie genre itself is popular because of how easy it is to survive and kill zombies. It's a family-friendly disaster. A motivated child or scrawny female character can still outwit zombies, and beat them or shoot them in the head, etc. You can be out of shape, heck, you could be in a wheelchair and still "partake" in the zombie outbreak. You don't need to be a squared away soldier or trained individual to cope with the average zombie stereotype.

There's a beautiful chase scene in Cockneys Vs Zombies in an old people's home where an old geezer on a zimmer frame (Richard Briers, for UK readers) is veeery slowly pursued through the garden by a similarly decrepit zombie...