Zombies - What's their motivation?

[M. Robert Gibson]

I've recently watched a couple of Zombie films and a thought struck me - why do they attack and eat the living?

I mean, if they are dead, then surely they don't need to eat.

And when they do attack, why do they usually only take one or two bites, leaving the victim to become one of them? This is not a very good survival strategy as any virus will tell you. If you kill all your hosts then your food source is gone with the end result of dying yourself.
And if there are more of you, then the food source becomes scarcer which means increased competition. Another bad survival strategy.

It's almost as if these Zombies are not very clever.

Could someone explain the biological requirements and the motivations of Zombies?

 

[tinkerdan]

Discriminate diners.

Zombie-ism is more like rabies. It drives the victim mad makes them less fearful though somewhat sluggish and if you get too close they will bite.
They have the added feature of not biting anything that smells like them, so they are more prone to bite someone not infected.
A lone Zombid person who bites someone usually does it less from hunger than from madness--not to say they don't get hungry.
But it is easy to get away from a single zombie--however once bitten is all it takes. You can run, but you can't hide.

A Zombid person tends to forage alone until there are so many infected that it becomes difficult to avoid crowd feasting.
Crowd feasting is so hard to analyze in the movies because things happen so fast. However there are fewer people who survive to become zombies, which is okay since once they reach crowd feasting level that means they are mostly overpopulated anyway.

I just saw the movie--The Girl With All The Gifts.

The Girl with All the Gifts - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

This sort of examines the next phase after the overcrowding of zombies occurs.

 

[TomMazanec]

I read an interesting article once somewhere online. The stereotypical living dead (dark rings around eyes, etc.) does not look like a corpse. Instead, it looks like a famine victim. The zombie apocalypse is actually a vision of starving hordes.

 

[alexvss]

Zombie stories are allegories for fears that people have in real life. The first fictional zombies came from the stories that americans that were in Haiti during the occupation of that country brought back. Romero used zombies as metaphors for cold war, exacerbated consumerism, etc.
Depending on the take, zombies (or ghouls) can be controlled by a higher entity, like a vampire, necromancer or witch. Alternatively, it could be a disease like rabies or the mad cow disease--that's what happens in Train to Busan or 28 Days Later, for instance. Or, it could be a fungus, like in The Last of Us. In those cases, the disease/parasite affects their brains, thus making them "not very clever", as you said.

There's a very interesting Youtube channel that I follow. They made three episodes about zombies:

 

[HareBrain]

Rant ahoy!

It's almost as if these Zombies are not very clever.

They don't have to be. They're mindless puppets -- not, as was originally the case, of sorcerers, but of writers who still rely on them for lazy scares or metaphor 5,362,926 years after the idea got old, and who don't seem to feel the need to justify their existence past the logic level of a D&D spell. (As Arthur C Clarke almost said, "Any sufficiently vague virus is indistinguishable from magic.")

For me, they rank alongside vampires and skater jeans as fashions that should have been strangled at birth but instead somehow went on to enjoy almost Biblical longevity.

 

[BAYLOR]

If you watch the movie Return of the Living dead and its sequel . The zombies spell it out quite clearly ." Brains ! Brains ! "

 

[Alex The G and T]

Ayup. A couple of C-grade Sci-fi movies from 60 years ago... this trope was pretty much spent.

And done to death (so to speak), these days.

 

[Dave]

Very interesting comments, What we seem to be saying here is that the Zombie trope is an easy and lazy way for writers to create a pan-regional, disastrous threat, but without any political, religious, ideological or scientific underpinning, so avoiding any backlash from using those metaphors badly, while still triggering our basic underlying fears of Death, Famine, War, and Conquest.

 

[Rodders]

Someone once told me that Zombies are in constant pain and eating human flesh is the only thing that abates it.

 

[nixie]

My first zombies were Haitian.
Fascinating read

Zombification Process | Nathan S. Kline’s Zombi in Haiti

 

[Venusian Broon]

Someone once told me that Zombies are in constant pain and eating human flesh is the only thing that abates it.

Reminds me, somehow, of the stories of the supernatural beings, the Preta. Except being a Preta feels that it would be much worse.

Preta - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The Ghouls in fallout are a bit better thought out as a sort of zombie. Ghoulification preserves humans, so that they can last hundreds of years, but the feral ones have 'rotted brains' from prolonged radiation posioning so they become instinct driven only. And very angry, so they just attack everything, bar other ghouls, they see.

@nixie....Although they were not called zombies at the time, Ishtar in the Epic of Gilgamesh, so ~4000 years ago, threatened to "smash the gates of the Underworld and raise the dead to eat the living". That's pretty much a zombie apocalpyse in my books

 

[BAYLOR]

Ayup. A couple of C-grade Sci-fi movies from 60 years ago... this trope was pretty much spent.

And done to death (so to speak), these days.

And yet this spent trope seems to constantly resurrect itself in the of tv series and movies . The Walking Dead Franchise is now three series in all with a possible fourth series on the horizon.

 

[BAYLOR]

Reminds me, somehow, of the stories of the supernatural beings, the Preta. Except being a Preta feels that it would be much worse.

Preta - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The Ghouls in fallout are a bit better thought out as a sort of zombie. Ghoulification preserves humans, so that they can last hundreds of years, but the feral ones have 'rotted brains' from prolonged radiation posioning so they become instinct driven only. And very angry, so they just attack everything, bar other ghouls, they see.

@nixie....Although they were not called zombies at the time, Ishtar in the Epic of Gilgamesh, so ~4000 years ago, threatened to "smash the gates of the Underworld and raise the dead to eat the living". That's pretty much a zombie apocalpyse in my books

Ever see the film On Dark Night ? This one an interesting take on resurrection of the the undead.

 

[paranoid marvin]

Brains.

 

[Danny McG]

 

[Toby Frost]

I agree in part with @HareBrain 's point. There's very little original mileage in the traditional zombie even if the imagery is effective. I think you can tell that it's getting stale when the same story gets told over and over again: the reports of strange violence that get closer and closer, the collapse of society, the fighting between rival survivors as well as zombies, etc. It's powerful, but it's getting old. The beginnings of both 28 Days Later and The Walking Dead owe quite a lot to Day of the Triffids, which doesn't bode well.

However, undeath, rather than traditional zombies or vampires, remains interesting. The idea that you could keep yourself going beyond death, at horrible cost, is strong and has a lot of interesting options.

 

[HareBrain]

even if the imagery is effective

I think that's the "problem" -- it's very effective, and frightening at a fundamental level, which is why creators still think it can carry an entire story (and for many readers and viewers, they're right).

 

[M. Robert Gibson]

and for many readers

Talking of which, are there any books about Zombies? Or do they only exist on film? I can't think of any off the top of me head, and I can't be bothered doing a search

 

[paranoid marvin]

Talking of which, are there any books about Zombies? Or do they only exist on film? I can't think of any off the top of me head, and I can't be bothered doing a search

Cell is pretty close to what could be described as a zombie novel. The novel is quite good (a little like a shortened 'The Stand') but avoid the film at all costs.

 

[HareBrain]

Talking of which, are there any books about Zombies? Or do they only exist on film? I can't think of any off the top of me head, and I can't be bothered doing a search

Of the top of my head, The Girl With all the Gifts, Twelve, World War Z. (Some of these were made into films). Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, of course ...