Transcript

Zombies are more popular than ever, but why? I know why I like them, because they freak me out; but why are they so popular on a global scale? There’s been a lot of debate about this, but I think there’s a couple reasons. One is that zombism is essentially a biological infection. It’s not some magic spell, it’s not based on ancient superstition or myth, so we understand it as a disease. We as a global society have a better understanding of microbiology and infectious diseases than we ever have throughout history. Zombies fit right in that mold with our understanding of infectious disease.

Another reason is that zombies are the only club that want all members. If you’re a vampire and you’re not cool enough, they’ll kick you out if you don’t wear the right pointy shoes or have the right ascot on. Zombies want everybody; they want the CEO, and they want the guy that works in the mailroom. They could not want you anymore than they possibly do, and they want the guy standing next to you, too. There’s this notion of the spreading of zombies of everyone belonging, and you can see that in zombie pop culture, in zombie walks where anyone can come, and anyone is welcome.

Lastly, I would say that zombies more so than any other monster are synonymous with the end of the world. You never just see one zombie. 1 zombie equals 10 zombies, equals 10 million zombies. The aftermath of a zombie outbreak looks a lot like the aftermath of other major natural and manmade disasters that we’re seeing on the news all the time. As we’re more worried about the end of the world: Global warming, major economic collapse, major acts of terror, manmade or natural disasters; that fits right in the zombie wheel house. It makes zombies inherently feel real to us.

Transcript

So what are some of the top Zombie movies of all time? Movies that, if you call yourself a Zombie fan, you have to see?

It starts out with George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. That movie started the Zombie craze as we know it today. It created the modern Zombie.

Secondly, Return of the Living Dead, from 1985. Return of the Living Dead is a semi-spoof movie, sort of a romp in the vein of Zombieland. The first movie ever where Zombies ate brains, and where Zombies said “brains.” Zombies don’t eat brains in George Romero’s movies, they don’t eat brains all sorts of Zombie movies. But in Return of the Living Dead, they do eat brains, and that’s where we get that from.

Next, 28 Days Later launched the living Zombie craze. It was the biggest advance in Zombie culture since 1968 when they were first created. 28 Days Later turned Zombies into rage-infected maniacs rather than undead ghouls coming back to life.

Some great Zombie comedies are Shaun of the Dead. Slow, shambling Zombies that you can throw records at, and essentially make fun of. Another good one is ‘Fido’.

If you want some obscure foreign Zombie movies, Zombie, also called Zombie 2 from 1979, an Italian Zombie movie.

More recently, we’ve got REC from Spain. Just R-E-C, like the record button. Great Zombie movie. Takes place in an apartment building in Barcelona, where the infection is spreading all over the place, and everyone is quarantined inside.

If you like Nazi Zombie movies, I’d check out a more recent movie called Dead Snow from Norway, where a bunch of students go on Spring Break in the ski slopes, and get eaten by Nazi Zombies.

Possibly the best Zombie fight scene ever is from the Italian Zombie movie just called Zombie, where a topless scuba diver encounters a shark in the ocean, only to then be attacked by a Zombie underwater, and the Zombie fights the shark. You’ve got to check it out.

The worst Zombie movie of all time? Raiders of the Living Dead. It’s got a poster stolen from Star Wars. It’s got a title stolen from an Indiana Jones movie. The plot revolves around a little kid creating a ray gun, to fight Zombies, with a broken laser disc player.

Transcript

Hi. I’m Matt Mogk; I’m the Head of the Zombie Research Society, and author of ‘Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Zombies’. Zombie Research Society is a group of academics, and artists and enthusiasts who are interested in advancing the knowledge and respect of zombies in science and survival.

I’ve always been obsessed with zombies. When I was a little kid, before I go to sleep at night, I would imagine zombies in my head in hopes of having a zombie nightmare, because I figured it was like a free movie. I didn’t have to borrow money from my mom or get my sister to drive me to the theater; I could just watch a zombie movie in my head.

I got a Masters from NYU Film School, where I actually studied horror and cinema, and did my Master’s thesis on zombies. Then through a series of circumstances, I ended up joining the French Foreign Legion, which if you don’t know, is the Mercenary Wing of the French Military. There, I got some survival skills and combat skills. Finally, I ended up working at a disease research company in downtown Los Angeles that focused on serious infectious and deadly diseases. I didn’t know at the time, but all these experiences led right up to starting Zombie Research Society and really looking at the unrealized threat of zombies as a potential world-ender.

To find out more about the Zombie Research Society check us out at www.ZombieResearchSociety.com, or you can find us on Facebook at Facebook.com/ZombieResearch.

Today, I’m going to talk to you about everything that you need to know to survive the coming zombie plague, because once the zombies hit, its run-and-scream time, too late.

Transcript

What is the zombie lifespan? If we can figure out how long zombies survive, we have a lot better chance of surviving ourselves. Unfortunately, we’re never going to be able to pin it down exactly, but what we can do, because we know that zombies occupy the human body, we can look at the stages of human decomposition.

What we learn is that human goes through 4 distinct stages of decomposition: The first one being the Fresh stage. By the end of the Fresh stage of decomposition, the bacteria in our mouths has eaten out our brain so much that it oozes out of our nose like yogurt.

If zombies are powered by their brains, their heart’s not beating. What makes them undead is that their brain is what’s driving their processes; it stands to reason that they would not survive beyond the Fresh stage of decay. That may be much longer in a zombie then it is in a normal decomposing body, but in theory zombies, would not last beyond the Fresh stage of decay. The Fresh stage of decay in humans varies on climate and conditions of the body, but it can be anywhere between a week to several weeks.

Humans decay because the bacteria that’s naturally occurring inside our body takes over once we’re dead, and essentially eats us from the inside out. If zombies are able to suppress this bacterial activity, then it stands to reason that they would survive much longer than a naturally-decaying human body.

Transcript

There are what we call ‘zombie animals’ that already exist in nature. Some great examples are Zombie Snails; snails that are infected with a parasite that takes control of the snail’s brain, causes the snail to climb up in a tree in the open where it never normally would go, and the snails tentacles pulsate and become huge. Birds see that, think it’s a caterpillar, and literally attack the snail, bite the tentacles off so the parasite is able to then be inserted inside the bird where it reproduces. Another great zombie animal are Zombie Ants. Zombie ants are infected by a fungus that takes control of the brain; causes the ant to climb out into the sun. The ant then dies and the fungus grows out of the ant.

Possibly the most disturbing example of zombie animals is the Zombie Cricket; crickets that are infected with a parasitic worm. The worm grows to adulthood inside the cricket, and then when the worm needs to get out of the cricket to go mate, it takes control of the cricket’s brain, causes the cricket to find a body of water, jump into that body of water. Crickets can swim, they normally would never go into water, and the cricket drowns in the body of water. As the cricket’s drowning, the worm exits the cricket, but the horrible thing is the worm is 10 times longer than the cricket. You see this little cricket and this giant worm coming out of it as it drowns. Totally disgusting.

Transcript

The modern zombie was created in 1968 with George Romero classic, ‘Night of the Living Dead’. This movie created the zombie that we know today from film, video games, and books. It was the first-ever depiction of dead coming back to life and trying to eat the living in mass hordes. Romero wasn’t inspired by the Haitian voodoo zombie; he was actually inspired by a vampire novel from the 1950’s called, ‘I Am Legend’.

Richard Matheson, the author of ‘I Am Legend’, was attempting to bring the vampire into the modern age with his novel. What he did was he created a biological explanation for vampirism. It wasn’t based on some curse or ancient superstition, it was a bacterial infection. Then what he did, is rather than having vampires be just a single solitary ghoul that lives on the edge of town and eats a virgin every once in a while, he turned vampires into roving hordes that wanted to suck the blood of every last living person on the planet. Sounds a lot like zombies, right?

14 years after ‘I Am Legend’ was published, a young filmmaker in Pittsburgh wanted to make his first feature film, and he essentially wanted to make ‘I Am Legend’. He couldn’t get the rights to it, it had already been turned into a movie, and he didn’t want to get sued. What he said was, “I’m going to change the creature in ‘I Am Legend’ just enough so that I can’t get sued.” He took out any last vestige of vampirism from them. Rather than just having them go out at night, they can go out during the day. Rather than having them be afraid of crosses, holy water, and garlic; get rid of all that stuff. Then the last thing he did is he said, “Rather than having my horde want to suck the blood of every last living person, I’m going to have them eat the whole body, that way nobody can possibly sue me.” He thought he was creating a brand new monster that he called the Flesh Eaters.

Romero created what he believed was a brand new monster, and the modern zombie was born.

Transcript

What would make up an ideal zombie survival team? You have to think about essential needs, for instance, healthcare, medicine, a doctor or a nurse, someone who has knowledge of that. A mechanic or engineer, someone that can create things, build things. Hopefully, someone that knows how to grow food. You also need to worry about security. In reality, your ideal zombie survival team is going to be whoever you’re near when the plague actually hits.

I have the ultimate zombie survival team and it’s made up a Navy Seal, an Emergency Room doctor, and all these different experts, and we all have a plan to meet at my house. If the zombie plague hits when I’m at work, I may never even be able to get to my house. I may never even be able to meet up with zombie survival team. For better or worse, the people that are going to end up on your zombie survival team are the people that you’re going to be around, potentially even strangers, when the zombie plague hits.

Transcript

What would the government response be to a zombie outbreak? We can never be sure, but one thing’s certain is that they would screw it up. Talking to dozens of Disaster Preparedness experts across the globe, they all agree; governments do not respond well to unforeseen crisis. The first time a disaster happens, they screw it up. The second time that same disaster happens; they’re able to handle it. You don’t get a second chance at a zombie outbreak.

In 2005, Hurricane Rita was bearing down on the city of Houston, and the mayor was so freaked out that it was going to be another Katrina that he told the residents of Houston to evacuate or they would die. It caused the entire population of Houston to all hit the road at once, resulting in a 115-mile traffic jam that lasted for 5 days. People were stuck on the road, didn’t move an inch for 5 days; ran out of food, ran out of gas, ran out of water. They were on the highway, motionless, as the hurricane came and went.

The governor of Louisiana at the time told the residents in the western part of her state that they should write their Social Security Numbers in magic marker on their arms so that their bodies could be identified when they were found dead from debris or the storm. Then they’re surprised when panic ensues.

Governments do one of 3 things: They either don’t react at all, they react incorrectly, or they wildly overreact.

Transcript

One important question of zombie survival is how do zombies hunt? If we could figure that out, we may have a much better shot of surviving when the dead actually do rise. Some movies, zombies hunt by the sense of smell. You could, for instance, cover yourself in zombie guts and they won’t be able to smell your humanness and walk among the zombies. Other movies, such as ‘Shaun of the Dead’, they hunt by sense of sight. If you shamble around like a zombie, you can get away with it until somebody sneezes and they figure you out.

One interesting theory about how zombies may hunt has to do with the Etruscan Shrew. The Etruscan Shrew is the smallest predatory mammal on the planet. The interesting thing about the Etruscan Shrew is that it has to eat its entire body weight every day or it will die. It’s on a constant, relentless hunt for food. Secondly, it hunts thing that are its same size, so rather than hunting little gnats or bugs, it hunts, for instance, crickets; same size and weight as the shrew. The shrew is tiny; it’ll fit in your hand like that. It’s like a tiny gerbil. Lastly, the shrew hunts primarily through sense of touch. The shrew will see a potential prey across the field, it will walk over to it, but it won’t decide if it’s going to attack until it actually touches the other creature. It’ll touch a black beetle and say, “No, I don’t eat black beetles. I’m not going to eat that.” It’ll touch a cricket and say, “Yeah, I love me some cricket. I’m going to eat the hell out of that.”

If we think about this in terms of zombies, it answers two questions that constantly come up in my mind anyway: One is that if zombies are thought not to work together, why are they always walking around in packs? If we think about this touch theory; if I’m a zombie and you’re a zombie and we see each other across a street, we both walk towards each other, touch each other and realize, “Oh, no. A dead, rotting zombie, cold-blooded, clammy, feels a lot different than a warm, living human, so I don’t want to eat you.” Then we end up walking next to each other. Repeat that a thousand times and you have 1,000 zombies happening to walk next each other right to your front door.

Secondly, it would explain why zombies are always depicted as having their arms out. If zombies hunted by sense of smell, they would be using their nose, they would be processing the world through their nose. If they hunted by sight, they would be doing the same things with their eyes; they would be standing still and looking around. Zombies process their world with their arms. They’re constantly reaching out, grabbing for things, figuring out what things are. That falls in line with the touch method.

Transcript

There are 4 deadly threats in a zombie outbreak, and only of them is zombies. We have the zombies; that’s the obvious one. Second threat is other hostile or desperate humans. If you don’t account for other people who are potentially going to want to take your stuff or need to take your stuff, just not because they’re bad people, just out of serious personal need, you’re going to have real problems. The third threat is what I call The System. The System is any outside government agency or body that is going to try to exert its will on you.

At the first sign of zombies, you can believe there’s going to be a bureaucrat somewhere who says, “I got to get a handle on this. I’m supposed to be in charge.” What they’re going to is they’re going to draw a line around a quarantine zone. You may have the perfect Zombie Survival Plan, you may be all stocked up in your house and ready to go, but military trucks going to show up at your front door and they’re going to escort you out. They’re going to take you down to the Refuge Center and put you next to a guy who’s wearing a long sleeve shirt and looks a little sick. It’s going to turn out he’s been bitten by a zombie, and you’re all going to get eaten.

The fourth threat is yourself. It has been played out time and time again that in extreme survival situations, the person that survives is not the most prepared, is not the fittest, is not the strongest; it is the person that can keep their head screwed on straight. Your own ability to keep yourself calm in extreme situation is what’s going to be the difference between life and death.

Any Zombie Survival Plan that doesn’t account for all 4 of the deadly threats is essentially not worth the paper it’s printed on. You may have the best Zombie Survival Plan that’s focused solely on zombies, but chances are you’re going to find yourself killed by one of the other 3 threats.

Transcript

What is the best zombie-defense weapon? Actually, the answer really varies. You may say that the best weapon hands down is the super-badass sniper rifle made in Russia with the custom scope handcrafted by children in Finland. If you don’t have access to that rifle, that’s a worthless rifle to you. The best zombie weapon for you is the weapon, A, you have access to, and B, that you know how to use.

If we are just playing fantasy, I would say that the best zombie-defense weapon is a nuclear bomb. How about a magic wand that when you zombies they turn into unicorns? In the land of reality, you only have access to the weapons that you would actually have. Remember, fighting zombies is not a video game; you won’t be automatically an expert shot and you will not know how to automatically load every weapon, use every weapon, and find ammunition. You really need to stay within your own abilities and be realistic.

If you have never loaded a firearm, if you have never cleaned a firearm, if you have never used an advanced combat blade like a katana, probably, they should not be your first choice. You need to have training, you need to know what you are doing, and you need to stay within your abilities.

The best zombie weapon for you is the weapon that you currently possess. Unfortunately in a catastrophic zombie outbreak, you may not even have time to go home. You may not have time to go to the gun store or to go to your dad’s house. Possibly, the best zombie weapon for you is whatever is sitting right next to you right now.

Transcript

What is the Voodoo Zombie? The Voodoo Zombie is an unrelated creature that springs from the Haitian voodoo tradition. Voodoo Zombies are created through a mix of religious ceremony and essentially drugging a victim. I drug you, I bury you in a coffin, and then a couple days later I dig you back up and tell you that you’ve died and I’ve brought you back to life. You didn’t actually die; you just passed out because you were on drugs. You believe it because you have the same religious belief. I tell you that I brought you back to life and that I own your soul because I have magically done this process of bringing you back to life. Then you have to work for me as slave labor, essentially. I have you clean my house, do my laundry, or whatever, and keep you as a slave. There are zombies in Haiti today, but they’re not dangerous, they don’t want to eat you, if they attack you, you don’t turn into a zombie, so in many ways, it’s nothing like the zombie that we know from movies and video games.

The term ‘zombie’ comes from the Haitian Voodoo Zombie. The way it’s been interpreted in contemporary film, video games, and books is nothing like the origins of Haitian Voodoo Zombies; same term, completely different creature. It’s like saying that a coffee cup and the cup that athletes wear to protect their jocks are intimately related because they both share the same name ‘cup’. Unlike the zombie from film, television, books, and video games that we know, the Haitian Voodoo Zombie is not aggressive, does not want to eat you, is not infectious, you cannot turn into one, essentially, not even a monster.

Transcript

In a catastrophic zombie outbreak, what you’ll quickly find is the most readily available easily-to-use zombie weapon is in the bludgeon category. Bludgeon weapons are any weapons that are designed to inflict blunt force trauma on its intended victim. For instance a baseball bat is the quintessential bludgeon weapon.

The advantages of bludgeon weapons over ranged weapons, such was firearms, or bladed weapons, such as Katanas, swords, and knives, is that they’re very easy to use. For my money, I would actually choose a bludgeon weapon; very easy to use, their also very difficult to hurt yourself with. You’re not going to shoot your face off with a baseball bat. For the average person who’s not a highly-skilled martial artist or not a firearms expert, bludgeon weapons may be the way to go. They can be something as simple as a frying pan. Use this to hit a zombie in the face and get away.

Generally speaking, bludgeon weapons are not as deadly as either firearms or bladed weapons, but they have the advantage of allowing you to strike and get away. Remember, it’s not about how zombies you kill; it’s about how long you survive. This isn’t a video game. Something like a baseball bat can be used as a bludgeon weapon. It can also be used as a distancing tool to get yourself out of a situation. Create distance, get yourself a way.

My primary weapon of choice in a zombie outbreak would be a bludgeon weapon. I would pick a baseball bat, aluminum baseball bat, or a steel pipe, something like that. If you don’t have a lot of options, something as simple as a rock can work. Many people suggest using a crowbar and the reason why is that it’s heavy, it’s sturdy, it’s not going to break, it won’t bend like a baseball bat might. Another upside of a crowbar that’s mentioned is that it has multiple uses. You can use it to pry doors open; you can use it to access buildings.

If we’re dealing with the most infectious, deadly, blood borne illness ever, the last thing I want to do after I beat a zombie to death with my crowbar is to then use that for other purposes that may spread that toxic blood around, that days later I might touch, forget about, grab that door handle that I’ve used the bloody crowbar with, and then touched my eye; ‘boom’, I’m a zombie.

One of the reasons that I really like a baseball bat is that they’re easy to find. They’re found in almost every home in the United States. They’re extremely easy to use and they don’t have a lot of other uses. My baseball bat in a zombie outbreak would only be used as a zombie weapon because I doubt I’ll be playing a lot of baseball.

Transcript

Have there been any zombie outbreaks throughout history? There are no confirmed zombie outbreaks throughout history, but there are certain unexplained events that we look at that could point to a past zombie outbreak. One in particular is the Lost Colony of Roanoke.

The Colony of Roanoke was intended to be the first permanent British Colony in what is now United States. It was settled on a small island off of North Carolina. 110 settlers landed there. The supply ship came left, came back 3 years later, and no one was there. It remains the biggest mystery in early American history. There’s no universally-accepted explanation for why these 110 men, women, and children vanished into thin air. They didn’t die of starvation; they weren’t attacked by hostile Native Americans.

Several years ago, an archeologist from Harvard discovered evidence of mass cannibalism on Roanoke. If these 110 settlers did not starve, were not attacked, were not forced to flee, what would cause them to become violent and eat one another on a mass scale? Sounds like zombies to me.

In York England several years ago, was discovered a mass grave of people who had been beheaded and violently killed. Researchers first thought that this was a gladiator burial site. The problem is there’s no history of ever having any gladiator events in York. Although there are no confirmed zombie outbreaks throughout history, there are a lot of unexplained events that potentially point to zombies, from the Mayan civilization collapse to the Choco Canyon Indians of New Mexico. I encourage you to look into that.

Transcript

Just-in-Time Management Principal is used by pretty much all governments and businesses as a way to reduce storage costs. What it dictates is that goods and services are delivered on an as-needed basis. When I buy a can of soup from the local grocery store, it goes into the system, and on Thursday when the truck shows up, it brings a can of soup along with everything else that everybody else bought.

If that system ever fails, we will be desperately out of supplies almost instantly. That means no food on the grocery store shelves, that means potentially no water even when you turn your faucet on in your house. It’s very important to prepare ahead of time for any disaster, zombie or otherwise, because without the regular infusion of deliveries that Just-in-Time Management Principal requires, there’s going to be no supplies for you to go pick up after the [beep] hits the fan.

By way of example, in 2005, there was a trucker strike in Italy that didn’t even make the front page of the local papers. It started on Monday, by Wednesday almost the entire country was completely out of gas and food. People drove to gas station to fill up their tanks to go to work, and were told, “Sorry. There’s no more gas. The truck didn’t show up to deliver it.” That’s what’s going to happen anytime the system breaks down, no gas, no food on the shelves, no water to buy. Preparation is key, because without it, the Just-in-Time Management Principal dictates that we’re all going to die.

Transcript

What are some ways to find and purify water if you’re stuck without water in a zombie outbreak? Lack of water, having no water to drink, or drinking tainted water that causes you to get sick is as dangerous, if not more dangerous, than encountering zombies.

If you’re in an urban environment, a great place to find water that people don’t think of is hot water heaters. Every building that has water needs a hot water heater. As long as it’s not tankless, you’re looking at plentiful amounts of water for you to drink. All you need to do is purify it ahead of time, and it’s good to go, sitting there for you. Another place to find water if you’re in an urban environment is golf courses, cemeteries, parks, any place that will have water features that aren’t regularly used for purpose of drinking.

If you haven’t prepared ahead of time with water purification tablets, and there are a whole range of them you can find, one way to purify water is by using common household bleach. You can add 1 part to 50 of bleach-to-water, let it sit for about 20 minutes. After that, it gives you that little bit of bleach smell, you’re good to go. Kills all the bacteria in the water and you can drink it.

If you don’t have any way to measure out the bleach while you’re adding it to your tainted water, a good rule of thumb is add enough until you just get that faint smell of bleach. Let it sit for about a half an hour, then it’s good to drink. It’s the same concept as a swimming pool, the chlorine that cleanses a swimming pool, and that is another great place to find water if you’re trapped in a urban environment. Look for swimming pools, you can drink that water.

Transcript

All your other options have been exhausted, there’s no way that you could avoid the fight; what should you wear in a battle when you’re taking on a zombie? First thing is, don’t do like they do in the movies; you should not wear only a t-shirt and a bandana to hack a zombie to death with a machete.

What you want to wear is something that they’re not able to bite through and something that will avoid you getting splattered on you. It’s not a matter of looking cool; it’s a matter of staying alive. We already know that zombies can’t bite through, for instance, the human skull. It’s also unlikely that they’d bite through something like a leather jacket, so racing leathers is a good idea. If you don’t have racing leathers, can’t afford them, or don’t have access to them, something as simple as a sweatshirt wrapped in duct tape should do the job.

You definitely want to cover your eyes, your nose, your mouth. You don’t want to get blood splatter or any infected bodily fluids inside of your own body because that’s how you turn into a zombie. Ski goggles, great idea. A hat or a helmet, absolutely. Something covering your mouth, very, very, important. Again remember, it’s not about looking cool. It’s about staying alive. Looking cool is cool, but staying alive is even cooler.

Transcript

There’s a lot we will never know about the coming zombie plague until it actually hits. One thing we can all agree on is that people make zombies. The Number 1 rule in surviving a zombie outbreak is stay away from other people. Without other people around, there could be no people turning into zombies and trying to eat you. They’re also won’t be other people around trying to take your stuff.

This basic philosophy can be placed against any zombie survival plan, as a test. Once you’ve created your zombie survival plan, and you’re looking at it and you think it’s fantastic, ask yourself, “Will other people want to do the same thing?” If the answer is yes, don’t do that plan. You want to stay away from other people. You don’t want to put yourself in harm’s way by being around other potentially hostile, desperate, or infected people. When you’re looking at your Zombie Survival Plan or looking at places you may travel in a zombie outbreak, population density turns out to be the most important factor.

There are a lot of important factors: Public health infrastructure, natural resources. We all need water or we’ll die of dehydration. The most important element to look at in any zombie survival location is population density. Stay away from other people and you’ll stay alive.

Transcript

Do zombies eat animals or are they just after humans? Some movies, they’re only eating people, other movies, for instance, ‘Night of the Living Dead’, the original modern zombie movie, they eat everything; they eat bugs off trees. They eat anything they can get their hands on that’s alive. Many movies and books show examples of zombies moving through an area like a locust, just eating everything alive and leaving nothing left for the survivors that are out there.

This is an easy thing to test. We think that zombies don’t work together, so it’s not like I’m a zombie and you’re a zombie, and we go up to a house and I say, “Hey. I’m going to go around the back and you moan at the front porch. They’ll coming running out the back, I’ll trip them, and we can both eat them.” Zombies don’t work together. All you have to do is go outside by yourself without a net, without any equipment, and try to catch a squirrel or try to catch a dog that doesn’t want to be caught. The notion that zombies are going to be able to move through an area and just eat every living thing doesn’t really seem told hold water. The reason you hunt deer with a rifle is because they don’t just stand there and let you walk up to them and bite them.

If zombies do eat animals, it could have a potential catastrophic effect on our own food supply. As we become . . . as civilization collapses and we become much more . . . we go much more back to our hunter/gatherer roots, we need to have something to hunt to be able to hunt, at all. If zombies do eat animals, it could cause severe problems for us, but the zombies have to be able to catch. The animals and the animals that don’t want to be caught are generally hard to catch.

Transcript

We already established that zombies crave the living, but do zombies eat dead people? The answer seems obvious, right? No; they’re looking for living people to hunt and infect. Let’s say I’m trapped in an alley being attacked by zombies. Then I fight them off and I survive for a while, but then I finally get bitten and I get dragged down to the ground. My guts are being ripped out, I am being chewed apart. At the moment that I die from blood loss or shock, do zombies continue to eat me or do they all get up and shamble away?

It’s an important question, because if they can continue to eat me after I technically died, then they’re actually eating their own reinforcements. If they basically eat me down to nothing, I’m not going to be a very dangerous zombie in back of some alley dragging myself around with no legs. Let’s hope that zombies eat dead people because we have a much better chance of surviving.

Is it that zombies crave only the living and have some sense of what’s alive and what’s not alive, or are they just craving fresh raw flesh? If they’re just craving flesh, then they would continue to eat the body they’ve tackled and killed, meaning they’d be eating their own reinforcements, so we got a much better shot of surviving.

Transcript

A key element to zombies is that they’re relentless aggressive. Why don’t they duck when you hit them? Why don’t they show any sense of self-preservation? A couple of interesting theories in humans may point to the reason.

Researchers in Italy were able to find an actual switch in the brain that controlled fear response. When the switch was turned on, people reacted appropriately to fear or harm, so they would shy away when they felt threatened or they would hide from things they were afraid of. When that switch is turned off in that same person, the only way they can respond to fear is through aggression. If we think about this in terms of zombies, what that would mean is that a zombie that feels threatened by you can do nothing but act more aggressive. Attacking a zombie, beating a zombie over the head with a baseball bat, will actually make them behave more aggressively toward you than have them shy away from you.

Secondly, there’s a rare disorder in humans called CEPA which creates chronic insensitivity to pain. Sufferers of this condition have the sense of touch just like everyone else. They can pick things up in their hand and feel it, but their pain response is completely turned off. What they’ll do is things like put their hand on a hot stove and let their skin completely burn, or little children will break their legs while out playing and just continue to run around on the leg. If something similar to CEPA is occurring in zombies, this would explain why they’re not responding to threats or fear, why they’re not responding to pain.

One thing is certain, that zombies do have the sense of touch; they can feel. If you can’t feel the ground under your feet, you can’t even walk. They do feel; they just may not feel pain.

Transcript

What are beer goggle zombies? Beer goggle zombies are creatures that aren’t zombies, but if you were really drunk and not able to put together a logical train of thought, you might mistake them as zombies.

For instance, Frankenstein is not a zombie. Occasionally, people will suggest that there’s a debate whether or not Frankenstein’s a zombie. Frankenstein is not a zombie. If we look at our definition of the modern zombie, we can see Frankenstein is not relentlessly aggressive; he’s just misunderstood. He wants to make friends. Nobody likes him, he’s ugly. He’s not a reanimated human corpse because he’s made from a collection of body parts. Lastly, he is biologically-based, but he’s not caused by an infection. You don’t get attacked by Frankenstein and turn into Frankenstein.

Other beer goggle zombies, Jesus. Jesus is not a zombie. Jesus was not reanimated, he was resurrected; big difference. He also didn’t go around trying to eat people when he came back. Mummies are not zombies because mummies are not biologically-based, they’re normally based on some kind of curse, and they’re not relentlessly aggressive. Mummies just want their stuff back. If you leave their tomb or give them back the gem you stole, they go back to sleep.

Anytime you’re looking at a creature and trying to judge whether or not it’s a zombie, it’s easy to look at the characteristics of that creature and figure out whether or not it fits in the mold of a zombie or not. If it’s a demon, if it’s a mummy, if it’s got a different name, chances are it’s not a zombie.

Transcript

When you’re pushed into a corner and you don’t have access to any weapons, what are the best hand-to-hand combat techniques to use against a zombie? First of all, you have to remember zombies want to bite you. Zombies have toxic infected blood and bodily fluid. What you want to do is avoid, for instance, putting your hands in their mouth, punching them in the face; not a good idea. You generally want to grab a zombie by any piece of clothing hopefully they’re wearing and use their own body force against them. Zombies are relentlessly aggressive, meaning they will charge at you no matter what. Use that to your advantage. As a zombie charges at you, step aside, grab them, and pull them past, push them past you, get out of the way. Use their own momentum to keep them going beyond you, to trip them, to make them fall.

Hand-to-hand combat with a zombie should be very brief and it should only be designed to get you away from them. Punching a zombie in the face is a horrible idea. Hopefully, you’re wearing gloves, but even with that, you don’t want to get yourself and your skin, your own body, close to infect blood, infected bodily fluid; complete disaster. Unfortunately, if you do find yourself in a situation where you are forced to engage in hand-to-hand combat with a zombie, you’ve probably made so many other mistakes in your zombie survival plan already that you might just want to let them eat you.

Transcript

What are the ups-and-downs of firearms when used in a zombie plague? There is no question that firearms are deadly. If you’ve ever brought a gun to a knife fight, chances are you are probably going to win.

One of the obvious problems with firearms is that they run out of ammunition. Each firearm has its own specific caliber of ammunition and once you run out of that caliber, if you cannot scrounge or buy any more, your shotgun essentially becomes a stick and not even a very good one at that. The real problem with firearms is that there are exceedingly loud. In a catastrophic zombie plague, the world would be a very quiet place. People would be lying low, not wanting to make any noise. If you use a shotgun or any sort of firearm to eliminate the zombie threat in front of you, you might as well stand on the roof with a dinner bell alerting any other zombie or hostile human within an earshot that you’re there.

Imagine hoards of zombies, or starving people, even, in a city and they hear a gunshot. Everyone is going to go straight to that sound because where there are firearms there are probably other vital supplies and other people. The last thing you want to do is draw attention to yourself. Firearms should only be used as a last resort.

Other range weapons that are not so loud are the bow and arrow or a crossbow. A problem with both of those is that they also run out of ammunition and new ammunition is hard to create. You can’t just whittle an arrow in your spare time, normally. Crossbows and compound bows like this often are very hard to load. It takes a lot of strength to actually pull them back. If you are going to use a bow, you want to use a very basic simple U bow. The real advantage of range weapons like firearms or bows is that you don’t have to get close to your enemy. What you do not want to do is get within grabbing, biting range, of a zombie. Other basic range weapons are a brick or a stone. Whatever you can use to create distance and keep yourself from coming in direct contact with zombies, that’s what you want to do.