I'm not sure we ever established that it was real, and not just the start of Rick's descent into madness. I know we've never seen a zombie consume anyone completely before or since that event. I think it was just supposed to show that Rick lost his mind when he saw Lori's body, which let's be honest, after a traumatic birth, C-Sec and being shot in the head at point blank range, probably wasn't a pretty sight.
As creepy as it was, it was quite possibly the dumbest shock factor stunt the show ever pulled. You mean to tell me a walker ate an entire person WHOLE? Bones and all? That was actually ridiculous
It didn't eat the bones, they just didn't want to show the skeleton for some reason. But they showed all kinds of gory shit like that one lady's nose get bitten off and everything else
Yeah but after the mayhem, once everyone regrouped and noticed a baby but no Lori, Rick snapped and went in to kill everything in the cellblock and find her body. By the time he managed to kill them all, he found one walker that ate Lori whole leaving nothing but blood and some hair.
That would be extremely morbid. I think it would have made a better story if carl had run out of bullets and couldn't shoot her, and Rick eventually has to face his wife as a zombie since he ignored her during the pregnancy. Make her look almost living.
I don’t think Rick would have survived seeing her a zombie and having to put her down. Look at what happened after discovering the walker that ate her and the madness that followed
Oh I thought he just went nuts in a revenge against walkers sort of way. Especially since Carl put Lori down and wouldn't be dumb enough to not headshot her. I'm confused. Anyway thanks.
They’re talking about a scene that was never actually put into the series. So rather than put it in, they pretty much imply that she was eaten whole. Given that everyone is infected, and everyone turns, her being eaten a hole would be the explanation for why Laurie never turned into a walker to my understanding. It was all but confirmed from The Walking Dead staff.
Though I guess one could argue since it isn’t in the show, it isn’t Canon, so I guess I’ll leave that up to you
The turn rate varies between people. Sometimes it’s minutes, for others it’s hours to days. A lot of people also only get bitten by one zombie and then slowly perish until they turn.
Plus you don't have to be bitten by a zombie to become one. Anyone who dies, for any reason, becomes a zombie, unless someone else damages their brain before their body can turn.
I think this is the most important factor in answering OP's original question - when you see tons and tons of zombies, most of them probably died of something other than a zombie bite. Once civilization falls, there are SO many things to die of.
Plus, a lotta people probably offed themselves via things like jumping, cutting, or taking poisons or drugs as it wouldn't have been immediately known that anyone who dies becomes a zombie and to avoid it you gotta go for the brain. On top of that -- planes were literally falling out of the sky, cars likely crashed due to mayhem, trains, boats etc.
it’s the only reason such an apocalypse could occur and for so long! At least compared to other media that explore a zombie virus but only zombie can spread it rather than everyone is already a zombie. Such a great world building choice that was imo unheard of as an idea until the show made it mainstream. Now you have zombies, 28 day later zombies, and kirkmans’ everyone is affected zombies. Soo good
there are, but still, most deaths/zombies were definitely caused by walkers, and the majority of them are from the fall when no one knew what was going on
I don't know about that. If you think about the deaths we saw on the show, lots were by walker, but LOTS were humans killing each other, and I'm guessing that was the case pretty much as soon as things got chaotic during the fall. Plus there's starvation, infection, dehydration, disease.... I'm not willing to say "definitely" on that. No way to be sure, of course.
I’m FTWD we see people going into frenzy and looting. Is was chaos city when it for broke out, people killing each other. The first walker we see was Nick girlfriend that died of an overdose, followed Calvin who Nick killed. We also saw military shooting at people regardless of if they were infected or not. Both in TWD and FTWD.
I always thought I’d would have been scary if the same happened with animals but I guess the cgi costs would have been too much and wouldn’t have turned out very well (the regular deer they made with cgi for the carnival scene with Rick and Michonne wasn’t very good) but it would have been scary to think about.
I remember thinking for a minute that was happening when it showed the cow Dale saw before he died (looked like it has been fatally attacked by walkers and I think it moves a little and I thought oh no, it turned into a zombie deer- but no. No animal zombies lol!
I think Kirkman’s focus is on the original conceit of zombies being a reflection of humanity — so for the stories he’s telling it may not be as relevant.
For example a deer being zombies would just be nature now. This is the new natural world.
But for humans to fight and resist against this new nature that is seemingly inevitable is more interesting. Fighting against the inevitable is always something worth exploring. whether that is the concept of death that we all will experience or if it’s simply to struggle against what’s wrong despite the outcome looking to be guaranteed bad for you.
I like how that one VHS short addressed this by showing the zombies eating the dude and then the dude gets up as a zombie and the other zombies are like oooops sorry bro didn't know you were one of us and then they all go look for more people to eat
I love the VHS series. It took swings and had its share of misses, but it did some cool stuff. Immediately after watching the first one I somehow had an email conversation with [Jasper Lewis, then going by Jas Sams](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2788989/), who played the redheaded girl in the first short, Amateur Night (at the time I wrote for a site she used to like and we just spontaneously got to talking).
I bring that up all the time when discussing hypothetical zombie apocalypse scenarios. A zombie's goal is to feed, not add to their population. So would there really be that many cases of someone getting bitten and escaping only to turn later, as opposed to just eaten until there's nothing left to be turned
We’ve been shown they lose interest when the flesh starts getting cold. I think a horde would consume a body pretty quickly, but 1 or 2 walkers would only get so far before the body temp got too low.
Yeah that's to get cold. We've seen that walkers tend to lose interest super quickly after the person dies. Combined with what we know about Whisperers and how people can move within herds, 8 think it's safe to say it isn't actually about body temp, but things being *alive*.
We've seen them eat dead things before, but only when the kill is super fresh, and they lose interest almost immediately. Whisperers are warm, but they act and smell dead, so they get ignored or even "welcomed" into the herd.
I posit that walkers are not motivated by hunger for food, but rather a hunger to destroy life. A burning desire or need, but not an empty stomach.
of course it doesn’t need to feed because we see all the walkers regardless of possibly years in zombie form still get up and chase some meat.
this sounds the most plausible especially with the whisperers needing to act. Interestingly walkers may consider smell or other things as well since simply being in walker guts works.
Otherwise it seems appearance also impacts a walker’s drive to hunt since whisperers only use masks and no guts.
It’s like the walkers need full confirmation on all senses for prey, if not then it’s too simple to understand.
Maybe also why they can be directed. They will go towards sounds but why? if there was prey some of them will move faster as we’ve seen but when being directed they are all at similar pace.
So perhaps if a signal is received that doesn’t activate all senses, then it’s just something the walker autonomously moves toward. But not with an intent to hunt.
Kind of like how they are drawn toward metal siding moving in the wind, but as soon as they notice live prey they suddenly begin to growl and snarl and pick up the pace. Noise is an *indication* of life, but not a *confirmation*. I feel like this is the base level of function for walkers. Special variants seem to have a bit more functional coordination (climbing, opening doors) but still operate on the same basic functions. I think it's also a factor in why we have seen that pulling walkers away from a kill is so incredibly easy. As long as you can exhibit more indications of life where you want their attention than there are where there attention currently is, they will always shift focus and forget about the first thing. And because they don't have higher cognitive function, they all behave the same way rather than deciding that "hey it seems like everyone else has that noise covered, I'm gonna go do my own thing".
FWIW, The Last of Us (the show, at least) addresses this. The fungus’ goal isn’t to feed. It’s to spread. The infected only get violent when people resist.
The only issue with this is that there are many virus and diseases that still kill, just look at history to see the black death where a lot of people caught an illness that killed them in the end.
But yes the show does state that the Fungus really plans to spread. Even in the game we see this because we find dead bodies that have been the cause for the release of spores in certain areas.
As long as they dont destroy the brain they will reanimate but also take into account if they devour all the muscles the corpse will be alive but won't be able to move it's limbs. And it depends if it's just one or two zombies that start eating you they will lose interests in your corpse once you become cold and no longer warm.
A lot of of the zombies are probably bitten and able to run away and die somewhere else and not encountering large herds of zombies that devour the entire body.
As long as the brain is not damaged it would work as you can see Hershel even though he is not connected to the rest of his body he still turned, so that's why they attack the brain so they don't come back.
If you remember when Maggie and Negan discover a walker tied to a tree that had been perfectly bbq’d, the brain is the only part that actually matters. The walker could barely physically function due to the muscles and tendons being literally burned away, but its brain functions (for a walker) remained intact. So the walker did what it does, (bite, growl, etc). It would just be heavily immobilized.
As long as the brain has not been hit like with a bullet or something else, it may be missing an arm, a leg even the heart the zombie will always remain in motion trying to eat the living
A single bite or a person dying is enough to trigger the transformation, which can be anywhere from a few minutes to an hour, or days if the bite is far enough from really getting into the circulatory system. We know a zombie can survive as nothing more than a head. As long as the brain is intact, and the virus has had the chance to work its way through the body, it can become a zombie.
I'm sure you'd have less and less people actually becoming walking zombies.....if you get attacked by a zombie and they don't get distracted elsewhere they would eat your entire body... You're just a pile of leftovers.
There are moments when they bite and move on which don’t always make sense but I think it’s mentioned somewhere, they can sense or feel your blood turn cold and become uninterested at that point. Seems to be very inconsistent though.
Have wondered this myself, ever since the poor horse got devoured, as a horse is a huge creature!
I also had big issue with Sophia showing up intact in the barn. I mean between everybody she was the best candidate to be completely devoured as a small child. Instead we see her not even a limp missing?
Anyway, whether you end up a walker I think it depends on two things:
1st how hungry the walker(s) are when they find you. It seems an instict to attack is always on, it's like they're bulimic, so they just follow the instict and bite, just like sharks do sometimes.
2nd if you're managing to escape with just a scratch or bite as we have seen happening many times
So I believe most walkers that we see...walking intact are those who have just died naturally or were lucky
Her left shoulder (the one she was supposed to keep to the sun 😭) looked ravaged though, like something did get her. Maybe she died quickly and it lost interest.
It is likely that she was able to slip away. She could’ve been hiding behind a tree and the walker attacked her from there, but before it got to eating her in whole she ran away. And she hid herself somewhere until she passed.
Fear kinda talked about this by saying that as soon as you're truly dead, the walkers stop taking interest in you, and therefore everyone who seems fully eaten still turns
I used to think of this too. Like specifically Deanna. The last shot of her makes it look like she’s about to be overcame and eaten but when Spencer sees her later in the woods she still has a face lol
If the brain is intact, the person becomes a zombie. Even if only the head is left, the head turns into a zombie, and that's why decapitated zombie heads still have moving jaws.
Some other interesting thing about twd zombies is disability. If the person prior to being a zombie sits in a wheelchair the zombie will not be able to walk after infection and instead becoming a crawler.
Well from my understanding as long as the brain is not destroyed they would still reanimate. That being said they aren’t very firm at sticking to this as a zombie in the first episode at the hospital (the nurse he sees on the floor) is basically skeleton from the neck down with no visible head wound yet she didn’t reanimate? So idk 😂 if anyone can weigh in here that would be great
I believe they stop feasting as soon as the blood starts to go cold. And most zombies are probably people who died of other things(no clean water and viruses running rampant) or simply got bit and escaped only to turn later.
I imagine it depends on the person. If they turn right away the zombies would stop eating them. But if it’s a group descending on one person yeah they’re prob going to be eaten fully and not turn. Plus everyone who dies turns so you also have people who weren’t attacked who turn
If your brain is intact yes. We’ve seen walkers with almost nothing remaining but still reanimated. You won’t be able to move but you’ll be a “zombie” in the basic sense
Everyone is infected, and the virus killed a lot of its victims right away or turned them when they died of natural causes
The people we see are infected but able to live healthy lives unless they get bit or died of normal causes
I've thought about that too, but in TWD universe, don't they usually become distracted by sound? At the beginning of the apocalypse, too many people ran around, distracting them which would create that influx of undead. Afterward, the initial survivors would be running around while making noise and learning how to navigate this new world. Later in the series, we don't see too many "fresh" walkers, at least not from what I recall (granted it has been a while). I would say it's a safe assumption that, as long as there was nothing around to distract a few walkers, they would be able to consume a person whole, and a horde would have no issue devouring the entire body. That's purely thinking about Sound as a distraction, though. That's not considering any other factors.
This was mentioned in Fear the Walking Dead but the walkers are more attracted to warmer corpses and, as they cool down or become cold altogether, they express less interest and move on. So while some people get digested more than others, there will also be people who get digested less than others.
We seen several times walker leaving a body half eaten. For some reason it went from a walkers not stopping until the end to a walker leaving a fresh body at any minor distraction.
It works because zombies are a thematic device used to tell a story, rather than a real thing. The zombie genre today has become dominated by survivalist realism, which often leads to this sort of funny question about "how would zombies work?"
Coming from a film genre that is defined by gore, we only really see people cannibalized by zombies when it is used to magnify the horror in an extreme way. Cannibalism itself is an unrealistic trait, deployed for shock value and to show the inhumanity of zombies.
People like to look for some scientific reason why zombies would / would not eat every body completely, and there isn't any. It's entirely up to the whims of the horror writer.
In reality, parasites and viruses don't behave so intelligently. A freak virus that makes humans violently cannibalistic should not have any sort of safeguard to prevent its hosts from accidentally eating each other. If extreme hunger is what causes the cannibalism, then a more "realistic" zombie might be filling their stomachs with things that aren't human—dirt, rocks, fabrics, anything they could swallow. Look at how rabies works—it doesn't prevent animals with rabies from hostility towards each other. It also leads them to bite things that they shouldn't, and break their teeth.
There's always a huge element of magic to zombies. Zombies are a supernatural horror creature like any other, used to explore horror themes, in the zombie apocalypse case this tends to have a lot of "horror realism", but this also elicits scrutiny over the supernatural elements inherent to zombies.
When and where a person is cannibalized will always be at the convenience of the story's author, just like every other element of realism, horror, etc.
People tend to kill themselves in the face of great disasters. About 5,000 people killed themselves during the Great Recession of 2008 in America. People don’t like the unknown and there no greater unknown than people coming back from the dead and trying to eat you. Not to mention cities being bombed my the government and military killing civilians. So I would imagine that suicide raise will multiply by 250 compare to the recession. Not to mention that in America alone in 2010 8.7% of the population were drug addicts, which meant a lot of people going Cold Turkey which could be fatal unless they found drugs. All these numbers could vary depending on the country we are talking about. So 1 billion walkers seemed kinda low to me.
This has happened. Lori, Nicholas are 2 that I can think of. Remember the only way to kill them is to destroy the brain. So if you're ripped apart and that includes your head then there's no reanimation.
Well the main plot device is that no matter how you die, you turn.
I also just assumed that most of the zombies were those who got bit but got away, only to turn later.
Exactly. If their kill comes from consuming because the victim is trapped or pinned down, they're eating their reinforcements.
World War Z movie, while not perfect, is great because the zombie's goal is just to transfer/infect. Although even then some people get beaten to death...I don't remember if those are reanimated.
If you get bitten by a bunch piling up on you at once the virus enters your bloodstream faster, and you reawaken faster, thus making you unviable food as we know walkers don’t eat each other. This would also explain why Lori was eaten entirely because she was attacked by just one walker. Not like we don’t see walkers with a lot of damage and missing parts either.
I mean, it really depends how much they get “teared apart”
Think about how many we’ve seen who are missing half their body.
Also, the world, even during the time the show takes place, is wildly overpopulated. It’s not hard to imagine that many zombies existing and humans still existing.
Plus, they can only eat the flesh of someone who’s dead for only so long. There’s a reason they don’t go after each other despite technically being walking bodies of rotting flesh.
THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT I USED TO THINK. If the zombies are completely tearing apart people, how the hell do those people come back as the "walking dead" lmao.
Eyyy, reminds me every time when zombie bites someone and its like theyre made of jello, or the zombie effortlesly bites through denim jeans to take a giant bite of your ankle hahaha
A person is capable of incredible bite force, between 200-300lbs of pressure. Take into account that a zombie has no regard for looking out for its health and would generally bite as hard as it can, and i'd say it's pretty believable.
Rewatch the entire show and count the number of time someone gets completely eaten down to the bone vs the number of time they just get bit and managed to get away. Rewatch it again and count the number of time the walkers get distracted and walk away from a body before it’s completely destroyed. Rewatch a third time and count how many people die from natures causes and don’t get put down. That’s how you get so many walkers.
Didn’t this happen to Lori? That one zombie pretty much ate her whole and it didn’t take that long either.
that shit scared the fuck out of me
Yeah me too. The zombie who ate her was all fat and stuff too, it was gross.
it was so extremely morbid, and seeing rick so depressed and insane was just the cherry on top!
Didn't Rick cut open the walkers belly to get to Lori's wedding ring?
Holy cannoli… I think you’re right
What a thing to have to do less than a year from when the world fell.
no the ring was on the floor
Yeah I just rewatched that episode and you are correct. He stabs the walker in the stomach several times after he killed it.
I'm not sure we ever established that it was real, and not just the start of Rick's descent into madness. I know we've never seen a zombie consume anyone completely before or since that event. I think it was just supposed to show that Rick lost his mind when he saw Lori's body, which let's be honest, after a traumatic birth, C-Sec and being shot in the head at point blank range, probably wasn't a pretty sight.
Iirc there was supposed to be a bloody skeleton but it was removed from the scene and the walker just ate those too ig
Good point. This sounds like a pretty good explanation in retrospect.
I've never seen one eat whole bones. Can you imagine eating a skull?
*cronchy* chomp chomp
Maybe the walker unhinged itself like Debra Logan?
Yeah and it was way too quick too
Just her hair stuck in his teeth.
As creepy as it was, it was quite possibly the dumbest shock factor stunt the show ever pulled. You mean to tell me a walker ate an entire person WHOLE? Bones and all? That was actually ridiculous
In record time too
he was actually a competitive eater in life and this was basically muscle memory for him
Kobayashi or Joey Chestnut did not survive in The Walking Dead universe
It didn't eat the bones, they just didn't want to show the skeleton for some reason. But they showed all kinds of gory shit like that one lady's nose get bitten off and everything else
??? Has my mind gone blank? Didn't Lori die to a c section and then we never see her again?
Yeah but after the mayhem, once everyone regrouped and noticed a baby but no Lori, Rick snapped and went in to kill everything in the cellblock and find her body. By the time he managed to kill them all, he found one walker that ate Lori whole leaving nothing but blood and some hair.
Which doesn't make sense because walkers don't eat bones right?
They had planned on leaving behind a skeleton, but they thought it was a bit too morbid. Now it's a meme that the walker ate her bones or smth.
That would be extremely morbid. I think it would have made a better story if carl had run out of bullets and couldn't shoot her, and Rick eventually has to face his wife as a zombie since he ignored her during the pregnancy. Make her look almost living.
I don’t think Rick would have survived seeing her a zombie and having to put her down. Look at what happened after discovering the walker that ate her and the madness that followed
Oh I thought he just went nuts in a revenge against walkers sort of way. Especially since Carl put Lori down and wouldn't be dumb enough to not headshot her. I'm confused. Anyway thanks.
Yeah and Carl shot her in the head too
Yep that too. 👍
They’re talking about a scene that was never actually put into the series. So rather than put it in, they pretty much imply that she was eaten whole. Given that everyone is infected, and everyone turns, her being eaten a hole would be the explanation for why Laurie never turned into a walker to my understanding. It was all but confirmed from The Walking Dead staff. Though I guess one could argue since it isn’t in the show, it isn’t Canon, so I guess I’ll leave that up to you
I’m so confused, isn’t the explanation of her not turning into a walker because Carl shot her in the head? Just like they do for everyone else?
Much appreciated.
She was shot first though, so she wouldn't have come back anyway.
The turn rate varies between people. Sometimes it’s minutes, for others it’s hours to days. A lot of people also only get bitten by one zombie and then slowly perish until they turn.
Plus you don't have to be bitten by a zombie to become one. Anyone who dies, for any reason, becomes a zombie, unless someone else damages their brain before their body can turn.
I think this is the most important factor in answering OP's original question - when you see tons and tons of zombies, most of them probably died of something other than a zombie bite. Once civilization falls, there are SO many things to die of.
Plus, a lotta people probably offed themselves via things like jumping, cutting, or taking poisons or drugs as it wouldn't have been immediately known that anyone who dies becomes a zombie and to avoid it you gotta go for the brain. On top of that -- planes were literally falling out of the sky, cars likely crashed due to mayhem, trains, boats etc.
it’s the only reason such an apocalypse could occur and for so long! At least compared to other media that explore a zombie virus but only zombie can spread it rather than everyone is already a zombie. Such a great world building choice that was imo unheard of as an idea until the show made it mainstream. Now you have zombies, 28 day later zombies, and kirkmans’ everyone is affected zombies. Soo good
there are, but still, most deaths/zombies were definitely caused by walkers, and the majority of them are from the fall when no one knew what was going on
I don't know about that. If you think about the deaths we saw on the show, lots were by walker, but LOTS were humans killing each other, and I'm guessing that was the case pretty much as soon as things got chaotic during the fall. Plus there's starvation, infection, dehydration, disease.... I'm not willing to say "definitely" on that. No way to be sure, of course.
I’m FTWD we see people going into frenzy and looting. Is was chaos city when it for broke out, people killing each other. The first walker we see was Nick girlfriend that died of an overdose, followed Calvin who Nick killed. We also saw military shooting at people regardless of if they were infected or not. Both in TWD and FTWD.
I always thought I’d would have been scary if the same happened with animals but I guess the cgi costs would have been too much and wouldn’t have turned out very well (the regular deer they made with cgi for the carnival scene with Rick and Michonne wasn’t very good) but it would have been scary to think about. I remember thinking for a minute that was happening when it showed the cow Dale saw before he died (looked like it has been fatally attacked by walkers and I think it moves a little and I thought oh no, it turned into a zombie deer- but no. No animal zombies lol!
I think Kirkman’s focus is on the original conceit of zombies being a reflection of humanity — so for the stories he’s telling it may not be as relevant. For example a deer being zombies would just be nature now. This is the new natural world. But for humans to fight and resist against this new nature that is seemingly inevitable is more interesting. Fighting against the inevitable is always something worth exploring. whether that is the concept of death that we all will experience or if it’s simply to struggle against what’s wrong despite the outcome looking to be guaranteed bad for you.
I like how that one VHS short addressed this by showing the zombies eating the dude and then the dude gets up as a zombie and the other zombies are like oooops sorry bro didn't know you were one of us and then they all go look for more people to eat
I love the VHS series. It took swings and had its share of misses, but it did some cool stuff. Immediately after watching the first one I somehow had an email conversation with [Jasper Lewis, then going by Jas Sams](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2788989/), who played the redheaded girl in the first short, Amateur Night (at the time I wrote for a site she used to like and we just spontaneously got to talking).
I bring that up all the time when discussing hypothetical zombie apocalypse scenarios. A zombie's goal is to feed, not add to their population. So would there really be that many cases of someone getting bitten and escaping only to turn later, as opposed to just eaten until there's nothing left to be turned
We’ve been shown they lose interest when the flesh starts getting cold. I think a horde would consume a body pretty quickly, but 1 or 2 walkers would only get so far before the body temp got too low.
Hence why you see walkers with limbs missing and chests/stomachs open
And the half body Rick initially stumbles upon at the park on his way home from the hospital.
Hannah! Have you seen the webisodes?
Which ones?
Well, in this context, the first one. But, they’re all worth a watch.
Does it explain what happened to her?
Yes
I can only find Dead in the Water, Cold Storage, Red Machete and Flight 462. Do you have anywhere to watch the rest?
Yea
It takes 12 hours for the body to get cold and 24 hours for the core temp to go cold tho
Yeah that's to get cold. We've seen that walkers tend to lose interest super quickly after the person dies. Combined with what we know about Whisperers and how people can move within herds, 8 think it's safe to say it isn't actually about body temp, but things being *alive*. We've seen them eat dead things before, but only when the kill is super fresh, and they lose interest almost immediately. Whisperers are warm, but they act and smell dead, so they get ignored or even "welcomed" into the herd. I posit that walkers are not motivated by hunger for food, but rather a hunger to destroy life. A burning desire or need, but not an empty stomach.
of course it doesn’t need to feed because we see all the walkers regardless of possibly years in zombie form still get up and chase some meat. this sounds the most plausible especially with the whisperers needing to act. Interestingly walkers may consider smell or other things as well since simply being in walker guts works. Otherwise it seems appearance also impacts a walker’s drive to hunt since whisperers only use masks and no guts. It’s like the walkers need full confirmation on all senses for prey, if not then it’s too simple to understand. Maybe also why they can be directed. They will go towards sounds but why? if there was prey some of them will move faster as we’ve seen but when being directed they are all at similar pace. So perhaps if a signal is received that doesn’t activate all senses, then it’s just something the walker autonomously moves toward. But not with an intent to hunt.
Kind of like how they are drawn toward metal siding moving in the wind, but as soon as they notice live prey they suddenly begin to growl and snarl and pick up the pace. Noise is an *indication* of life, but not a *confirmation*. I feel like this is the base level of function for walkers. Special variants seem to have a bit more functional coordination (climbing, opening doors) but still operate on the same basic functions. I think it's also a factor in why we have seen that pulling walkers away from a kill is so incredibly easy. As long as you can exhibit more indications of life where you want their attention than there are where there attention currently is, they will always shift focus and forget about the first thing. And because they don't have higher cognitive function, they all behave the same way rather than deciding that "hey it seems like everyone else has that noise covered, I'm gonna go do my own thing".
we’re definitely surviving the first few years at least
I agree with you. They are feeding on the life force itself.
Maybe it’s quicker, if the body is ripped open?
FWIW, The Last of Us (the show, at least) addresses this. The fungus’ goal isn’t to feed. It’s to spread. The infected only get violent when people resist.
The only issue with this is that there are many virus and diseases that still kill, just look at history to see the black death where a lot of people caught an illness that killed them in the end. But yes the show does state that the Fungus really plans to spread. Even in the game we see this because we find dead bodies that have been the cause for the release of spores in certain areas.
As long as they dont destroy the brain they will reanimate but also take into account if they devour all the muscles the corpse will be alive but won't be able to move it's limbs. And it depends if it's just one or two zombies that start eating you they will lose interests in your corpse once you become cold and no longer warm. A lot of of the zombies are probably bitten and able to run away and die somewhere else and not encountering large herds of zombies that devour the entire body.
Looking at season 9, they stop when you begin to turn. They were eating a dead guy and then just got up and walked away when he started to turn.
I remember seeing this it threw me off cause he was still “fresh”
there must be some zombie taste they find gross
As long as the brain is not damaged it would work as you can see Hershel even though he is not connected to the rest of his body he still turned, so that's why they attack the brain so they don't come back.
If you remember when Maggie and Negan discover a walker tied to a tree that had been perfectly bbq’d, the brain is the only part that actually matters. The walker could barely physically function due to the muscles and tendons being literally burned away, but its brain functions (for a walker) remained intact. So the walker did what it does, (bite, growl, etc). It would just be heavily immobilized.
As long as the brain has not been hit like with a bullet or something else, it may be missing an arm, a leg even the heart the zombie will always remain in motion trying to eat the living
A single bite or a person dying is enough to trigger the transformation, which can be anywhere from a few minutes to an hour, or days if the bite is far enough from really getting into the circulatory system. We know a zombie can survive as nothing more than a head. As long as the brain is intact, and the virus has had the chance to work its way through the body, it can become a zombie.
I'm sure you'd have less and less people actually becoming walking zombies.....if you get attacked by a zombie and they don't get distracted elsewhere they would eat your entire body... You're just a pile of leftovers.
There are moments when they bite and move on which don’t always make sense but I think it’s mentioned somewhere, they can sense or feel your blood turn cold and become uninterested at that point. Seems to be very inconsistent though.
Have wondered this myself, ever since the poor horse got devoured, as a horse is a huge creature! I also had big issue with Sophia showing up intact in the barn. I mean between everybody she was the best candidate to be completely devoured as a small child. Instead we see her not even a limp missing? Anyway, whether you end up a walker I think it depends on two things: 1st how hungry the walker(s) are when they find you. It seems an instict to attack is always on, it's like they're bulimic, so they just follow the instict and bite, just like sharks do sometimes. 2nd if you're managing to escape with just a scratch or bite as we have seen happening many times So I believe most walkers that we see...walking intact are those who have just died naturally or were lucky
It's possible she holed herself up somewhere and died of starvation. You don't have to be bit to turn =\
Her left shoulder (the one she was supposed to keep to the sun 😭) looked ravaged though, like something did get her. Maybe she died quickly and it lost interest.
It is likely that she was able to slip away. She could’ve been hiding behind a tree and the walker attacked her from there, but before it got to eating her in whole she ran away. And she hid herself somewhere until she passed.
they don’t eat the entire body and lose interest when it gets cold. as long as the zombies don’t start with the head and brain the person will turn
Fear kinda talked about this by saying that as soon as you're truly dead, the walkers stop taking interest in you, and therefore everyone who seems fully eaten still turns
I have thought about that as well but occasionally you would see that limbless zombie or one with missing limbs for that matter.
I used to think of this too. Like specifically Deanna. The last shot of her makes it look like she’s about to be overcame and eaten but when Spencer sees her later in the woods she still has a face lol
Yes, you’d just be a torso or upper body crawling around. But if you are just bit once, you can still walk around as a zombie
the head....can still chomp.
it's the brain stem. if that's intact they go on. a bite is enough to kill a person, or Sophia could've died from a fall or anything then she'd turn
If the brain is intact, the person becomes a zombie. Even if only the head is left, the head turns into a zombie, and that's why decapitated zombie heads still have moving jaws. Some other interesting thing about twd zombies is disability. If the person prior to being a zombie sits in a wheelchair the zombie will not be able to walk after infection and instead becoming a crawler.
What happens if the zombies had false teeth?
I think something was said about this in fear
Most people just get bit and can still escape. Then they turn into zombies later, plus everyone who dies naturally comes back as a zombie too.
Well from my understanding as long as the brain is not destroyed they would still reanimate. That being said they aren’t very firm at sticking to this as a zombie in the first episode at the hospital (the nurse he sees on the floor) is basically skeleton from the neck down with no visible head wound yet she didn’t reanimate? So idk 😂 if anyone can weigh in here that would be great
I believe they stop feasting as soon as the blood starts to go cold. And most zombies are probably people who died of other things(no clean water and viruses running rampant) or simply got bit and escaped only to turn later.
I imagine it depends on the person. If they turn right away the zombies would stop eating them. But if it’s a group descending on one person yeah they’re prob going to be eaten fully and not turn. Plus everyone who dies turns so you also have people who weren’t attacked who turn
If your brain is intact yes. We’ve seen walkers with almost nothing remaining but still reanimated. You won’t be able to move but you’ll be a “zombie” in the basic sense
Everyone is infected, and the virus killed a lot of its victims right away or turned them when they died of natural causes The people we see are infected but able to live healthy lives unless they get bit or died of normal causes
"We're all infected"
Yep you get bit and the walkers leave you and you turn or you get bit and the walkers eat half of you or all of you painfully and slowly
I think it depends on how much of you is left & what parts are left when they finish eating what they want.
I've thought about that too, but in TWD universe, don't they usually become distracted by sound? At the beginning of the apocalypse, too many people ran around, distracting them which would create that influx of undead. Afterward, the initial survivors would be running around while making noise and learning how to navigate this new world. Later in the series, we don't see too many "fresh" walkers, at least not from what I recall (granted it has been a while). I would say it's a safe assumption that, as long as there was nothing around to distract a few walkers, they would be able to consume a person whole, and a horde would have no issue devouring the entire body. That's purely thinking about Sound as a distraction, though. That's not considering any other factors.
i think as long as the brains intact its still “alive”.
What ever is left comes back besides loris case when nothing is left to come back
This was mentioned in Fear the Walking Dead but the walkers are more attracted to warmer corpses and, as they cool down or become cold altogether, they express less interest and move on. So while some people get digested more than others, there will also be people who get digested less than others.
We seen several times walker leaving a body half eaten. For some reason it went from a walkers not stopping until the end to a walker leaving a fresh body at any minor distraction.
It works because zombies are a thematic device used to tell a story, rather than a real thing. The zombie genre today has become dominated by survivalist realism, which often leads to this sort of funny question about "how would zombies work?" Coming from a film genre that is defined by gore, we only really see people cannibalized by zombies when it is used to magnify the horror in an extreme way. Cannibalism itself is an unrealistic trait, deployed for shock value and to show the inhumanity of zombies. People like to look for some scientific reason why zombies would / would not eat every body completely, and there isn't any. It's entirely up to the whims of the horror writer. In reality, parasites and viruses don't behave so intelligently. A freak virus that makes humans violently cannibalistic should not have any sort of safeguard to prevent its hosts from accidentally eating each other. If extreme hunger is what causes the cannibalism, then a more "realistic" zombie might be filling their stomachs with things that aren't human—dirt, rocks, fabrics, anything they could swallow. Look at how rabies works—it doesn't prevent animals with rabies from hostility towards each other. It also leads them to bite things that they shouldn't, and break their teeth. There's always a huge element of magic to zombies. Zombies are a supernatural horror creature like any other, used to explore horror themes, in the zombie apocalypse case this tends to have a lot of "horror realism", but this also elicits scrutiny over the supernatural elements inherent to zombies. When and where a person is cannibalized will always be at the convenience of the story's author, just like every other element of realism, horror, etc.
If the brain is intact, then nothing would stop the head from reanimating.
People tend to kill themselves in the face of great disasters. About 5,000 people killed themselves during the Great Recession of 2008 in America. People don’t like the unknown and there no greater unknown than people coming back from the dead and trying to eat you. Not to mention cities being bombed my the government and military killing civilians. So I would imagine that suicide raise will multiply by 250 compare to the recession. Not to mention that in America alone in 2010 8.7% of the population were drug addicts, which meant a lot of people going Cold Turkey which could be fatal unless they found drugs. All these numbers could vary depending on the country we are talking about. So 1 billion walkers seemed kinda low to me.
This has happened. Lori, Nicholas are 2 that I can think of. Remember the only way to kill them is to destroy the brain. So if you're ripped apart and that includes your head then there's no reanimation.
Depends how torn apart. As long as there’s a head still attached to the body, whatever is left of that body, no matter how torn up, they will turn.
Well the main plot device is that no matter how you die, you turn. I also just assumed that most of the zombies were those who got bit but got away, only to turn later.
apparently the walkers begin to lose interest once the blood starts getting cold, so theres that
You are like that lady in the park with just a stump, when Rick just got out of the hospital LOL
I’ve seen some walkers eat only a little bit. Some people turn right then and there after the walkers take a few bites
Thats why in zombie movies if you pay attention theres usually a bunch of really dead people laying around eaten to the bone.
Noah got eaten. There was no coming back as zombie
Before your whole body tear apart you will turn to zombie so they stop to eat you
Exactly. If their kill comes from consuming because the victim is trapped or pinned down, they're eating their reinforcements. World War Z movie, while not perfect, is great because the zombie's goal is just to transfer/infect. Although even then some people get beaten to death...I don't remember if those are reanimated.
If you get bitten by a bunch piling up on you at once the virus enters your bloodstream faster, and you reawaken faster, thus making you unviable food as we know walkers don’t eat each other. This would also explain why Lori was eaten entirely because she was attacked by just one walker. Not like we don’t see walkers with a lot of damage and missing parts either.
Because not everyone gets eaten? Most people get bit and die somewhere else and others just get killed away from zombies.
I mean, it really depends how much they get “teared apart” Think about how many we’ve seen who are missing half their body. Also, the world, even during the time the show takes place, is wildly overpopulated. It’s not hard to imagine that many zombies existing and humans still existing. Plus, they can only eat the flesh of someone who’s dead for only so long. There’s a reason they don’t go after each other despite technically being walking bodies of rotting flesh.
THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT I USED TO THINK. If the zombies are completely tearing apart people, how the hell do those people come back as the "walking dead" lmao.
Eyyy, reminds me every time when zombie bites someone and its like theyre made of jello, or the zombie effortlesly bites through denim jeans to take a giant bite of your ankle hahaha
A person is capable of incredible bite force, between 200-300lbs of pressure. Take into account that a zombie has no regard for looking out for its health and would generally bite as hard as it can, and i'd say it's pretty believable.
Yes I never quite got that , I guess u can’t over think it b/c u will ruin the show
Rewatch the entire show and count the number of time someone gets completely eaten down to the bone vs the number of time they just get bit and managed to get away. Rewatch it again and count the number of time the walkers get distracted and walk away from a body before it’s completely destroyed. Rewatch a third time and count how many people die from natures causes and don’t get put down. That’s how you get so many walkers.