The Zombie Group! discussion

A book of my zombie stories, BEACH BLANKET ZOMBIE, came out earlier this year, and most of the zombies in the various stories come to life in different ways. But, I bet there are methods of zombie resurrection which I may have overlooked! I love thinking about this sort of stuff...

You're all the zombie experts, so please, list every possible way in which a corpse might be brought back to life.... I look forward to seeing the imaginative responses!

Voodoo, meteor, virus, biochemical accident, biochemical terrorist attack, satanic ritual, pagan ritual, airborne virus, nuclear blast, alien attack, historical artefact, amazon poison, African jungle poison, exotic animal bite, undiscovered insect, reptile,monkey, fish, snake, mammal, bite or venom, rabid Jungle animal attack, alien probe!! Undiscovered STI and volcanic ash inhalation!!! Have I left any out?

What about parasitic infestation.

I foegot the main one! When theres no more room in hell the dead will walk the Earth!

Steven -- I see you are a true zombie aficionado! You came up with lots of great answers. Now, if you count Frankenstein's Monster as a zombie, you can add lightning -- and if you count mummies, you can add tea made from tanna leaves.

In The Serpent and the Rainbow Davis claimed it was by means of a powder, containing tetrodotoxin and/or datura.

And then of course, there's the bite of the Sumatran rat-monkey (which was technically already covered by Steven as 'exotic animal bite').

What movie is the one with the Sumatran rat-monkey...? It rings a bell, but I can't remember.

Brain dead by Peter jackson!

Ah yes, BRAIN DEAD! :-) I watched TOXIC ZOMBIES a week or so ago - remember that? About prisoners who use experimental formaldehyde as a drug and that turns them into zombies. The look of it reminded me a lot of another el cheapo zombie classic, CHILDREN SHOULDN'T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS.

Insufficient worship of the zombie Jesus.

Paul -- Or, EXCESS worship of the zombie Jesus!

I just realized, the movie about the prisoners huffing formaldehyde isn't TOXIC ZOMBIES. It's GARDEN OF THE DEAD. I get those two mixed up! In TOXIC ZOMBIES, they're zombified by toxic marijuana.

I've thought of another! Have you seen night of the creeps? The dead where brought back by leeches of some kind but I guess you could class that as a parasite!

Steven -- I guess we can lump space parasites and leeches under, ummmm ... alien symbiotic zombies? I think SLITHER also has some of those, right...?

Yep that's right I think we may have covered the lot?

Oh, I hope not!

In my stories, I've raised the dead with a matter transference machine ... Aleister Crowley rituals ... films with subliminal content that zombifies folks ... horror movies coming to life for various reasons ... Egyptian rituals combined with surgery ... formulas made with jungle mold ... and, simply baptizing the dead.

There are ALWAYS new ways to raise the dead. And the minute we say we've listed every possible way of raising the dead in movies -- we'll probably think of another one a minute later!

Drew wrote: "What about parasitic infestation."

Good one. That's my take. My book even has it as the title.
Parasite; The True Story of the Zombie Apocalypse

In MACE OF THE APOCALYPSE, the dead are brought back to life by a black-market toxin injected with alien amino acids from a meteorite. There is an actual meteorite called, "The Murchison Stone," that landed in Australia in 1969, which contains life forms as old as the solar system itself.

Alien amino acids! That's a good reanimation method! :-)

Evil book, ancient curses, miracle drugs, aliens, pacts with the devil, bio chemical war or experiments.
are some of the ways that you can turn into an undead.

Julio -- Good list!

Mark wrote: "Julio -- Good list!"



thanks man, there can be like 1001 ways to turn into a zombie, some are good, others not so good, it all depends on the person you ask

I think the best zombie reanimation method I ever devised in one of my stories was in "Cyber-Vengeance of the Internet Witches" in Beach Blanket Zombie: Weird Tales of the Undead and Other Humanoid Horrors. If you anger a member of the cult of Internet Witches, who live online, they'll send a special virus to your computer....

awesome I should've added evil cultists to the list and they send the virus through the internet, clever. in mine it is set in some future year that I will not mention due to the risk of getting the ideas stolen, the US has been reduced to warring states, my idea is to do my book like the keith Adam or these other books memoirs of a walking dead where the character is a zombie

Julio -- I've written about my Internet witches and their cyber-zombies in several books and some zombie anthologies, too. The first time I wrote about them was in my book THE GOSSAMER EYE, which I wrote with Rain Graves and David Niall Wilson, a horror poetry book that won a Bram Stoker Award.

writer to writer what's your source of inspiration?

How aboyt total and utter boredom. Or from watching too much television, not very imaginative but what can I say:-)

Maniacal Toxic-Metabolic Encephalopathy Inanition is a custom-made biological weapon created by combining parts of the HIV virus, Ebola, black plague, and rabies in my book Atrum Terra: Dark Lands.

Julio -- My source of inspiration? Anything and everything. :-) Thoughts occur to me, inspired by various random observations which lead to plot concepts. For example, for my concept of Internet Witches, which I've used in many of my books, I figured: Where is the best place for a witch to live? A place with loose laws: a frontier. And, in today's world, the biggest frontier is probably the Internet. So, witches would go digital and live in the Internet.

Vicky -- Yes, most of today's bland TV shows probably COULD zombify a person!

Brenton -- Sounds like a cool concept, a biological cocktail so deadly, it kills you and then brings you back to life! :-)

Gene therapy
Anti-Sentient

I used a chemical plant housing a form of concentrated LSD for the government whom was studying it for chemical warfare during Vietnam (true by the way) built ignorantly on top of a slave cemetery which back in the day slaves and servants were buried on top of each other in boxes so it seeped into quite a few of them after a fire broke out and burned the place to the ground.

Linda -- Gene therapy, I like that! :-)

Jacob -- Concentrated LSD, that's good, too! The scenario you depict has a lot of potential for drama. :-)

See, there are so many ways to bring the dead back, it's a wonder we don't have corpses shambling around in broad daylight. ;-)

When I feel dead, I bring myself back to life with a couple cups of coffee!