Zombie Cliches #2 Deny the zombie. Yeah, you deny that zombies are real, that’ll save you. I recently watched “The Walking Dead” season 2 so prepare yourselves for some minor spoilers.
Are you ready? It’s not that big of a spoiler, but Herschal keeps walkers in the barn in a misguided belief that they aren’t zombies they are just sick people. Despite him seeing all sorts of crazy crap and having medical knowledge himself, Herschal manages to convince himself that they are still alive, just dangerous. Evedence suggests that Herschel is either insane or dumb. What the crap? I will give “The Walking Dead” credit for writing Herschel’s comeuppance really well though. Kirkman does handle the zombie cliches well.
But you see these zombie cliches a lot in zombie movies. Oh you see it in other monster movies as well, but it’s only in zombie movies that the characters denying that zombies exist gets stretched well past the reasonable point. That is totally ridiculous.
I saw some terrible vampire movie recently. All it took was the main character noticing bite marks on a victim and he jumps to the conclusion, vampires are real. Now contrast that with a zombie movie and they will spend half the movie getting picked off one by one and someone still won’t believe in zombies.
Why is that I ask you? Are people really that dumb? No, no they aren’t, but the people who write zombie movies think that you are. That is really annoying.
My long winded rambling point is that lets assume people are smarter than that in movies. Then we can have less time focused on unrealistic zombie cliches of silly character reactions and we can skip to the part where they make poor life choices and everyone gets killed.
That reminds me next time I’ll write about how characters should stop making so many stupid choices.
All you forgot was the line: “SEE! I told you he was aliv…hurrk!”
Nice and funny because it’s true.
Watching the original Dawn of the Dead tonight.
Is this like that girl on 16 And Pregnant who said “There is really no way to prevent pregnancy”
She would also be the same person.
I think people that write zombie movies must work in the services industry. Most of the people are ok normal smart people.
But you get several people a day that are so stupid it convinces you the general population must be dumb in order to produce these supermorons. Go read the websites; Not always right, and not always working to get a idea that yes there will be people stupid enough that they can’t see the zombie in their face
Given the average intelligence of most city dwellers, they would have a hard time telling the difference between their fellows and zombies. Both smell bad.
The thing is that the writers have to assume that people are monumentally dumb, because that’s the only way a zombie epidemic could ever start. There’s just too many scientific and cultural reasons why the existence of zombies would never get to epidemic proportions. It would very soon become quite obvious that the zombies aren’t just sick people, but before that time, said people would already be in hospitals, strapped down when they started getting all zombie-y (is that a word?). The zombie (or zombies) would be easily isolated, and eliminated.
At worst, I could see it being something more like Fido, where corporations turn zombies into a consumer product as the likely event, not people being overrun by zombies. You gotta face it; zombies are pretty slow, dumb and predictable.
You also have to take into consideration, the average intelligence of most of most writers. Zombies are more intelligent than the writers for most of those movies.
Hey zombie carter, here is a suggestion that would be an improvement over the typical vampire BS we see lately. Think of Conan the Barbarian (the originals, not the newer screwup) as a vampire.