I've recently been reading "World War Z" By Max Brooks and really enjoying the serious tone of the book, which is marketed heavily as a fictional non-fictional work. The setup is that the book is written based on interviews with survivors and notes from official UN records years after "the zombie war".

Anyway, it inspired me to start this thread, post fun facts about zombies:

fun fact: zombies would legally be classified as people with human rights, and would not be legally dead - thus if you shoot them it's murder, and you can't inherit their stuff if it's a relative

Which type of zombie are you talking about?
Those that die, and come back to life? If so, wouldn't they be legally dead once they are declared dead?

Or are you talking about the kind who are people bitten who then turn zombie? If so, wouldn't they have to be quarantined (like how that guy with a weird strain of tuberculosis was quarantined)?

This post was last modified: 07-02-2012 06:58 AM by sg1008.

The most realistic zombie is the type caused by a pathogen, and we don't declare people who are infected with a pathogen dead.

TWIMConcern:
Zombies (pron. "zŭm′-beez) are supposed to have been reputably documented as made by a procedure involving brief live burial to increase suggestibility(!), poisoning w/ a small dose of a powerful natural toxin called "tetrodotoxin" and ≥1 "programming" psycho-manipulations to induce something like a hypnotic/anæsthetized state.  Reportedly well known in Haiti/other Caribbean nations.
regards,
kullervo

Ah yes, puffer-fish poison, it's actually part of voodoo practices and where the whole zombie concept came from before romero invented the brainless shambler zombie.

....when one day, one man did not come out of the hypnotic state, and it turns out the tetrodotoxin mutated a dormant virus strand in his spinal  chord creating tetrodotoxin-9 (or T-9). The toxic virus strand began accumulating in his blood stream, and seeped out through his sweat and saliva. T-9, also began to attack the mans RNA so that he began to rapidly loose the ability to produce proteins. This further damaged his brain, and gave him an intense craving for protein foods- As he slowly lost sense and the ability to cognize a shopping trip, he began eating that which was around him. However, T-9 was contagious, so that upon biting other people he spread the toxic virus and soon, zombies took over the world forcing those not yet infected to hide on remote islands, and in hard to reach places (where zombies would not be able to cognize how to approach). Soon, the zombies deprived themselves of all sources of protein (which at the time were the dinosaurs) and they slowly wasted away and died out.

Man was able to come out of hiding, and hence forth, zombies became mythical creatures...


[NOTE: none of what I wrote^ would actually constitute a fact].

This post was last modified: 07-02-2012 08:05 AM by sg1008.

Yeah........ I don't think tetrodotoxin is a mutagen.

The T-Virus however, is a mutagenic toxin developed by the international pharmaceutical corporation Umbrella.




^ Only half fact, and i'll be disturbed if anyone thinks the latter part is the fact.

In Toraja they believe that the dead are only sleeping until they are released during an elaborate and bloody ceremony. Years ago, although only the elderly people remember having seen it, the traditional holy men used to wake the dead from their slumber, after they had been dead for up to a year while the ceremony was planned. The dead would then walk up to the caves where the bodies are kept. My wife swears this is all true.

I remember you posting about that, weird mix of religious practices there

I love Max Brooks, though I've only read the zombie survival guide.

Fun fact: Zombies' heads can still deliver and bite and moan. The bite will cause an infection. The "Brotherhood of life" an ancient Japanese society dedicated to destroying the zombies had several heads hung on a wall in a room and as part of the initiation ceremony a new member had to spend an entire night in the room, with nothing but the heads for company.

Fun fact: The Roman army had a special order, that meant they had to kill an infected individual on sight.

Fire is NOT the easy way to kill zombies as the skull will protect the brain.  Instead of leveling the masses of undead, you will have a bunch of hungry, FLAMING monstrosities chasing after you.

Zombies only become Zombies when either biten or awoken from a very loud noise known as the big kabang....

You can train a dog to detect The Virus even if the person hasn't yet shown any symptoms.

And now voodoo practitioners are making the same discoveries in robotics, I mean zombification, that led to the zombie apocalypse in the first place.  "All this has happened before, it will happen again."

You could make a pretty good four-year TV series out of that.

This post was last modified: 07-10-2012 09:10 PM by Lang.