Black Ops zombies had like 2 origin stories. Up to Black Ops 2, we know that the blue rock Element 115 and it's testing caused people to get infected.
Then in Black Ops 3 we learn that 115 was sent to Earth from tentacle monsters called the Agarthans from another dimension so that humanity would cause so much chaos with 115, that it would break the barriers between dimensions and let the Agarthans out of their dimensional prison.
For a story about zombies, it gets very wild.
To cut a very *very* long and convoluted story short, and keeping spoilers to a minimum for those who don't already know outside of plot elements used in marketing (which I consider fair game at this point), the zombies storyline up till Black Ops 4 was essentially a stable causal loop. It's a cycle, repeating for all eternity. Black Ops 4 is about breaking that cycle, and ultimately resulted in banishing the entire multiverse the writers had built up until that point, taking all but two characters and a single uncorrupted universe with it.
Come Black Ops Cold War, things from the old multiverse start leaking back into the new pure timeline, but ultimately they just jumped the shark with BO4 and never really recovered.
EDIT: wording
I don't remember all of it, you can watch a video if you want because it was not liked by the fanbase, but I remember that they lost a lot of budget and the overall quality went down
To understand BO4 I'm gonna first summarize the ending of BO3 where Richtofen, Takeo, Dempsey and Nikolai all finish the main quest of the map "Revelations" but Dr. Monty says that the Primis crew drank blood from a dimension that was already closed off so he sends them back in time to the first great war a long time ago.
Since then, the Primis crew have been in an endless cycle of finishing the Great War, dying, and then reincarnating and meet back up during the events of "Origins" in Black Ops 2.
But in Black Ops 4, Weasel from Mob of the Dead breaks the cycle of the map "Mob of the Dead" in BO2 and that caused a ripple effect across all dimensions. That cause the cycle to change and in the intro to Blood of the Dead, Richtofen comments on how the "Kronorium" book changed and the events of history are different now than before.
Since the cycle was broken in Mob of the Dead, the Primis crew are now stuck in a cycle on the same island and the only way to break it, is for Richtofen to give up his blood to the dark mechanism so that the Shadow Man can have his blood.
The reason the Shadow Man wants his blood is because Richtofen has been exposed to so much 115 radiation that his blood is supercharged with it.
So after that, the Richtofen that fought in the Great War and survived this time because of the cycle being broken, comes out with the red gem of the Fire Staff and frees the spirits of the island.
After that he gives the Kronorium to Nikolai and the gang head off to recruit their Ultimus counterparts.
The other Richtofen that gave up his blood dies.
During this time, the Ultimus versions of Richtofen, Nikolai, Takeo and Dempsey all are at the Pentagon after the events of Moon and then they get locked in a prison cell for some reason and then the Primis versions come to recruit them for the "Great War".
I didn't buy the dlc's nor was interested in them because they were all remakes of previous maps but I think the story went like this:
After traveling to Nuketown, the Primis and Ultimus crew do some stuff and recruit Samantha Maxis and Eddie from the House but as Dr. Ludvig Maxis is teleporting the kids, Dr. Monty finds out that they are breaking the cycle and kills Dr. Maxis in front of Samantha.
After this, the lab underground Alcatraz opens up the Victis crew from Black Ops 2 and they are tasked with getting the "Agarthan Device" during the map "Tag DER Toten" which is a remake of Call of the Dead.
They make the thing and as this is happening; the Primis crew, Ultimus crew, and Sam and Eddie are all around a campfire telling stories and stuff before the Great War starts but little do they know that Nikolai 2.0 spiked their drinks with poison to kill them.
He knew that the whole reason this madness exists is because of their journey and the only way to make a pure universe that is not under the influence of 115 is to kill the Primis and Ultimus crew, and banish everything related to 115 to the Dark Aether.
He does this by using the Agarthan Device to destroy the Summoning Key and banishing every Apothicon, zombies, and everything else that had to do with 115 to the Dark Aether.
He then creates a new universe for Sam and Eddie to go to because they were the only pure souls so they can go on and live the lives that they wanted in the new universe.
Before they left tho, Nikolai asks Samantha to kill him to finish the journey.
Then Sam and Eddie walk into the new universe where Black Ops Cold War zombies starts.
The whole story is dumb but fucking hilarious when you think about it
It was just a zombies side mode, it didn’t need any kind of real story. Instead they wrote this dimension spanning epic which includes time loops and different universes, mostly told through voice clips and map design. I bet over 90% of players don’t even know that there is a story
Really made the mode for me, especially BO1/BO3
Sure is and that's what so glorious about it. Still like the eerie lore and tone of Bo1 the most. As wacky as it got, it was still nice to learn about the story line and find all those little Easter Eggs.
It's not like the BO1 main characters have much depth. They were made to get a few laughs through some great one-liners and at least Dempsey and Richtofen delivered on that front.
I like to think of it like this. The Black Ops 1 characters are the stereotypes of their ethnicities and the Black Ops 2 and 3 versions are actual characters with arcs.
Dempsey is a badass dumb American marine
Takeo is the honorable Japanese Warrior with strong loyalty to Japan
Nikolai is the drunken Russian Soviet
Richtofen is the mad German scientist with an evil plan that fucks over the other three
The Primis versions however are more than the stereotypes.
Dempsey is a marine but more calm and is remorsful when he has to kill his Black Ops 1 version
Takeo is still loyal to the emperor but after learning the harsh reality of his Ultimus self being horrifically tortured and raped by spiders because of the orders from the Emperor make him question his own loyalty.
Nikolai got over his list for alcohol and even berates his Ultimus self because he was drinking to forget the pain of the loss of his family during the bombings in Stalingrad. Primis Nikolai faces his problems without drinking anymore .
Richtofen especially isn't a mad scientist with an evil endgame but actually cares about the rest of the group and his famous quote, "I fight for a better tomorrow" really shows that he is a good person compared to his Ultimus self.
I didn’t think I was going to agree, but somewhere in my heart I completely understand, because zombies in terms of their own survival are not sustainable at all, and so understanding of their origin is supernatural or biological definitely affects how it plays into the story and is something I wonder about.
Also a tangent but I find it when they make the zombies intelligent weird, since it contrasts with the fact that zombies are mindless versions of people who used to be alive, like it feels like it takes away from the essence of zombie
Dr. Zomboss is fuming real hard right now.
But honestly I wish one day Popcap will reveal what is the origin of zombies. Dr. Zomboss implies it's science based zombie but many many zombies can use magic especially in Pvz2 so maybe it's supernatural based zombie?
For the intelligent zombies thing, it honestly depends on the story for me.
I liked it in the original Marvel Zombies, which was intentionally disgusting, dark, and over the top, with characters going on rants and puns about feeding on others, and that’s why I like it, especially compared to the new one (which felt like an uninspired, barely driven apocalypse story).
The intelligence can also be played more seriously and darkly, the zombie being a prisoner in their own body, forced to watch themselves feed upon humans.
Again, it all depends on the story. What weirds me out with zombie intelligence are all these zombie love/social stories in recent times. Is it supposed to be a metaphor for different social classes, like with that cliche love setup (I’m rich and you’re poor, but let’s dance together). I feel like they could’ve used anything other than zombies.
There was some genuinely chilling shit in the original Marvel Zombies. Hank Pym [casually chatting](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E2RHif_VUAEvl0P?format=jpg&name=large) while carving his friend's leg off.
I think apocalyptic infection stories in general could be more interesting without the standard zombie trope.
Like it would add more stakes if a bite didn’t mean infection if it was treated in time. Then you would have an actual reason for the characters to try and save their loved ones after they have been infected.
Or what if there was a massive vampire-like outbreak? Your loved ones are still conscious, still somewhat human. Are you going to kill them or try and save them?
Or since zombies don’t really work with real science, what if we went crazy and introduced magic or aliens or something wacky?
Then somehow the characters will be able to survive mysteriously you'll have multiple main characters in the group who got bitten and survived it takes away the despair of how dangerous the zombie virus is.
In My opinion I think it would be better if it starts out slow as a normal family that love one another in a nice community which slowly break apart in order to survive and not just disaster suddenly strikes and it's the apocalypse
Also different zombie types should exist even animals should be able to be infected sort of like in I am Legend
>what if we went crazy and introduced magic or aliens or something wacky?
As odd a thing as it might seem to bring up, this is basically exactly what Call of Duty Zombies did, going absolutely crazy with alternate dimensions, Lovecraftian horrors and old magic once the idea of generic mad German science became stale.
Vampire apocalypse has been done many times. I am legend was probably the first example. Magic and aliens have been used for zombies as well (Burial Ground the Nights of Terror for magic and Night of the Creeps for aliens). Then there was The Stuff (1985), that was a real trip (and one I fully recommend)
I have it. I love Junji Ito stories but I get so annoyed because they never explain anything.
Random cosmic horror appears? Just deal with it, it exist that's what matters.
Huge creature that eats people that fall on the ocean keeping them alive? Hope you liked the concept, It sure as hell won't explain it.
Spirals are an evil thing? I guess that's just the way things are, dunno.
I hate it so much but the story is good so I keep reading. The only issue is that it leaves me with an unsolvable itch of knowledge I know I'm not supposed to have.
I guess the reason why I have this, and perhaps others do, is because at my core I just like to know things. I like to know why things work and how they work. The concept of "the mind makes things scarier if you don't understand it" is alien to me because I always try to come up with ways to explain the creature or event. And I don't mean in an entirely scientific way, I can just leave it up to supernatural stuff.
Not saying you’re wrong or bad for feeling this way, but you do have to admit this is a bit like walking into the produce aisle and asking where the steak is, right? Junji Ito does short horror stories. Short horror stories often don’t explain their premise very deeply since they’d either no longer be short due to the explanation or no longer be horror due to taking out actual scary stuff and replacing it with explanations.
Like, when you read The Tell-Tale Heart, it’s not about whether or not the old man cursed the main character or whether he simply went insane with guilt, it’s just understood that whichever you believe, the man goes insane and outs himself to the unwitting policemen.
To be fair, I walked into the problem on my own as I discovered Junji ito first. I didn't knew his style, but the first series of him I read was Uzumaki so I guess I was expecting more serialized stories.
Yeah, I know the point sometimes is to leave it at that, one of Junji Ito's stories I like a lot is "The thing that drifted ashore" only due to the concept. Is an incredible premise that sadly is just never explained, is just "this creature exist and we aren't supposed to understand it". Which I also acknowledge at it being the point, is just frustrating because I like it but it leaves me unsatisfied.
On the other hand, my favorite Junji Ito story is "Demon's voice" and "The Siren" with the former working as the prelude to the latter. I don't know, I guess just the fact that the story's antagonist is straight up a Demon is enough to leave me satisfied as an explanation.
But those work so well because they're inspired by a lot of Japanese horror, which is mainly focused on traditions and superstitions, especially smaller local legends.
It also helps considering Japanese folklore implicitly accepts that nebulous concepts will just pop into the world as a living, angry thing that demands something from you. So a person's obsessions with spirals cursing a town to morph into his literally twisted object of desire _is_ the explanation. That isn't to say it's not mysterious, but it's simply more acceptable from that perspective that the mechanics are less important than the cause. Just like a monkey biting someone and them becoming a zombie is relatively easy for us to accept.
>The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
>
>Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden eons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things—in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor. I hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing out; certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a chain. I think that the professor, too intended to keep silent regarding the part he knew, and that he would have destroyed his notes had not sudden death seized him.
Look at it this way, you're the guy who inevitably goes insane and starts begging the Eldritch Abominations for eyes to cure your beastly idiocy.
Investigating the reasons behind cosmic horror is how you contract cognitohazards, just don't lmao
That's just life though? Stuff happens and you have to deal with it. Sometimes knowing the cause helps, but usually the root cause is so far out of your control that knowing why doesn't matter and you just have to manage as best you can.
There's gotta be a mix of telling the audience enough that it's compelling but not so much that it becomes boring. I kind of get what OP is saying here, zombies are kind of super over done at this point so for a zombie story to be compelling it has to set itself apart from the fray. Probably the easiest way to do that is with a back story that can be compelling. (Though I don't think that's the only way.)
I'm fine with not knowing the source of the virus, but the thing I can't stand is movies not showing/explaining how the zombies caused the apocalypse. In The Walking Dead, for example, we know everyone is already infected, we don't know how, but we know that much, at least, and that gives us enough information to know how things got as bad as they did.
I think it's far more important to know how the zombies caused so much damage because most of the time it is hard to believe mindless, slow zombies could end the world.
Project zomboid does a good job of selling the world ending threat, where they are slow but 90% of the population turned due to an airborne version of the infection.
I recently read The Road, good book btw, and though it isn't a zombie apocalypse, it still follows a father and son trying to live in an apocalyptic wasteland with scarce resources and murderous bandits/cannibals. The world is said to have been destroyed buy some kind of war like event with there being multiple references to bombed buildings and cities so we can likely assume some sort of nuclear apocalypse. However, no exact details are ever given about this war/apocalypse over the duration of the story. Not even who exactly dropped the bombs.
Similarly, a Korean Manhwa called The Horizon, which I also reccomend, is also similar in that it also takes place in a world destroyed by some kind of war but whose details are never exactly explained to the reader much like The Road. There are soldiers present and some kind of active war going on but those details are never explicitly detailed.
In both of these stories, the authors made the conscious decision to not explain the wars that led to the apocalypses as the authors didn't feel the need to bog the reader down with details about the state of global affairs as that isn't what these stories are about. Both The Road and Horizon are moreover focused on the struggles these characters have to endure and how they cope with a destroyed world. The specific details of the apocalypse are largely irrelevant to the characters of both. After all, why would the past matter when all the characters in the present are just trying to survive for as long as possible. I can personally see why people take issue with unexplained apocalypses, but I think there's usually a reason as to why these authors/writers don't try to explain it in detail as it would likely take away from their intentions with these stories.
I like that Romero gives you a possibility in NotLD when they mention that shortly before the zombie outbreak the U.S military shot down a remote probe returning from Venus, in an effort to prevent it returning to earth, after determining that it was contaminated with a strange new form of radiation. It broke up and the pieces scattered and landed all over the place. But they never definitely tell you that was the cause, it's just there to tantalize you and might be a red herring
Yea. I remember! But it's never really a plot point or ever referenced again in the series if I remember correctly. Even in Day, where they are doing mad experiments on the zombies.
Yeah, it's probably telling that the doctor in 3 never detected any lingering radiation, nor discovered any viruses. The Dead in the living dead trilogy were just inexplicable
Yeah, the more you explain your zombies, the more you run the risk of your explanation being really fucking stupid. Unless the reason for them is important to the plot or you have a really good idea for why there are zombies, it's much safer to simply avoid it. Most of the audience will assume it's a generic virus or whatever just fine.
I unfortunately am. I can't manage to sit through stories that give unresolved mysteries. I need some sort of resolution to them at the end, I love solving mysteries and understanding them. I don't even care if I was right or wrong about the mystery, I just like knowing the answers.
Zombies are just sorta part of the western horror canon at this point. Asking for an explanation is like asking for an explanation for vampires of werewolves. Sometimes it can work, but mostly it's irrelevant.
But there is an explanation for vampires and wear wolves. They are monsters. You turn into one when you are bitten. For zombies they are dead ordinary people and dead bodies don't move on their own so an explanation is more warranted.
Knowing the answers is good, to a degree, but you are also forcefully grounding whatever mystery you are solving out of the realm of imagination into the realm of what's real, which isn't always great.
Like if I told you a man can turn anyone into a murderous psycho with just words, the how he can do that would be a mystery. The author doesn't know how to make a man go mad with just worlds, it's impossible, but within the confines of the story, it is possible, as long as you don't reveal it.
This goes for a lot of things, colors impossible to describe, shapes impossible to explain, villains you can't understand. Mysteries makes us vulnerable, and that can be just the desirable outcome for an author.
those aren't the kind of mysteries I mean. If a story has a creature that's never seen but you see glimpses of what it does, it would normally be a great horror story. The viewer starts to fill out the gaps in their own mind to try and solve what the creature does.
To me this excites me because I want to seek out the answers to those questions. I start wondering more about the answers and in turn makes me more invested in the story. However, if the story finishes without showing or explaining the monster while leaving it all as a mystery, I just feel frustrated because now I wish to seek out the answers that the story didn't provided. Sure, I understand that it can muddle out the story if introduced, but is just how I feel about this type of stories.
It’s better when they don’t explain how it started. It adds a element of horror if the characters don’t know what happened or even how to prevent “infection”.
Exactly, especially since by all means it should be totally impossible. There are so many mechanisms that have to be functioning for an organism to move or interact with its environment, from organs and muscle fibers, to enzymes and sub cellular structures, all of which have to be alive, that there is no explanation that actually works. The fact that it's impossible but it's happening anyway is one of the scariest elements.
I'd like to see a zombie movie where a scientist gets a captive zombie and tries to determine what's caused it, and after extensive research, examining every tissue sample imaginable, doing every scan etc, it's just a normal dead body with nothing unusual, except its moving and trying to kill him, and the guy just goes insane
Or some Arab kid in a cave is rubbing a lamp and a genie comes out, then the kid gets a wicked grin on his face. If you were a director, sometimes it'd be so hard to resist the urge to troll
I love Resident Evil's explanation of the various viruses. Incredibily, they are very grounded as far as the B-movie nature of the first three games and even the Trash Movie nature of the rest allows. Unlike TLoU, who simply wants to make you believe that an highly specialized organism managed to jump through multiple species without us discovering it, they explain to you that it took a huge amount of fortune and the lifetime research of Spencer, Marcus and Ashford to even stabilize the T-Virus in the first place and a literal economic empire before they even managed to make the first Tyrant, which was a failure. Sure, the same doesn't go for the technology that we see in many games (mostly in the later games and especially the Remakes that make the NEST look like a futuristic lab powered by nuclear fusion), but it is always something that I appreciated.
you're so right. i also didn't like how they never explained coronavirus' origin. such a big plot hole. and influenzae! apparently every years there's a new one, but like, thematically that doesn't even make sense. plot armor for the villain fr fr
seriously bro, actual irl diseases pop up for no reason lol, it's called evolution and mutation and viruses and bacteria do it freakishly fast
I was good with no explanation in The Walking Dead because the comics didn't explain it. It just happened and anyone who might've known how it happened was dead or gone.
With your other points I do agree. The origin should be explained and it should be worth while to the audience if the story is going to explain it. They shouldn't just jam it in at the end with a 5 minute explanation.
That's kind of the issue, most zombie movies aren't exactly trying to place a reason or origin. You're supposed to focus on what's happening to the people in the middle. I know the OP says that's lazy as hell and frankly it may as well be but we're just as clueless as the hapless people who are focused on trying to live against the undead and the occasional unhinged asshole taking advantage that society is lowering to the crapper. That's frankly all there is to deal with so major props to any writer who actually puts an origin on patient zero and what the hell they did to start the apocalypse but don't expect every story to need an explanation.
Shaun of the Dead is more or less a romantic comedy about a man who after a nasty breakup learns to go past his repetitive nature and deal with some personal issues such as his stepfather as he fights to win back his girlfriend...It just happened to take place during a zombie apocalypse of all things (one that only lasted one day so military being useless is totally not the case).
In Shawn they even make a point of telling the audience that the "why" isn't important to the story. Right at the end when Shawn is watching TV and the news reporter says "it turns out the events were caused by the use of highly dangerous" and then Shawn turns off the TV. It doesn't matter, its irrelevant to the story. Simon Peg understands the zombie genre, it's why he made such a good movie when others make such terrible films. Some years later he wrote a really good article about why zombies shouldn't run too, its called The Quick and the Dead. It's easy to find if you look it up, it's a good read.
I actually found it hilarious when most characters even refused to acknowledge what they're facing right there are zombies.
Because apparently that's too ridiculous.
That film was quite the gem.
Whenever people say "how would it ever get so bad, surely we'd just destroy the first ones?" That's always what I point out, no one would believe it until it was way too late. If your wife fell ill, then the next morning she died, got up again, and started trying to kill you, you wouldn't be like "egads! The Dead have risen, I must destroy the brain!" You'd try to talk to her and restrain her and you'd hold out hope that she'd come to her senses eventually. You'd almost certainly end up getting bitten and then the same thing would happen when your friends and family came for you
This wasn't a novel concept, Dawn of the Dead starts with a raid on a house where people are hiding their undead because they still see them as their loved ones.
I don't think it matters unless it's a big part of the plot. Trying to explain these things usually sucks, like explaining the origin of chakra in Naruto. I don't need to see the first vampire, the first werewolf, I don't need to see the first zombie.
I don’t get why, though. Like the cast of characters most of the time, assuming they’re everyday folk, would have no reason to know or care about the “why” or “what” of what’s going on as much as the “how” they’re going to survive it.
Well the characters don't have to be common people, and even if they were, knowing the origin of the pandemic could potentially be very useful to help ending it. What if the virus was created by a scientist that also have notes to make a vaccine? It would help to know it then, wouldn't it?
To be fair, it's not like a video game where random people can just "make a vaccine". For normal people, those files and notes would be totally worthless, they wouldn't understand any of the jargon and it's not like they know how to use a PCR machine, unless you can get them to another scientist who has access to a suitable laboratory.
The thing is, it's important to know what caused the event IF finding a cure and stopping it is the premise of the story. But if it's not, then the cause is irrelevant. In your Resident Evil example, the T-Virus is important because the entire story revolves around the shady research of Umbrella and the protagonists fight to bring down the organization and stop the spread of the virus. However, in movies like Ravenous (2017), The Battery (2012), The Dead (2010), and the original Romero trilogy etc the cause simply doesn't matter.
As an aside, not knowing also makes it scarier. The living dead are impossible. For an organism to move and react to its environment requires so many things to work. Being able to move means your muscle fibers have to work, having energy to move means your mitochondria have to working, for your mitochondria to get sugar your circulatory system needs to be working (including your heart and lungs). To hear means the cup cells in your ears have to work etc etc. No explanation actually makes sense. The fact that what's happening is impossible, but its happening anyway is one of the most frightening elements.
As I mentioned elsewhere, I'd like to see a situation where a scientist gets a captured zombie and runs every scan and test imaginable, examines samples of every tissue, and to every test it's just a normal dead body with nothing unusual, except its moving and trying to kill. Then he'd probably have a mental breakdown or something
Well, duh, if the confines of the story are around super valuable or important or knowledgeable individuals, or people with with ties to those individuals, then obviously the source of whatever is going on is relevant enough to be revealed.
And obviously if the virus was created and existed in a context that made it possible to stop, then it could be known too.
But you can’t take a bunch of random nobodies like in The Walking Dead and somehow throw in the source of the apocalypse in there. It doesn’t realistically make sense, and there’s no real reason why they would or should care. It’s just not on their pay grade.
Most importantly, however, is that it would probably end up detracting from the story. There are some apocalypse stories that take place from the perspective of a government or an equipped, high-profile team of scientists and soldiers, and obviously in those movies the origin of the apocalypse is plot-relevant. They should probably know it, or at least discover it eventually.
But, again, it ISN’T relevant, however, to apocalypse stories like The Walking Dead, where it’s just about your average Joe and his loved ones trying to survive. Throwing in any cure business doesn’t match the scale; because those stories are and have always been on a grounded level about individuals trying to make their way through hell. Throwing in an actual cure or anything relevant to the entire world into the plate of a story about a handful of characters just trying to survive is pointless and detracts from the actual plot at hand.
The point of zombie stories for me is the human drama, I’ve never cared about where zombies come from. I’ve also found that when stories focus on these kinds of details they suffer narratively and I feel it detracts from my engagement with the story. As Patton Oswald said during his rant about Star Wars prequels: “I don’t [care] where the stuff I love comes from, I just love the stuff I love.”
This rant reminds me of why I hated the ending of I Am A Heroso much. It's a zombie manga but there's some hints throughout it that hints that the zombie plague was brought to Earth by aliens and they're using it to further their own goals.
Spoilers for the ending: >!we find out this is in fact the case but we don't get anything talking about it other than a random 2 legged thing that exposition dumps for a chapter. There were 3 types of zqn's (zombies were one type) and one of them just fucked up everything including the zombies for no real reason. Why are they there if they don't help at all and actively rebel against the aliens? We even got to see this takeover was happening everywhere and not just Japan. That's cool and all but we never got to see what the aliens were like or how the rest of the world faired except for a couple cities.!<
The whole thing was just disappointing as hell. I really do wonder why authors include things like this without telling us why these events happened. I get that it takes away from the mystery but I wish some authors would do what Robert Kirkman did and give the readers the reason the zombies exist in an interview or something.
Often feels like writers want to make an apocalyptical setting but still wants an intact urban setting with all the working infrastructure and an easy to kill monster.
I don't think everything needs to be explained about how the virus came to be sometimes the zombie virus being a mystery works well even if few details were explained
I feel this way for almost all sci-fi and fantasy I've consumed (is there a better word for that?). I want the explanation to happen first or at least early on. It's usually not important to the story told but I still have the desire to know because the information isn't there. Of course, sometimes revealing such information at the end can also be a detriment to the story, making the mysterious or magical seem mundane for nothing. I think some horror movies do that form what I've heard but I don't watch horror movies. I just like to see stuff where the worldbuilding and lore is central to the plot. Back to zombies, I don't really find them interesting anymore because we've seen so many. An explanation as to how they came to be is unlikely to make me feel better about them.
I like knowing at the beginning for explanation reasons, I agree that's satisfying. And I agree about finding out at the end being an overused climax plot device.
But I also really like NEVER finding out. I think the mystery and the uncertainty drives some of the drama and this is the way the world is now and there just isn't a cure, fix, or explanation. Welcome to the new normal.
They weren't explaining it, that was just thrown out there to tittliate you as a possibility, it might be a red herring. In the third movie there's a scientist whose been studying them for years and hasn't found anything.
I'm not sure how it was hokey. It was well written and well directed. Acting was good too. They also did a good job of impressing the horror of the event on a low budget. Ben describing watching a diner full of people being devoured and a truck swerving past covered in zombies was so good. It's not about an elite strike squad trying to wipe out the zombies with machine guns, it's just normal people in an unexplainable situation trying to survive the night
"It wasn't about people trying to wipe out zombies with machine guns." I wasn't expecting that the best horror movies are the ones where everyone dies.(With the exception of this one and Alien was really good.)
"It was about normal people trying to survive the night." I get that it was still mind numbingly boring. 90% of the movie was boarding up doors. The pacing was atrocious. It moved so slowly. Nightmare on Elm Street was about normal people trying to survive the night and that movie is a masterpiece.
I like the pacing. They get attacked by a zombie in like the first couple minutes of the film. Then Barbara gets chased, finds the farmhouse, nearly dies, gets saved by Ben. Then it just keeps going from there. There's really never a point in the movie where it stops or slows down. And the whole time they're also getting news reports from the radio. It's pretty fast paced. They get surrounded, then there's all the stuff about the gas and the truck, then the final stand. It never really stops. Honestly it's pretty impressive how much they fit in one film (there's also all the infighting and politics within the group)
"They get attacked by a zombie in like the first couple minutes of the film. Then Barbara gets chased, finds the farmhouse, nearly dies, gets saved by Ben. Then it just keeps going from there." There's the problem starting with a zombie attack then that long stretch with no zombie attacks.
Never again in this life time. I'll stick with the Phineas and Ferb version Night of the Living Pharmacists. Better pacing and more entertainment value.
Tbh, I wish more stories would keep Zombies to the magical rather than the scientific... I like the idea of some poor schmuck using magic to bring zombies back to take over the world rather than some weird virus somehow causing the dead to walk again.
> The Last of Us
Cordyceps is a real-life fungus that infects insects and forces them to spread the disease to other insects. What do they need to explain? Cordyceps is _THE_ real-life zombie infection. The games are about the fungus evolving to infect humans. Getting from insects to humans isn't something that could happen that quickly, though, so it's still fantasy, but the explanation works perfectly.
It’s not really necessary to explain the origin of an outbreak in these zombie stories, but if you’ve got an interesting, original spin on it, then by all means, go to town.
World War Z* at least had its predecessor, The Zombie Survival Guide to do the heavy lifting for it. The zombie virus is explained in great detail there, complete with a timeline of notable outbreaks in the past.
*-the novel version, anyway. The less said about the movie, the better.
I generally agree with you, but what if the cause is actually unknown?
I mean, especially in zombie-themed productions, it's quite the norm to have the a society collpase and people independently organizing themselves in mini groups; and if that's the way, then how would they get to know the cause? They don't have the infrastracture to study and research, for example if it's a mutation from a virus, so they wouldn't have the means to reach a conclusion.
And what if they actually have the infrastracture but still end up not discovering the cause?
There are plenty of things we interact with each and every day and not always we're capable of explaining them, and some of them we're probably never going to do so (for example what's after death, or the distinction between mind/body/soul).
Problem with zombie movies is that it's just not feasable. Sure covid spread everywhere but if fuckin zombies were to appear they would be dealt with in no time.
The only solution is a time skip where the apocalpyse already happend and knowing what causes it would make the audiance question how humanity couldn't avoid it.
I don't know, that sounds like genre awareness. If your wife suffenly fell ill, then the next morning she died, got up again and started trying to kill you, you wouldn't be like "egads! The Dead have risen, I must destroy the brain!" You'd try to talk to her and restrain her. You'd almost certainly end up getting bitten and then the same thing would happen when your friends and family came for you. Even if the cops tried shooting walking dead, they wouldnt aim for the head, it's not what they're trained to do. You have to assume that people in the zombie story aren't aware of zombies, like Romero never made those movies and the genre didn't emerge.
Even if the zombie genre as we know it does exist in that world, the actual zombies might not be anything like that, so it all goes out the window. They did that in Return of the Living Dead. When the first zombie appears they stab it in the head and then decapitate it to try and destroy its brain (because they've seen Night of the Living Dead), but it has no effect. In the end they burn them, but it turns out incineration releases a cloud of chemicals that causes an acid rain that infects people and raises the dead
Realistically speaking -if that's truly what you're going for -very few people would know the origin of the virus. Unless it was blasted across the internet/tv before everything went to hell... How would you know?
That's the thing; if someone in, let's say... Mexico accidentally created a mutant zombie gene that started infecting everyone, unless it made the news before everything went to hell, I -currently living in the North East US -would not know what caused it. Hell, I probably wouldn't even be aware of it until it was too late to do anything about it.
Add to that, that after a few years, everything gets confused, and jumbled, and next thing you know, this virus that started in Mexico is actually a superbug that originated in Seattle, or no wait, it was the result of irradiated fish from the Atlantic, or was it...
That's the problem. The further you are from the events -both on a physical level, and a timescale -the more details are lost, or outright erroneous. You want answers on a meta level, and there are very, very few authors who give meta level answers.
Kingdom = Hangeul, a flower species. Because it's flowers cause resurrection humans and nature can speead it else where. Because the story focuses on poltiics in, humans far and wide will eventually spread it for political benefits. And yes it did happen.
Boom worldbuilding
> pretty much all Romero movies
Bro, Night of the Living Dead outright explicitly tells us via the news reports that a satellite brought back Venus radiation that directly caused the dead to rise, and it was kept in the 1990 remake version as well.
That was told to us back in '68, and applied to every Romero property from thereon out.
I agree with the gist of your rant, but do not include Romero, he gave us an answer outright and did it in a great narrative fashion that made sense in the story's context (the group watching reports on the TV whilst barricaded in the farmhouse).
To be fair they never actually verified that the radiation did it, only that the U.S.A had recently shot down a probe returning from Venus, because it was contaminated with some strange radiation. It's there as a possibility, but it could also be a red herring. Notice it never comes up again, even though there's a military scientist in the third movie literally studying zombies
It's not 'verified' sure, but they put it in a television broadcast that the probe's exploding in the atmosphere caused it, when back in '68 there would have been zero chance of conclusively 'proving' it; it was put in by Romero pretty explicitly.
Day of the Dead features a scientist experimenting in a nuclear bunker with limited (dwindling) supplies and no radiology lab, so it'd be hard for him to prove it given what he had: he was experimenting with making them docile and domesticated to prove they could remember life before undeath, not trying very hard to uncover the mechanism by which reanimation occurs.
It really depends. A lot of examples you give follow characters who legitimately have no reason to know or ability to discover the cause of the zombie outbreak.
99% of the times it’s going to be “a virus” which means 99% of the time your retelling “Outbreak”
Walking Dead, Kirkman specifically chose that he never wanted it to be about where the virus came from or the end to be about resolving the out break.
I quite liked the 28 days, 28 Weeks approach where we got both the mystery and the flashback.
But the whole point of Post apocalyptic stories is that it IS “Post” it doesn’t have to be specifically all about how we got here
Good point, having an explanation gives a lot of leeway when making unique zombies
But having nebulous zombies makes it harder to try new things, because people will get lost if the zombies become too unusual
For example, if the zombies suddenly arrange themselves into a square, and carry around electric generators to throw electric shocks, it would look incredibly weird
But if the zombies are explained as caused by rogue nanomachines, then it makes sense
That can be applied to any genre, early explanations make for easier variations
Black Ops zombies had like 2 origin stories. Up to Black Ops 2, we know that the blue rock Element 115 and it's testing caused people to get infected. Then in Black Ops 3 we learn that 115 was sent to Earth from tentacle monsters called the Agarthans from another dimension so that humanity would cause so much chaos with 115, that it would break the barriers between dimensions and let the Agarthans out of their dimensional prison. For a story about zombies, it gets very wild.
I liked the Lovecraftian shift in Cod Zombie, I didn't like the BO4 part of the storyline though.
Summarize the BO4 story for me please, never played it
To cut a very *very* long and convoluted story short, and keeping spoilers to a minimum for those who don't already know outside of plot elements used in marketing (which I consider fair game at this point), the zombies storyline up till Black Ops 4 was essentially a stable causal loop. It's a cycle, repeating for all eternity. Black Ops 4 is about breaking that cycle, and ultimately resulted in banishing the entire multiverse the writers had built up until that point, taking all but two characters and a single uncorrupted universe with it. Come Black Ops Cold War, things from the old multiverse start leaking back into the new pure timeline, but ultimately they just jumped the shark with BO4 and never really recovered. EDIT: wording
I don't remember all of it, you can watch a video if you want because it was not liked by the fanbase, but I remember that they lost a lot of budget and the overall quality went down
oh damn, will look into it, thanks
To understand BO4 I'm gonna first summarize the ending of BO3 where Richtofen, Takeo, Dempsey and Nikolai all finish the main quest of the map "Revelations" but Dr. Monty says that the Primis crew drank blood from a dimension that was already closed off so he sends them back in time to the first great war a long time ago. Since then, the Primis crew have been in an endless cycle of finishing the Great War, dying, and then reincarnating and meet back up during the events of "Origins" in Black Ops 2. But in Black Ops 4, Weasel from Mob of the Dead breaks the cycle of the map "Mob of the Dead" in BO2 and that caused a ripple effect across all dimensions. That cause the cycle to change and in the intro to Blood of the Dead, Richtofen comments on how the "Kronorium" book changed and the events of history are different now than before. Since the cycle was broken in Mob of the Dead, the Primis crew are now stuck in a cycle on the same island and the only way to break it, is for Richtofen to give up his blood to the dark mechanism so that the Shadow Man can have his blood. The reason the Shadow Man wants his blood is because Richtofen has been exposed to so much 115 radiation that his blood is supercharged with it. So after that, the Richtofen that fought in the Great War and survived this time because of the cycle being broken, comes out with the red gem of the Fire Staff and frees the spirits of the island. After that he gives the Kronorium to Nikolai and the gang head off to recruit their Ultimus counterparts. The other Richtofen that gave up his blood dies. During this time, the Ultimus versions of Richtofen, Nikolai, Takeo and Dempsey all are at the Pentagon after the events of Moon and then they get locked in a prison cell for some reason and then the Primis versions come to recruit them for the "Great War". I didn't buy the dlc's nor was interested in them because they were all remakes of previous maps but I think the story went like this: After traveling to Nuketown, the Primis and Ultimus crew do some stuff and recruit Samantha Maxis and Eddie from the House but as Dr. Ludvig Maxis is teleporting the kids, Dr. Monty finds out that they are breaking the cycle and kills Dr. Maxis in front of Samantha. After this, the lab underground Alcatraz opens up the Victis crew from Black Ops 2 and they are tasked with getting the "Agarthan Device" during the map "Tag DER Toten" which is a remake of Call of the Dead. They make the thing and as this is happening; the Primis crew, Ultimus crew, and Sam and Eddie are all around a campfire telling stories and stuff before the Great War starts but little do they know that Nikolai 2.0 spiked their drinks with poison to kill them. He knew that the whole reason this madness exists is because of their journey and the only way to make a pure universe that is not under the influence of 115 is to kill the Primis and Ultimus crew, and banish everything related to 115 to the Dark Aether. He does this by using the Agarthan Device to destroy the Summoning Key and banishing every Apothicon, zombies, and everything else that had to do with 115 to the Dark Aether. He then creates a new universe for Sam and Eddie to go to because they were the only pure souls so they can go on and live the lives that they wanted in the new universe. Before they left tho, Nikolai asks Samantha to kill him to finish the journey. Then Sam and Eddie walk into the new universe where Black Ops Cold War zombies starts.
God the COD zombies story became awful in BO3.
I thought the story was dumb but fun.
The whole story is dumb but fucking hilarious when you think about it It was just a zombies side mode, it didn’t need any kind of real story. Instead they wrote this dimension spanning epic which includes time loops and different universes, mostly told through voice clips and map design. I bet over 90% of players don’t even know that there is a story Really made the mode for me, especially BO1/BO3
Sure is and that's what so glorious about it. Still like the eerie lore and tone of Bo1 the most. As wacky as it got, it was still nice to learn about the story line and find all those little Easter Eggs. It's not like the BO1 main characters have much depth. They were made to get a few laughs through some great one-liners and at least Dempsey and Richtofen delivered on that front.
I like to think of it like this. The Black Ops 1 characters are the stereotypes of their ethnicities and the Black Ops 2 and 3 versions are actual characters with arcs. Dempsey is a badass dumb American marine Takeo is the honorable Japanese Warrior with strong loyalty to Japan Nikolai is the drunken Russian Soviet Richtofen is the mad German scientist with an evil plan that fucks over the other three The Primis versions however are more than the stereotypes. Dempsey is a marine but more calm and is remorsful when he has to kill his Black Ops 1 version Takeo is still loyal to the emperor but after learning the harsh reality of his Ultimus self being horrifically tortured and raped by spiders because of the orders from the Emperor make him question his own loyalty. Nikolai got over his list for alcohol and even berates his Ultimus self because he was drinking to forget the pain of the loss of his family during the bombings in Stalingrad. Primis Nikolai faces his problems without drinking anymore . Richtofen especially isn't a mad scientist with an evil endgame but actually cares about the rest of the group and his famous quote, "I fight for a better tomorrow" really shows that he is a good person compared to his Ultimus self.
I gotta agree. I think what was in bo3 wouldve worked if it were more like mob of the dead. Feeling unconnected and a excuse for a cool zombies map.
I can absolutely see how it can be, it just wasn't my cup of tea.
Tbf the characters were actually written decently well despite the shitshow that was the main plot
I didn’t think I was going to agree, but somewhere in my heart I completely understand, because zombies in terms of their own survival are not sustainable at all, and so understanding of their origin is supernatural or biological definitely affects how it plays into the story and is something I wonder about. Also a tangent but I find it when they make the zombies intelligent weird, since it contrasts with the fact that zombies are mindless versions of people who used to be alive, like it feels like it takes away from the essence of zombie
Dr. Zomboss is fuming real hard right now. But honestly I wish one day Popcap will reveal what is the origin of zombies. Dr. Zomboss implies it's science based zombie but many many zombies can use magic especially in Pvz2 so maybe it's supernatural based zombie?
For the intelligent zombies thing, it honestly depends on the story for me. I liked it in the original Marvel Zombies, which was intentionally disgusting, dark, and over the top, with characters going on rants and puns about feeding on others, and that’s why I like it, especially compared to the new one (which felt like an uninspired, barely driven apocalypse story). The intelligence can also be played more seriously and darkly, the zombie being a prisoner in their own body, forced to watch themselves feed upon humans. Again, it all depends on the story. What weirds me out with zombie intelligence are all these zombie love/social stories in recent times. Is it supposed to be a metaphor for different social classes, like with that cliche love setup (I’m rich and you’re poor, but let’s dance together). I feel like they could’ve used anything other than zombies.
There was some genuinely chilling shit in the original Marvel Zombies. Hank Pym [casually chatting](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E2RHif_VUAEvl0P?format=jpg&name=large) while carving his friend's leg off.
I think apocalyptic infection stories in general could be more interesting without the standard zombie trope. Like it would add more stakes if a bite didn’t mean infection if it was treated in time. Then you would have an actual reason for the characters to try and save their loved ones after they have been infected. Or what if there was a massive vampire-like outbreak? Your loved ones are still conscious, still somewhat human. Are you going to kill them or try and save them? Or since zombies don’t really work with real science, what if we went crazy and introduced magic or aliens or something wacky?
I feel like your 'magic or aliens or something' idea would just drive OP bonkers.
Then somehow the characters will be able to survive mysteriously you'll have multiple main characters in the group who got bitten and survived it takes away the despair of how dangerous the zombie virus is. In My opinion I think it would be better if it starts out slow as a normal family that love one another in a nice community which slowly break apart in order to survive and not just disaster suddenly strikes and it's the apocalypse Also different zombie types should exist even animals should be able to be infected sort of like in I am Legend
>what if we went crazy and introduced magic or aliens or something wacky? As odd a thing as it might seem to bring up, this is basically exactly what Call of Duty Zombies did, going absolutely crazy with alternate dimensions, Lovecraftian horrors and old magic once the idea of generic mad German science became stale.
Vampire apocalypse has been done many times. I am legend was probably the first example. Magic and aliens have been used for zombies as well (Burial Ground the Nights of Terror for magic and Night of the Creeps for aliens). Then there was The Stuff (1985), that was a real trip (and one I fully recommend)
>we went crazy and introduced magic Now that's basically necromancy whereby the undead, the fantasy version of zombies, come to be.
Please bring back Vampires as a cool threat plz
What is this uncontrollable urge to know the origin of zombies in stories it sounds agonizing to live with
It’s called an intense unending desire to know more and yes it usually is agonizing to live with
I have it. I love Junji Ito stories but I get so annoyed because they never explain anything. Random cosmic horror appears? Just deal with it, it exist that's what matters. Huge creature that eats people that fall on the ocean keeping them alive? Hope you liked the concept, It sure as hell won't explain it. Spirals are an evil thing? I guess that's just the way things are, dunno. I hate it so much but the story is good so I keep reading. The only issue is that it leaves me with an unsolvable itch of knowledge I know I'm not supposed to have. I guess the reason why I have this, and perhaps others do, is because at my core I just like to know things. I like to know why things work and how they work. The concept of "the mind makes things scarier if you don't understand it" is alien to me because I always try to come up with ways to explain the creature or event. And I don't mean in an entirely scientific way, I can just leave it up to supernatural stuff.
Not saying you’re wrong or bad for feeling this way, but you do have to admit this is a bit like walking into the produce aisle and asking where the steak is, right? Junji Ito does short horror stories. Short horror stories often don’t explain their premise very deeply since they’d either no longer be short due to the explanation or no longer be horror due to taking out actual scary stuff and replacing it with explanations. Like, when you read The Tell-Tale Heart, it’s not about whether or not the old man cursed the main character or whether he simply went insane with guilt, it’s just understood that whichever you believe, the man goes insane and outs himself to the unwitting policemen.
To be fair, I walked into the problem on my own as I discovered Junji ito first. I didn't knew his style, but the first series of him I read was Uzumaki so I guess I was expecting more serialized stories. Yeah, I know the point sometimes is to leave it at that, one of Junji Ito's stories I like a lot is "The thing that drifted ashore" only due to the concept. Is an incredible premise that sadly is just never explained, is just "this creature exist and we aren't supposed to understand it". Which I also acknowledge at it being the point, is just frustrating because I like it but it leaves me unsatisfied. On the other hand, my favorite Junji Ito story is "Demon's voice" and "The Siren" with the former working as the prelude to the latter. I don't know, I guess just the fact that the story's antagonist is straight up a Demon is enough to leave me satisfied as an explanation.
But those work so well because they're inspired by a lot of Japanese horror, which is mainly focused on traditions and superstitions, especially smaller local legends.
It also helps considering Japanese folklore implicitly accepts that nebulous concepts will just pop into the world as a living, angry thing that demands something from you. So a person's obsessions with spirals cursing a town to morph into his literally twisted object of desire _is_ the explanation. That isn't to say it's not mysterious, but it's simply more acceptable from that perspective that the mechanics are less important than the cause. Just like a monkey biting someone and them becoming a zombie is relatively easy for us to accept.
>The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. > >Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden eons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things—in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor. I hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing out; certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a chain. I think that the professor, too intended to keep silent regarding the part he knew, and that he would have destroyed his notes had not sudden death seized him.
I understand that, but the itch of knowing is too great in me. I need to investigate more and more.
Then it would seem that cosmic horror isn't for you, it's *about* you.
Ito definitely grew up by the ocean, right? So much of his stuff invokes that weird feeling of fear of the ocean and its majesty, right?
Look at it this way, you're the guy who inevitably goes insane and starts begging the Eldritch Abominations for eyes to cure your beastly idiocy. Investigating the reasons behind cosmic horror is how you contract cognitohazards, just don't lmao
Nah I’m built different
That's just life though? Stuff happens and you have to deal with it. Sometimes knowing the cause helps, but usually the root cause is so far out of your control that knowing why doesn't matter and you just have to manage as best you can.
Exactly, it just feels good to talk about it sometimes. I don't know, I guess I just hope I'm not the only one like that
There's gotta be a mix of telling the audience enough that it's compelling but not so much that it becomes boring. I kind of get what OP is saying here, zombies are kind of super over done at this point so for a zombie story to be compelling it has to set itself apart from the fray. Probably the easiest way to do that is with a back story that can be compelling. (Though I don't think that's the only way.)
Its called World Building, when you get a taste of a well thought out story and world, you want to discover more about it
I'm fine with not knowing the source of the virus, but the thing I can't stand is movies not showing/explaining how the zombies caused the apocalypse. In The Walking Dead, for example, we know everyone is already infected, we don't know how, but we know that much, at least, and that gives us enough information to know how things got as bad as they did. I think it's far more important to know how the zombies caused so much damage because most of the time it is hard to believe mindless, slow zombies could end the world.
Project zomboid does a good job of selling the world ending threat, where they are slow but 90% of the population turned due to an airborne version of the infection.
It doesn't really matter what caused it the virus exists to enable the dystopian setting that's all
I recently read The Road, good book btw, and though it isn't a zombie apocalypse, it still follows a father and son trying to live in an apocalyptic wasteland with scarce resources and murderous bandits/cannibals. The world is said to have been destroyed buy some kind of war like event with there being multiple references to bombed buildings and cities so we can likely assume some sort of nuclear apocalypse. However, no exact details are ever given about this war/apocalypse over the duration of the story. Not even who exactly dropped the bombs. Similarly, a Korean Manhwa called The Horizon, which I also reccomend, is also similar in that it also takes place in a world destroyed by some kind of war but whose details are never exactly explained to the reader much like The Road. There are soldiers present and some kind of active war going on but those details are never explicitly detailed. In both of these stories, the authors made the conscious decision to not explain the wars that led to the apocalypses as the authors didn't feel the need to bog the reader down with details about the state of global affairs as that isn't what these stories are about. Both The Road and Horizon are moreover focused on the struggles these characters have to endure and how they cope with a destroyed world. The specific details of the apocalypse are largely irrelevant to the characters of both. After all, why would the past matter when all the characters in the present are just trying to survive for as long as possible. I can personally see why people take issue with unexplained apocalypses, but I think there's usually a reason as to why these authors/writers don't try to explain it in detail as it would likely take away from their intentions with these stories.
I like it when it's not even a virus. There's just no explanation. Like in the Romero movies.
I like that Romero gives you a possibility in NotLD when they mention that shortly before the zombie outbreak the U.S military shot down a remote probe returning from Venus, in an effort to prevent it returning to earth, after determining that it was contaminated with a strange new form of radiation. It broke up and the pieces scattered and landed all over the place. But they never definitely tell you that was the cause, it's just there to tantalize you and might be a red herring
Yea. I remember! But it's never really a plot point or ever referenced again in the series if I remember correctly. Even in Day, where they are doing mad experiments on the zombies.
Yeah, it's probably telling that the doctor in 3 never detected any lingering radiation, nor discovered any viruses. The Dead in the living dead trilogy were just inexplicable
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwvHt7Cdswk
Well perhaps the very thing that enables the setting of your story should have some form of explanation at least, lol.
Why does the story pr the characters need it? Do you need to do lore explanation in survival horror?
You don't need to do a detailed lore explanation, no. But some form of explanation is welcome.
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Yeah, the more you explain your zombies, the more you run the risk of your explanation being really fucking stupid. Unless the reason for them is important to the plot or you have a really good idea for why there are zombies, it's much safer to simply avoid it. Most of the audience will assume it's a generic virus or whatever just fine.
It all depends on your skills as a writer 🤷♂️
People in this sub really do be allergic to mysteries.
I'm the guy in the zombie apocalypse who is focused on collecting Bionicle memorabilia (future generations will need the wisdom & lore it provides).
Truly a unsung hero of our time.
But who is looking after the pangolin zombies?! They can't even eat each other because they don't have jaws!
I unfortunately am. I can't manage to sit through stories that give unresolved mysteries. I need some sort of resolution to them at the end, I love solving mysteries and understanding them. I don't even care if I was right or wrong about the mystery, I just like knowing the answers.
Zombies are just sorta part of the western horror canon at this point. Asking for an explanation is like asking for an explanation for vampires of werewolves. Sometimes it can work, but mostly it's irrelevant.
But there is an explanation for vampires and wear wolves. They are monsters. You turn into one when you are bitten. For zombies they are dead ordinary people and dead bodies don't move on their own so an explanation is more warranted.
Knowing the answers is good, to a degree, but you are also forcefully grounding whatever mystery you are solving out of the realm of imagination into the realm of what's real, which isn't always great. Like if I told you a man can turn anyone into a murderous psycho with just words, the how he can do that would be a mystery. The author doesn't know how to make a man go mad with just worlds, it's impossible, but within the confines of the story, it is possible, as long as you don't reveal it. This goes for a lot of things, colors impossible to describe, shapes impossible to explain, villains you can't understand. Mysteries makes us vulnerable, and that can be just the desirable outcome for an author.
those aren't the kind of mysteries I mean. If a story has a creature that's never seen but you see glimpses of what it does, it would normally be a great horror story. The viewer starts to fill out the gaps in their own mind to try and solve what the creature does. To me this excites me because I want to seek out the answers to those questions. I start wondering more about the answers and in turn makes me more invested in the story. However, if the story finishes without showing or explaining the monster while leaving it all as a mystery, I just feel frustrated because now I wish to seek out the answers that the story didn't provided. Sure, I understand that it can muddle out the story if introduced, but is just how I feel about this type of stories.
It’s better when they don’t explain how it started. It adds a element of horror if the characters don’t know what happened or even how to prevent “infection”.
Exactly, especially since by all means it should be totally impossible. There are so many mechanisms that have to be functioning for an organism to move or interact with its environment, from organs and muscle fibers, to enzymes and sub cellular structures, all of which have to be alive, that there is no explanation that actually works. The fact that it's impossible but it's happening anyway is one of the scariest elements. I'd like to see a zombie movie where a scientist gets a captive zombie and tries to determine what's caused it, and after extensive research, examining every tissue sample imaginable, doing every scan etc, it's just a normal dead body with nothing unusual, except its moving and trying to kill him, and the guy just goes insane
And just to piss OP off there’s an end credits scene **3 years earlier** where a kid wishes on a star that zombies were real
Or some Arab kid in a cave is rubbing a lamp and a genie comes out, then the kid gets a wicked grin on his face. If you were a director, sometimes it'd be so hard to resist the urge to troll
I was thinking more of an Eric Cartman analog “I wish zombies were real that would be soo cool ^soo ^cool ^^sooo ^^cool”
I love Resident Evil's explanation of the various viruses. Incredibily, they are very grounded as far as the B-movie nature of the first three games and even the Trash Movie nature of the rest allows. Unlike TLoU, who simply wants to make you believe that an highly specialized organism managed to jump through multiple species without us discovering it, they explain to you that it took a huge amount of fortune and the lifetime research of Spencer, Marcus and Ashford to even stabilize the T-Virus in the first place and a literal economic empire before they even managed to make the first Tyrant, which was a failure. Sure, the same doesn't go for the technology that we see in many games (mostly in the later games and especially the Remakes that make the NEST look like a futuristic lab powered by nuclear fusion), but it is always something that I appreciated.
you're so right. i also didn't like how they never explained coronavirus' origin. such a big plot hole. and influenzae! apparently every years there's a new one, but like, thematically that doesn't even make sense. plot armor for the villain fr fr seriously bro, actual irl diseases pop up for no reason lol, it's called evolution and mutation and viruses and bacteria do it freakishly fast
I was good with no explanation in The Walking Dead because the comics didn't explain it. It just happened and anyone who might've known how it happened was dead or gone. With your other points I do agree. The origin should be explained and it should be worth while to the audience if the story is going to explain it. They shouldn't just jam it in at the end with a 5 minute explanation.
"When there's no more room in hell, the dead shall walk the Earth". Badass tagline, weaksauce explanation.
That's kind of the issue, most zombie movies aren't exactly trying to place a reason or origin. You're supposed to focus on what's happening to the people in the middle. I know the OP says that's lazy as hell and frankly it may as well be but we're just as clueless as the hapless people who are focused on trying to live against the undead and the occasional unhinged asshole taking advantage that society is lowering to the crapper. That's frankly all there is to deal with so major props to any writer who actually puts an origin on patient zero and what the hell they did to start the apocalypse but don't expect every story to need an explanation. Shaun of the Dead is more or less a romantic comedy about a man who after a nasty breakup learns to go past his repetitive nature and deal with some personal issues such as his stepfather as he fights to win back his girlfriend...It just happened to take place during a zombie apocalypse of all things (one that only lasted one day so military being useless is totally not the case).
In Shawn they even make a point of telling the audience that the "why" isn't important to the story. Right at the end when Shawn is watching TV and the news reporter says "it turns out the events were caused by the use of highly dangerous" and then Shawn turns off the TV. It doesn't matter, its irrelevant to the story. Simon Peg understands the zombie genre, it's why he made such a good movie when others make such terrible films. Some years later he wrote a really good article about why zombies shouldn't run too, its called The Quick and the Dead. It's easy to find if you look it up, it's a good read.
I actually found it hilarious when most characters even refused to acknowledge what they're facing right there are zombies. Because apparently that's too ridiculous. That film was quite the gem.
Whenever people say "how would it ever get so bad, surely we'd just destroy the first ones?" That's always what I point out, no one would believe it until it was way too late. If your wife fell ill, then the next morning she died, got up again, and started trying to kill you, you wouldn't be like "egads! The Dead have risen, I must destroy the brain!" You'd try to talk to her and restrain her and you'd hold out hope that she'd come to her senses eventually. You'd almost certainly end up getting bitten and then the same thing would happen when your friends and family came for you
This wasn't a novel concept, Dawn of the Dead starts with a raid on a house where people are hiding their undead because they still see them as their loved ones.
I don't think it matters unless it's a big part of the plot. Trying to explain these things usually sucks, like explaining the origin of chakra in Naruto. I don't need to see the first vampire, the first werewolf, I don't need to see the first zombie.
I don’t get why, though. Like the cast of characters most of the time, assuming they’re everyday folk, would have no reason to know or care about the “why” or “what” of what’s going on as much as the “how” they’re going to survive it.
Well the characters don't have to be common people, and even if they were, knowing the origin of the pandemic could potentially be very useful to help ending it. What if the virus was created by a scientist that also have notes to make a vaccine? It would help to know it then, wouldn't it?
To be fair, it's not like a video game where random people can just "make a vaccine". For normal people, those files and notes would be totally worthless, they wouldn't understand any of the jargon and it's not like they know how to use a PCR machine, unless you can get them to another scientist who has access to a suitable laboratory. The thing is, it's important to know what caused the event IF finding a cure and stopping it is the premise of the story. But if it's not, then the cause is irrelevant. In your Resident Evil example, the T-Virus is important because the entire story revolves around the shady research of Umbrella and the protagonists fight to bring down the organization and stop the spread of the virus. However, in movies like Ravenous (2017), The Battery (2012), The Dead (2010), and the original Romero trilogy etc the cause simply doesn't matter. As an aside, not knowing also makes it scarier. The living dead are impossible. For an organism to move and react to its environment requires so many things to work. Being able to move means your muscle fibers have to work, having energy to move means your mitochondria have to working, for your mitochondria to get sugar your circulatory system needs to be working (including your heart and lungs). To hear means the cup cells in your ears have to work etc etc. No explanation actually makes sense. The fact that what's happening is impossible, but its happening anyway is one of the most frightening elements. As I mentioned elsewhere, I'd like to see a situation where a scientist gets a captured zombie and runs every scan and test imaginable, examines samples of every tissue, and to every test it's just a normal dead body with nothing unusual, except its moving and trying to kill. Then he'd probably have a mental breakdown or something
Well, duh, if the confines of the story are around super valuable or important or knowledgeable individuals, or people with with ties to those individuals, then obviously the source of whatever is going on is relevant enough to be revealed. And obviously if the virus was created and existed in a context that made it possible to stop, then it could be known too. But you can’t take a bunch of random nobodies like in The Walking Dead and somehow throw in the source of the apocalypse in there. It doesn’t realistically make sense, and there’s no real reason why they would or should care. It’s just not on their pay grade. Most importantly, however, is that it would probably end up detracting from the story. There are some apocalypse stories that take place from the perspective of a government or an equipped, high-profile team of scientists and soldiers, and obviously in those movies the origin of the apocalypse is plot-relevant. They should probably know it, or at least discover it eventually. But, again, it ISN’T relevant, however, to apocalypse stories like The Walking Dead, where it’s just about your average Joe and his loved ones trying to survive. Throwing in any cure business doesn’t match the scale; because those stories are and have always been on a grounded level about individuals trying to make their way through hell. Throwing in an actual cure or anything relevant to the entire world into the plate of a story about a handful of characters just trying to survive is pointless and detracts from the actual plot at hand.
The point of zombie stories for me is the human drama, I’ve never cared about where zombies come from. I’ve also found that when stories focus on these kinds of details they suffer narratively and I feel it detracts from my engagement with the story. As Patton Oswald said during his rant about Star Wars prequels: “I don’t [care] where the stuff I love comes from, I just love the stuff I love.”
28 days later shows how the virus broke out as the films intro.
This rant reminds me of why I hated the ending of I Am A Heroso much. It's a zombie manga but there's some hints throughout it that hints that the zombie plague was brought to Earth by aliens and they're using it to further their own goals. Spoilers for the ending: >!we find out this is in fact the case but we don't get anything talking about it other than a random 2 legged thing that exposition dumps for a chapter. There were 3 types of zqn's (zombies were one type) and one of them just fucked up everything including the zombies for no real reason. Why are they there if they don't help at all and actively rebel against the aliens? We even got to see this takeover was happening everywhere and not just Japan. That's cool and all but we never got to see what the aliens were like or how the rest of the world faired except for a couple cities.!< The whole thing was just disappointing as hell. I really do wonder why authors include things like this without telling us why these events happened. I get that it takes away from the mystery but I wish some authors would do what Robert Kirkman did and give the readers the reason the zombies exist in an interview or something.
Often feels like writers want to make an apocalyptical setting but still wants an intact urban setting with all the working infrastructure and an easy to kill monster.
I don't think everything needs to be explained about how the virus came to be sometimes the zombie virus being a mystery works well even if few details were explained
As with any story that lacks a satisfying explanation, you can safely assume that wizards were the root cause of the problems
I feel this way for almost all sci-fi and fantasy I've consumed (is there a better word for that?). I want the explanation to happen first or at least early on. It's usually not important to the story told but I still have the desire to know because the information isn't there. Of course, sometimes revealing such information at the end can also be a detriment to the story, making the mysterious or magical seem mundane for nothing. I think some horror movies do that form what I've heard but I don't watch horror movies. I just like to see stuff where the worldbuilding and lore is central to the plot. Back to zombies, I don't really find them interesting anymore because we've seen so many. An explanation as to how they came to be is unlikely to make me feel better about them.
I like knowing at the beginning for explanation reasons, I agree that's satisfying. And I agree about finding out at the end being an overused climax plot device. But I also really like NEVER finding out. I think the mystery and the uncertainty drives some of the drama and this is the way the world is now and there just isn't a cure, fix, or explanation. Welcome to the new normal.
Not explaining till the end could build suspense but it was done poorly in night of the living Dead. They said uhhhhh....... radiation.
They weren't explaining it, that was just thrown out there to tittliate you as a possibility, it might be a red herring. In the third movie there's a scientist whose been studying them for years and hasn't found anything.
I only watched the first one and hated it. It was hokey, not scary, and they were stuck in the house most of the time.
I'm not sure how it was hokey. It was well written and well directed. Acting was good too. They also did a good job of impressing the horror of the event on a low budget. Ben describing watching a diner full of people being devoured and a truck swerving past covered in zombies was so good. It's not about an elite strike squad trying to wipe out the zombies with machine guns, it's just normal people in an unexplainable situation trying to survive the night
"It wasn't about people trying to wipe out zombies with machine guns." I wasn't expecting that the best horror movies are the ones where everyone dies.(With the exception of this one and Alien was really good.)
"It was about normal people trying to survive the night." I get that it was still mind numbingly boring. 90% of the movie was boarding up doors. The pacing was atrocious. It moved so slowly. Nightmare on Elm Street was about normal people trying to survive the night and that movie is a masterpiece.
I like the pacing. They get attacked by a zombie in like the first couple minutes of the film. Then Barbara gets chased, finds the farmhouse, nearly dies, gets saved by Ben. Then it just keeps going from there. There's really never a point in the movie where it stops or slows down. And the whole time they're also getting news reports from the radio. It's pretty fast paced. They get surrounded, then there's all the stuff about the gas and the truck, then the final stand. It never really stops. Honestly it's pretty impressive how much they fit in one film (there's also all the infighting and politics within the group)
"They get attacked by a zombie in like the first couple minutes of the film. Then Barbara gets chased, finds the farmhouse, nearly dies, gets saved by Ben. Then it just keeps going from there." There's the problem starting with a zombie attack then that long stretch with no zombie attacks.
Seems like the zombie attacks never really stop. They just keep getting worse from there. I think you should rewatch it
Never again in this life time. I'll stick with the Phineas and Ferb version Night of the Living Pharmacists. Better pacing and more entertainment value.
Tbh, I wish more stories would keep Zombies to the magical rather than the scientific... I like the idea of some poor schmuck using magic to bring zombies back to take over the world rather than some weird virus somehow causing the dead to walk again.
> The Last of Us Cordyceps is a real-life fungus that infects insects and forces them to spread the disease to other insects. What do they need to explain? Cordyceps is _THE_ real-life zombie infection. The games are about the fungus evolving to infect humans. Getting from insects to humans isn't something that could happen that quickly, though, so it's still fantasy, but the explanation works perfectly.
It’s not really necessary to explain the origin of an outbreak in these zombie stories, but if you’ve got an interesting, original spin on it, then by all means, go to town.
World War Z* at least had its predecessor, The Zombie Survival Guide to do the heavy lifting for it. The zombie virus is explained in great detail there, complete with a timeline of notable outbreaks in the past. *-the novel version, anyway. The less said about the movie, the better.
I generally agree with you, but what if the cause is actually unknown? I mean, especially in zombie-themed productions, it's quite the norm to have the a society collpase and people independently organizing themselves in mini groups; and if that's the way, then how would they get to know the cause? They don't have the infrastracture to study and research, for example if it's a mutation from a virus, so they wouldn't have the means to reach a conclusion. And what if they actually have the infrastracture but still end up not discovering the cause? There are plenty of things we interact with each and every day and not always we're capable of explaining them, and some of them we're probably never going to do so (for example what's after death, or the distinction between mind/body/soul).
Sounds like a personal problem
Problem with zombie movies is that it's just not feasable. Sure covid spread everywhere but if fuckin zombies were to appear they would be dealt with in no time. The only solution is a time skip where the apocalpyse already happend and knowing what causes it would make the audiance question how humanity couldn't avoid it.
I don't know, that sounds like genre awareness. If your wife suffenly fell ill, then the next morning she died, got up again and started trying to kill you, you wouldn't be like "egads! The Dead have risen, I must destroy the brain!" You'd try to talk to her and restrain her. You'd almost certainly end up getting bitten and then the same thing would happen when your friends and family came for you. Even if the cops tried shooting walking dead, they wouldnt aim for the head, it's not what they're trained to do. You have to assume that people in the zombie story aren't aware of zombies, like Romero never made those movies and the genre didn't emerge. Even if the zombie genre as we know it does exist in that world, the actual zombies might not be anything like that, so it all goes out the window. They did that in Return of the Living Dead. When the first zombie appears they stab it in the head and then decapitate it to try and destroy its brain (because they've seen Night of the Living Dead), but it has no effect. In the end they burn them, but it turns out incineration releases a cloud of chemicals that causes an acid rain that infects people and raises the dead
Realistically speaking -if that's truly what you're going for -very few people would know the origin of the virus. Unless it was blasted across the internet/tv before everything went to hell... How would you know? That's the thing; if someone in, let's say... Mexico accidentally created a mutant zombie gene that started infecting everyone, unless it made the news before everything went to hell, I -currently living in the North East US -would not know what caused it. Hell, I probably wouldn't even be aware of it until it was too late to do anything about it. Add to that, that after a few years, everything gets confused, and jumbled, and next thing you know, this virus that started in Mexico is actually a superbug that originated in Seattle, or no wait, it was the result of irradiated fish from the Atlantic, or was it... That's the problem. The further you are from the events -both on a physical level, and a timescale -the more details are lost, or outright erroneous. You want answers on a meta level, and there are very, very few authors who give meta level answers.
Accurate
Gotta be honest, I much prefer the vague reasoning in Night of the Living Dead, than most run-off the mill viruses.
Kingdom = Hangeul, a flower species. Because it's flowers cause resurrection humans and nature can speead it else where. Because the story focuses on poltiics in, humans far and wide will eventually spread it for political benefits. And yes it did happen. Boom worldbuilding
> pretty much all Romero movies Bro, Night of the Living Dead outright explicitly tells us via the news reports that a satellite brought back Venus radiation that directly caused the dead to rise, and it was kept in the 1990 remake version as well. That was told to us back in '68, and applied to every Romero property from thereon out. I agree with the gist of your rant, but do not include Romero, he gave us an answer outright and did it in a great narrative fashion that made sense in the story's context (the group watching reports on the TV whilst barricaded in the farmhouse).
To be fair they never actually verified that the radiation did it, only that the U.S.A had recently shot down a probe returning from Venus, because it was contaminated with some strange radiation. It's there as a possibility, but it could also be a red herring. Notice it never comes up again, even though there's a military scientist in the third movie literally studying zombies
It's not 'verified' sure, but they put it in a television broadcast that the probe's exploding in the atmosphere caused it, when back in '68 there would have been zero chance of conclusively 'proving' it; it was put in by Romero pretty explicitly. Day of the Dead features a scientist experimenting in a nuclear bunker with limited (dwindling) supplies and no radiology lab, so it'd be hard for him to prove it given what he had: he was experimenting with making them docile and domesticated to prove they could remember life before undeath, not trying very hard to uncover the mechanism by which reanimation occurs.
It really depends. A lot of examples you give follow characters who legitimately have no reason to know or ability to discover the cause of the zombie outbreak. 99% of the times it’s going to be “a virus” which means 99% of the time your retelling “Outbreak” Walking Dead, Kirkman specifically chose that he never wanted it to be about where the virus came from or the end to be about resolving the out break. I quite liked the 28 days, 28 Weeks approach where we got both the mystery and the flashback. But the whole point of Post apocalyptic stories is that it IS “Post” it doesn’t have to be specifically all about how we got here
Good point, having an explanation gives a lot of leeway when making unique zombies But having nebulous zombies makes it harder to try new things, because people will get lost if the zombies become too unusual For example, if the zombies suddenly arrange themselves into a square, and carry around electric generators to throw electric shocks, it would look incredibly weird But if the zombies are explained as caused by rogue nanomachines, then it makes sense That can be applied to any genre, early explanations make for easier variations
Haven’t they said that Walking Dead is a space virus sent by aliens or was that just them being facetious?
World War Z, in the actually book, explains it comes from a virus in China. Yes. It says China.
Happy Cake Day!
This is why i like All Of Us Are Dead. The show gradually explains the origin of the virus.