How were the zombies so fast?
they were looking like Olympic sprinters
I am a God
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MovieChat Forums > World War Z (2013) Discussion > How were the zombies so fast?
Really, how would any zombie move at all without the properly working mechanics that provide movement to living humans? Answer THAT question and then supersize it, and that's how these zombies run.
"That's like putting your whole mouth right in The Dip!" - Seinfeld
who says zombies don't have the properly working mechanics that provide movement to living humans?
I am a God
Well, they're dead. I'm assuming that they don't breathe or digest or have a heartbeat. A digestive system, respiratory system, and nervous system that work the muscles that provide locomotion. They don't breathe, so they can't get oxygen to the blood. And even if they did breathe, they don't have a heartbeat to pump the blood that delivers necessary substances such as nutrients and oxygen to the cells and transports metabolic waste products away from those same cells.
Everything in the body allows for everything else in the body to work. It's a very streamlined machine that doesn't respond well to giant portions of it being removed or shut down. People don't walk around when they're dead because they are physically unable to.
And that's before things like massive trauma to the bones and muscles that render a person unable to move in real life.
A virus by itself could never animate a corpse. It would be like if you jumped behind the wheel of a broken-down car.
"That's like putting your whole mouth right in The Dip!" - Seinfeld
you're taking this to literally lol. obviously this is all true, but that would mean zombies themselves couldn't exist. In the universe of the movie, they do exist, and I'm asking for the in-universe explanation to why they're so fast.
I am a God
A good way for zombies to exist is if the zombies were being puppeteered in some way.
In some zombie stories, the zombies are being puppeteered by demons or black magic.
If the zombies are activated by a bug, like a virus or bacteria, then the bug could be similar to a swarm of nanomachines. Once it hits human flesh, it multiples and can fill in the gaps of where the human doesn't function, for instance the muscles, essentially puppeteering the person from the inside.
So, if the bug were strong enough, it could make the zombie run very fast.
"That's like putting your whole mouth right in The Dip!" - Seinfeld
Because its scary... That's the reason
shareThere really isn't a good reason why they're so fast as virus, radiation or curse would not give them superhuman powers. It's one of those zombie "facts" that got created as the filmmaker made them that way. The filmmaker appears to have some leeway as viruses are not independent living organisms and need a living host to reproduce.
shareThis is why I personally prefer the supernatural zombie. "Hell is full and so now the dead walk the Earth" and all that.
Also I don't particularly like the "Jessie Owens" fast zombie. I like the slow creeping death zombie. Yes, you can escape one, or even a group, but they never stop. Relentlessly inching their way to get you. And no matter how many you kill there are always more coming.
I just find it more fun and scary than the virus zombie where we always know science will somehow save us eventually.
Lol!! Olympic Sprinters! Hilarious
shareThis isn't the first Zombie movie where they moved quickly. A film starring Ving Rhames was the first I can remember.
shareJust a pleasant change from the normal slow stumbling mumbling variety.
shareThis isn't the first Zombie movie where they moved quickly. A film starring Ving Rhames was the first I can remember.Me to - Dawn of the Dead (2004) a remake of a movie from 1978. Some hardcore zombiefans prefer the 1978 edition, but I like the one from 2004, because the damn zombies move so fast - much scarier! :D share
28 days later and 28 weeks later, where all runners aswell ! :)
Smokers get eaten first me thinks O_o Haha! That's me out the game then lol :D
28 days later and 28 weeks later, where all runners aswellHow could I forget that one!? I actually think it WAS the first one with sprinter-zombies! :D
- Well, I stopped smoking a couple of years ago, so I might have a slight advantage over you mate! :D share
This isn't the first Zombie movie where they moved quickly. A film starring Ving Rhames was the first I can remember.
2004 Dawn of the dead, but he's been in at least 3 zombie films.
1985 Return of the living dead was the first real fast zombies I remember.
You hate Congress but every election you re-elect YOUR "guy" and wonder why things never change! share
1985 Return of the living dead was the first real fast zombies I remember.You're right, but I don't consider this as a "real" zombie movie - it is more a horror comedy, nothing frightening at all, but a lot of fun. :) share
Are they zombies?
I watched it last night and a couple of characters tossed the word "zombie" around for want of a better explanation, but by all hints given in the film, they were normal people who got bit/infected by a virus that just made them brutal savages - they don't even try to eat victims like zombies, they just try to kill or infect them. My take whilst watching waas that the virus urged them on to spread it, which is why they bit people and then promptly moved on to the next one in the crowd.
Now, if they are indeed not zombies, why don't they die after being without water for a few days? Out in Israel, the "zombies" all mill about in the desert... it made no sense that there'd be so many of them, given that the heat would've caused them to die of thirst much sooner.
Overall a pretty bad film, but at least the fast-moving zombies added urgency (and made the whole point of being able to walk past them so important).
Are they zombies?Well non of Hollywood's "zombies" are - at least not according to the original definition from the Caribbean Voodoo culture, where the term "Zombie" first originated.
The stories goes, that the Caribbean (Especially Haitian, where the Voodoo culture originated as a mesh up between Christianity and several African heathen religions) Voodoo priests could put a spell on a man so he died, was buried and a couple of days later, he stood up from his grave, and became the slave of the priest that put the spell on him. There were never any brain eating, or eating human flesh at all, or even killing other humans involved - it's purely fictional character traits invented by popular culture.
- It's partially true, the priests COULD put a man in his grave, and then he raised from that grave a couple of days later, but it was done using poison from the puffer fish, which introduced a state of suspended animation, and in combination with a deliriant drug, these ingredients were said to induce a deathlike state in which the will of the victim would be entirely subjected to that of the priest, but obviously the victim wasn't really dead, just drugged. Unfortunately the drugs usually fried the brains of the victims, so the chances to fully recover was slim to none.
In popular culture, Zombies has taken many forms and many ways to become zombies: Witchcraft, Chemical waste, Virus, Bacteria, Radiation.. etc. etc., so to say which one is the right one is almost impossible, because there isn't a "right one" - in fact they're all wrong, taken the origin of the term "zombie" in mind. :) share
I get that this response is like 7 months after you posed the question, but here goes.
First this is accepting the fact that in this universe Zombies can exist, so taking that into account.
Since the infected turn in around 10-15 seconds, there really is not time for decay to set in right away (we know that with no heartbeat there is no blood flow and thus no oxygen getting to the tissue and without that tissue dies and decays quite rapidly, (but we have to accept that Zombies don't rot the way they should).
So since they turn so quickly, they should be just as fast as a Zombie as they were when they were living, but here is the thing.
Zombies would actually be a bit stronger then humans because we humans are limited by our pain thresholds, since Zombies do not feel pain they are not limited by pain thresholds.
if I gave you a 1 inch thick piece of steel and told you to bite down on it as hard as you can, you wouldn't actually bite down on it as hard as you can, you would bite down on it as hard as your pain tolerance would let you, (at a certain point it would be too painful to bite down any harder and you would stop)
But a Zombie would bite down on it until either his teeth shattered or his jaw snapped, or both, since he would not feel any pain he would just bite as hard as his jaw muscles could,, which would end up busting teeth and or the jawbone.
We often see Zombies ripping people open, well that would take quite a bit of strength, but again, if I gave you a 1 inch piece of steel and told you to squeeze it as hard as you can, again you would only squeeze it as hard as your pain threshold would allow you to,, a Zombie would squeeze it until his finger bones/tendons snapped,, no pain = no pain threshold.
So back to the running and jumping,, a Zombie since it is not restricted by a pain threshold like living people are, they would actually push their bodies to the physical limit without consideration for pain, where humans push it to the pain limit, Zombies push it to the physical limit of the human anatomy.
So at least in theory, Zombies would have a physical advantage over the living.
(This is all of course based on the theory that in their universe Zombies exist)
Thanks for keeping this thread alive, tbirum!
I just watched this film for the first time last night. I dont really have problems with fast running viruszombies, even if I find it to be more creepy (in different ways) with slow moving. Its like the difference beween creepiness and chock effect. But still,I felt that these so called zombies gave me a flashback of the ridiculous I Am Legend zombies who defied the laws of physics by climbing on walls like Spiderman or like insects although they must have weight like normal humans. Instead of terror it made me feel it was ridiculous and my "trust" towards the filmmakers were "broken".
In WWZ, the zombies did not really go that bad, but still a BIT too fast. It seems that nowadays when moving things are CGI, the artists seem to overdo it. Werewolves that transforms in a matter of seconds instead of minutes that used to give us that creepy feeling of horrible CHANGE, and CGI zombies and vampires seems to move without the real weight that make them believable if they move on planet Earth. Get it? WWZs zombies is still too fast moving to be believable. Even a fast moving sprinter cannot loose their weight just because they run fast, turn around the corner fast, jump fast...Thats how I feel. And it stopped me from feeling the fright I wanted, and started to think about this problem instead.
I agree that WWZ greatly over did the abilities with the Zombies, with their speed/jumping/climbing/ability to fall from high places yet get up and move like it was no big deal.
Fall from 100+ feet and land on hard surface you are going to have shattered bones,, pain or no pain, shattered bones means you are not getting up and attacking anyone.
The movie could have reduced the Zombies abilities quite a bit and it still would have been a good movie, for me it was a decent Zombie flick, nothing great, but it really is hard to make a good Zombie flick because there have been so many that trying to introduce something new, or just do something that has been done before but doing it in a new and creative way becomes problematic.
I have no problem with fast moving Zombies, or slow moving Zombies,, the fast are far more dangerous, because with slow moving Zombies you are really only in danger if you get surrounded by them or are in a place where you have a few of them and you are cornered (like stuck in a dead end ally or a room where they are blocking the exit.
But with fast moving Zombies, even if you are out in an open field, you will tire from running,, the Zombie will not, and even if you are stronger, all it takes is one bite and it is game over.
The best Fast moving Zombie flick IMHO is the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead, little to no CGI so the Zombies looked and moved much more realistically.
And it was face past with some great chase/fight scenes.
I wholeheartedly agree with you. And, actually the one fastrunning zombie movie I prefer from all others IS the Dawn of the Dead remake you mentioned! Great! Although it would be fun to see a new fresh "slowzombie" movie for a change. Toofast zombies in film make it hard to get into it, because if you get into it, you know you cannot win! Thats not suspense, thats dispair!
shareI have always wondered about what a ZA would look like in India,, there is a country that is 1/2 the size of the US, but has 4 times the population, and they have very large portions of their country that is agricultural so basically they have a lot of "Mega cities", so while slow moving Zombies would not be too huge of a problem here in the US unless you are stuck in a city and by the time you realize what is going down until there are already tens of thousands of Zombies you would need to wade through to get out of the city, but in India there really would be no safe place to go because even if you made it out of a city with 1.2 billion people, (hundreds of millions of them being Zombies) even if you make it out into the countryside there just isn't going to be anywhere to go that is safe because the countryside would be picked clean of food and usable material by the hundreds of millions of people who are still alive and then when those Zombies start invading the countryside you would have people fleeing,, killing each other for a car/boat/train seat, it would just be a totally disastrous situation.
Plus you need to take into consideration their religious beliefs when it comes to dealing with dead people (Karma/reincarnation) how many would be dealing with Zombies the way we would in the US, I would think many in India may take a different view, due to their beliefs in the afterlife and how what we do in this life translates into how the next life goes for you.
Another thing I would like to see done is a ZA that takes place around the time of "The Black Plague" IE Medieval Europe circa 1300's , No guns, no supermarkets to raid for supplies, not many homes to raid for food due to the fact that since there was no refrigeration pretty much all food was gathered/prepared daily, so there really would be very little in the way of being able to stockpile food supplies.
So in that scenario, no easy food/water supplies to stock pile, a bow and arrow or spear is going to be your best long range weapon to use against the Zombies, otherwise you need to get up close and personal, each and every day is going to be a struggle to get food and fresh water.
Would make for a very interesting scenario,, I wish Hollywood would do a ZA movie like that, at least it would be a new direction to go in the ZA genre.
Hi again!
Thanks for sharing your imagination. In fact during the Dark Ages it must have been the closest to ZA plague. As the Black Death was so contagious and immediate it must have been the ultimate terror among the citizens of Europe. Quite food for good films I say!
About your thoughts on India as an enormously populated country, you are right. I know that many crazy things happens there among superstitous countryfolks, due to their beliefs, but I think that if zombieplague really would spread, many "modern" citizens would react as anyone on this planet. Survival!!!!
Here in Sweden, we have quite few people and LOTS of nature areas, mountains and forests. Here would be the place to be during a slowmoving zombie plague! But as things are going now, like in other places in Europe, the masses of refugees/immigrants come pouring in with not enough security politics to catch criminal and radical muslim men. Some of them are going crazy in the countryside, raping and stealing (not exaggerating!) so people start buying rifles and making bows in case...You know, not many have any guns or weapons..
Here in the States, we have a great deal of advantages that many other countries do not.
Vast areas of wide open spaces,, huge areas of farm land, and plenty of animals to hunt, plus the US has tens of millions of Gus, lol too many guns in fact.
Now that can work 2 ways for us,, great for putting down hordes of Zombies, but that also means you are going to have roving bands of looting/raping hordes of humans who are going to use the ZA to acquire wealth/power, basically become ZA warlords.
I think Ideally the place to be in a ZA would be Iceland,, very few people, reasonable amount of food (lots of fishing) plenty of fresh water lakes to get drinking water and again fish, and the fact that it is cold I would think that Zombies would freeze, so with very small population plenty of fish/reindeer/sheep/cattle,, lots of wide open spaces and freezing cold, that is the place I think I would want to be on vacation when the ZA hits.
tbirum wrote:
So since they turn so quickly, they should be just as fast as a Zombie as they were when they were living, but here is the thing.
Zombies would actually be a bit stronger then humans because we humans are limited by our pain thresholds, since Zombies do not feel pain they are not limited by pain thresholds.
I prefer to call them "Infecteds", rather than Zombies. It seems more descriptive, without all the emotional connotations and baggage of the cooler word.
Your theory would explain the recently Infecteds' ability to run fast. Their bodies would still have oxygen and food nutrients suspended in the blood stream and the liver with which to power the muscles--for awhile.
But eventually, those nutrients will be used up, and such Infecteds should slow down and/or keel over altogether.
Perhaps these creatures start out as Infecteds, and then over time they use up their onboard nutrients and must transition into the more familiar actual Zombies by actually eating their victims?
That we didn't see them do so doesn't mean that they didn't do so, here. It only means that the filmmakers sanitized the goriest bits to focus on the urgency of the recently Infected. Maybe sequels will explore the Zombification of the Infecteds? share
I never read the book WWZ, but as I understand it, in the book the Zombies/Infecteds, were slow, Most fans of the book thought that the movie was garbage, since the only thing the book and the movie had in common was the name,,,lol, But yes I do hope that in the sequel that they are making they do address the deterioration of the dead.
Most movies shy away from the "HOW", since everyone knows that Zombies as they are portrayed in the movies and TV shows are impossible from a medical and physics stand point, I am still waiting for a movie to give a half way plausible explanation as to how something like a zombie could exist.
The Movie 28 days later and its sequel 28 weeks later did a really good job of it,, But again those were not zombies, just rage infected humans, after about a month or so they starved to death.
At least with this movie since once you are bitten you turn in like 10 seconds, the thing about being fast makes sense since when a person dies decay sets in once the body uses up the oxygen in the blood and once the oxygen is used up the cells in the tissue begin to die, but that takes several minutes, so at least initially the infected would be fast. Which would explain why the infection spread so fast throughout the cities and the world.
In the book of World War Z and The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks, the zombies are actual "zombies," in that they live only to eat human flesh and the only functioning organ they have is the brain and the central nervous system allowing them to walk around and grab people. To reiterate, these zombies walk or shuffle, and they can only be killed by shooting them in the brain (although a shot to the spine would cripple them). The cause of zombies was the fictional virus, "Solanum."
In the film WWZ, even though it's called "Z" for zombies and they're referred to as zombies, the creatures are more along the lines of infected humans than zombies. Instead of wanting to eat people, these zombies exist only to spread the virus, which they haven't specified to be "Solanum" yet. That's why instead of eating people, the infected bite people then continue on, it's also why they avoid the sick, weak or elderly, because they wouldn't efficiently spread the virus as quickly as possible.
In the movie we aren't given a timetable but the outbreak in Philadelphia (and concurrent outbreaks elsewhere) show the zombies turning in roughly 10 seconds. In South Korea, the soldiers tell Gerry that the doctor's victims turned in about 15 minutes, and in Israel Warmbrunn mentions the first reports came in from India. This gave Israel enough time to build a giant wall, although the rest of the world ignored it until there were outbreaks in Asia (according to Warmbrunn), South Africa (according to Gerry's TV at the beginning) and then simultaneous outbreaks in the USA, Europe, and the rest of the world.
This suggests that the time it takes for someone to turn into a zombie has been decreasing, until eventually it only takes 10 seconds, which is also when the disease begins to spread throughout the world fastest. Perhaps the earliest infected were slower or something, but as the virus evolved the infected became faster.
But if you're wondering why WWZ's zombies are so fast, it's because they're not "true" zombies, but rather infected people.
Can't be too careful with all those weirdos running around.
At least I thought that fast zombies are not the problem, but CGI zombies moves as though they dont have a weight, they move too fast. They give a s light impression of cartoon, like in I AM LEGEND. But I have only watched WWZ once. so I should tell you that. Its just my gut feeling.
shareThe production crew hired extras to play zombies and told them.
"Run with your chest out. Keep your arms by your sides. Do not look natural. Do not dare to move like a biped."
"Keep your mouth wide open at all times. Wag your head slightly from side to side."
"We are going to put an object in front of you....we want you to run into it, chest first. Again...do not attempt any form of 'natural movement'. We want the viewers to be totally confused by how the zombies act. We want there to be no logic or rational in the way that the zombies move."
"What ever you do. Do not take any natural movement that you have ever seen in your entire life for your 'zombie performance' in the film."
"We are aware of the debate about 'slow versus fast' zombies in films. We want a new form of zombie movement that makes no sense to anyone, living or dead."
"We want you to look as contrived and as unrealistic as possible."