"Zombie Origins?" Topic

Maybe we've done this in the past?

What's your favorite rationale for a zombie outbreak?

A. Voodoo
B. Human engineered via industry/military
C. Satanic
D. Black magic/Necromancy
E. Alien/Outer space
F. ?

The genre, at least for the large and small screen, is exhausted and has been for years.

E, then B

Virus

Booze.

B – accidentally with unexpected consequences.

Wasn't E the plot line from "Plan 9 from Outer Space"?

F – naturally occurring.

F: Naturally occurring

The screens genre isn't completely played out yet, fungal pathogens are still ripe for use:
link

G— Tetrodotoxin. (Look it up.)

H. — A-F. It's all fantasy, even the SF stuff, because a decomposing body will soon lose the muscle tissue and tendons necessary to move at all.

I. — A & G. This combination is essentially a function of a paralyzing neurotoxin which simulates death, combined with resulting brain damage and a fundamental societal belief— the zombie "victim" believes he has died (as do the people around them) and has been brought back to life by a shaman who now controls his soul, so now he acts that way. Great rationale for a RPG (think a Bond-type story), but of little use for a mass battle game.

apathy

The internet, cell phones and screens

B. Classic method.

B, then E

B

Fungal pathogen has also been used

The Girl with all the gifts

I will choose {?}. Too much back story can ruin things, often less is more.

-especially stuff like Zombies.

I actually think a story on a zombie apocalypse at the beginning would be good

No Zombies – its all a liberal or conservative election ruse/plot (take your choice) – so no preparedness – have to use whats at hand only

Don't worry the CDC has it all under control. Just make sure any zombies you encounter are wearing a mask.😷

Virus/biological.

None of the above

I personally like Bob Hope's take on them

YouTube link

Micheal, one of the best!

CCP Experiments with bio weapons that got loose. Like Covid

Voodoo

Meetings. Nothing turns a man into a zombie faster than PowerPoint. I live in hope that some day everyone who holds a "brown bag lunch" to lie to and/or bore their staff without having to pay them for their time may be eaten by their zombified victims.

Frederick +1 for the win

You see, when a daddy zombie and a mommy zombie are in love, sometimes, he will give her his heart. If she eats it, then he will rip out her stomach and they will start glomming on various of their parts, partaking voraciously of live human brains to regnerate the bits given to the offspring. When it begins to shamble under its own power, they chuck it out into the wild to fend for itself and never see it again. They won't even friend it on Facebook. Or X. Whatever.

That aside, voodoo is my fave zombi origin.

You really need something like an unrealistically fast acting pathogen or parasite for an outbreak, though.

Most likely near future cause: weed.

Bath salts delivered via air-burst artillery.
But by whom ?

B and ERead the book "Tooth and Nail" for an example of B.

I saw a PBS show about how slimemolds can search a large area looking for food, and thought a zombie virus could work similarly (and would explain how individual zombies can work together as a horde, being controlled by a virus in the background, so to speak… ;-)

The concept of zombies in film and TV has its origins in folklore and literature, but the first significant appearance in cinema was in the film "White Zombie" (1932), directed by Victor Halperin. This movie is widely recognized as the first feature-length zombie film.

In "White Zombie," the plot revolves around a young woman who is turned into a zombie by a voodoo master in Haiti. Unlike the flesh-eating undead of later depictions, these zombies were more closely tied to the Haitian voodoo tradition, representing individuals under the control of a malevolent force.

"The concept of zombies evolved over time, especially with the groundbreaking "Night of the Living Dead" (1968) by George A. Romero, which introduced the modern interpretation of zombies as reanimated corpses with a hunger for human flesh. This film set the foundation for the portrayal of zombies as we commonly know them in contemporary culture.

TV didn't fully embrace the zombie genre until much later, but films like "White Zombie" laid the groundwork for its eventual expansion into television."

The computer overlord.

I agree with StoneMtnMinis.

My vote for the cause of the zombie outbreak is a natural cause: It's a disease that arose among one of the scattered human populations hundreds of thousands of years ago. That entire population was infected, but it was so far from other humans that the zombies ran out of energy and died.

Natural processes happened -- volcanoes and forest fires and whatever -- and the only bodies that were not utterly destroyed (along with the zombie disease) were those that had fallen into a deep cave.

In the present day, college students on summer vacation find the opening and decide to climb down and investigate.

Hijinks ensue.

Second choice:

Satanists and Christian extremists in the military have worked their way into the command structure of a biological warfare research facility. They find common ground in bringing about the end times by developing a zombie virus.

Meanwhile, a private genetic engineering company has set up a major laboratory in Haiti. It hires locals as janitors and drivers and pats itself on the back for putting money into the Haitian economy. Little do the executives know that they have hired voodoun -- practitioners of voodoo -- who may not know much about science and math, but are perfectly capable of taking control of the scientific staff and getting them to create a virus that will turn people into zombies under the control of the voodoun -- and who have no interest in any end times prophecy, but in their own personal power.

When each side learns of the other, the stage is set for The Great Zombie War.