In Brightest Day: Questions About the Undead Disease

Zombie movies, television shows, and comics have been part of mainstream pop culture for a while now. Society loves a story about humans trying to fight off hordes of undead. It’s a sexy story.

I assume that, at least in most cases, becoming undead is caused by a virus instead of a genetic disability. This is not always the case. In The Walking Dead, it turns out that all humans are carriers of the zombie trait. When a human dies, he turns into a zombie unless the human’s brain is destroyed. There is no other way around that.

 

This leads to several questions about how undead genetics works. These questions are going to be a lot louder in my head once Warm Bodies comes out.

For starters, humans do not go from living to undead. They must go from being alive to being dead to finally become undead. So, if the undead began to become “cured,” what would happen? Do they come back as humans, or do they die? Seems to make sense that they would just go back to being dead.

So how the hell does the premise of Warm Bodies work? In the trailer, humans are eaten. Do humans not get turned by being bitten? What the hell is this ‘strain of undead’?

The only way this works is if the old adage that ‘zombies still hold their human memories, but just can’t gain control of the need to feed’ is true and I don’t have a problem with that.

But then how do undead-turned-humans get past that pesky ‘being dead’ thing? This is a question that needs to be addressed in Warm Bodies for the zombie story to advance. At this point, undead stories have done pretty much everything they can in terms of the zombie illness being a physical disease.

If Warm Bodies changes the game, I can see the disease of zombie-ism becoming more similar to a disability. If zombies can overcome being undead, the undead disease/virus can and should have a new classification as a disability. And that can only mean good things for writers of zombie stories.