If they ARE actually competent, they'll likely happen to be evil. The Militaries Are Useless trope is usually a must in such a movie, if only to avoid the film ending in five minutes. Since trying to plot a zombie outbreak from Patient Zero is long and difficult, most zombie stories are set either After the End, have zombies turn very quickly, or have a significant mass of people infected all at once by some sort of bioweapon. Either from the character's actions or circumstance which are out of their hands, no matter how improbable it is. Another main staple is that things will always, always go From Bad to Worse. Failure is often the only option in these stories rarely do they have an ending that could be considered 'happy' by typical standards, or indeed one where humanity survives as a species. Whether they'll attack animals other than humans varies, but it's rare for The Virus to affect other species, probably because it's cheaper and easier to film humans in make-up than to work with animals, whether trained, animatronic, or CGI.ĭue to the threat that zombies pose (they did just become the apocalypse, after all), protagonists of more serious works are required to become very smart very quickly (but will be ignorant with regard to the word 'zombie' itself). The breakdown of society, the fear that your Fire-Forged Friends could be infected and turned against you without warning, are at least as important to a zombie story as the zombies themselves, if not more so.Ĭommon to virtually all Zombie Apocalypse tales is that, regardless of the reason zombies attack living/non-infected people, they never attack other zombies. Instead it can come from the reaction of the living humans involved, and how they respond to the state of fear and violent chaos brought about by the zombies. While Horror is assumed to be an inherent part of the zombie apocalypse, not all the horror and conflict comes from the zombies themselves. As society collapses, it's up to the Big Damn Heroes (or a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits) to fight their way to safety or keep shooting until things blow over. With each victim they claim, their numbers swell, and no force on Earth can contain them.

Whatever the cause, the result is the same the recently dead have risen, en masse, to feed on the living. Maybe an alien space probe broadcast a weird signal at the Earth, or fell to Earth and brought radiation with it. Maybe the Synthetic Plague the government was working on got unleashed.

Within the past couple days or hours, something very strange has happened. Romero, director of Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Survivors the quest underground hunger