The Zombie Group! discussion

I'm curious as to what everyone's favourite "source" is for any given zombie plague. I.E - tainted meat, government testing, terrorist, etc. I am also curious as to what the inspiration was behind said plague(s). My personal favourite is the tainted meat idea. Mad Cow anyone?!

I think the less specific you can be about the cause of the plague/infection/whatever, the better. I've always loved Romero's original Night of the Living Dead explanation... the reanimation of the dead might be due to radiation from a crashed satellite, and that's as much as we're told. That said, I also love the follow-on cause from Return of the Living Dead - some fools just happen to open sealed barrels containing the remains of the dead from the original movie.

Tainted meat is a great idea. Imagine that... we're all too busy chowing down to realise we're being contaminated. By the time the connection's made between the food and the living dead, we've all (literally) had a gut-ful!

Sometimes, though, I think it's better not to think about the cause at all, just to concentrate on the people left dealing with the effects. I have a couple of characters talking about that in the first of my Autumn books. They're talking in circles for a while about what might have caused the dead to rise, before someone gets wound up with the pointlessness of the conversation. We just have to deal with it, he says. If you get hit by a car, does it matter what colour it is?

Why the dead have risen isn't the focus of the story - it's what the survivors do about it that counts!

I actually prefer a more specific scenario. I loved Mira Grant's idea in the Newsflesh trilogy: A killer virus is the cause, but the kicker is that it developed when two man-made LIFE SAVING viruses meet. I think one was the cure for cancer, transmitted via influeza virus if I recall correctly. One of the viruses is accidentally released before it is tested, ironically by someone protesting the use of the virus...and......zombie pandemic!

All the way through the novels, you learn more about what the original viruses were designed to do, how they mutated, what effect this has on the population (all of which carry an inert form of the virus), even the effect on animals. It makes for a really intricate and fascinating plot. Best of all, it's completely plausible.

I'm on the fence about it. On a selfish level, I definitely like to be informed about the source of the plague because otherwise it's a constant thought throughout the book or movie. On the other hand, David you are absolutely right! The source of the plague is irrelevant. When I think about it, what I enjoy most is the stories of the survivors.

I also agree with Ruby in that it can sometimes be an important plot aspect...I really just can't decide!

I liked the premise of this one: I can't recall 100% but the source had it's origins in food additives. After years and years of buildup of this certain additive people started turning. I should note however that I liked the feasibility of this one because I'm vegan and a huge proponent of whole, unprocessed foods.

OMG Alexis I was totally going to bring up Zombies: A Record of the Year of Infection! It totally cracked me up that pretty much only Vegans didn't start to turn in that book. That's like the second best zombie book I've ever read!

lol! it IS a pretty awesome book! We had a house fire this summer, and I lost most of my book collection :( :( (hence why I had to think a little about the premise of that one). I also appreciated the Canadian connection ;)

David, I am curious as to what your plague inspiration was for the Autumn series?!

I rather enjoy a scientific description of the genesis of the zombie plague, as it lends the story a sense of authenticity and thus a sense of a real threat, but at the same time I feel that it is far more important to have a well-developed plot that involves interesting and detailed characters and describes their journey through hell!

Alexis - I deliberately didn't think too much about the cause of the plague in Autumn. There is an explanation of sorts in the third book (Autumn: Purification) but it's left deliberately vague as to whether it's true or just a rumour made up by a survivor.

I set out to write a believable zombie story (which is ridiculous in itself - dead bodies walking... how's that ever going to be believable?!). To make the horror more realistic, I deliberately chose a cast of 'normal' people who react to events in the way I think that I, or any of the people around me, probably would.

The reality is that should something of the magnitude of the virus in Autumn happen, the people who are left alive would have no way of knowing what had caused the catastrophe. Also, with hundreds of thousands of dead bodies after them constantly, working out the cause would be the least of their concerns!

In the books I also wanted to avoid some of the more traditional zombie cliches, so with my virus you're either dead or alive at the end of day one... the infection doesn't get passed through bites or zombie attacks.

Interesting! Thanks for the clarification :) I thought it was definitely one of the more unique ways to go about having the dead rise. The not knowing what the heck is going on in the first installment, and then the additional layer of impending doom with the military folk. You're right though, it's all a moot point.

haha, I am certainly just being nosy.

My novel has a plague, albeit it is man made and driven more by greed than anything else. Investors decide the market will plunge if there is a zombie plague, especially because it will be recognizable from fiction. All this craziness will be true (the zombie plague stuff), people will think it really is the end, and they'll rush the markets and take out their money. Then the evil investors can bet against the market just before they release the bug, but, like all Frankenstein stories, the genie gets out of the bottle.

Zombies represent uncertainty to me, and the increasing rise and perhaps even more accurately the increasing awareness of pandemics creates an almost constant state of uncertainty. When Night of the Living Dead started, they hint at radiation, then the dominant uncertainty at the height of the Cold War.

Interestingly, the idea that things in nature will spiral out of control and against us was discussed by Mary Shelly in Frankenstein, and also in her novel The Last Man, published in something like 1826. There she also wrote of a humanity ending plague.

Finally, we were comfortable with plagues while we could chalk them up to divine or supernatural wrath. The lack of intent inherent in a randomly occurring virus, the fact that it doesn't give a damn about us one way or another, is terrifying. Its that same impersonal quality that zombies bring to terror.

Interesting...

I was watching this show last night called "Ancient Aliens", and the topic was plagues (I laughed at the timing). As you may suspect from the show's title, they referenced some extraterrestrial sightings coinciding with plagues such as The Black Death. (yes, I agree, it IS all a little crazy, but an interesting take nonetheless). This idea takes the place of God's wrath, or otherworldly sources for our global pandemics.

They actually did some studies on rocks in space, and found that bacteria actually survives and sometimes thrives. Salmonella, for instance, becomes 700 times more deadly in the atmosphere of space.

Food for thought!