Zombie Cliché Lookout:
Let’s say you need to search a dangerous area for some reason. Wouldn’t you start off by looking out for any potential dangers and addressing them before searching for clues/supplies/confederate gold? You wouldn’t if you were in a genre film, anyway. Whenever people are searching an area that might be infested with zombies,they just jump right in and hope the zombies have something better to do than eating your delicious flesh.
As one might imagine, the zombies invariable show up and give our protagonists trouble. Whether said protagonist survives depends entirely upon his or her importance to the plot. If they have a role to play down the road, they’re going to have a very close call, but ultimately walk away. If they’ve exhausted their potential as characters, or if their death can serve as some sort of jumping off point for the primary hero, well, it’s been good knowing you, secondary character.
Well, it’s not always ‘walk’ away, sometimes a major character crucial to a plot could sustain life-altering and severe injuries but still wind up as a major character, or less often, as a significant, possibly injured, side-character after a long bedside coma. 😉
That’s a good point, BrickVoid. In zombie fiction, if you’re bitten, you’re a goner, but there are many, many other ways to hurt yourself.
Of course, there’s always someone claiming to have a last-minute cure requiring one (or more) super-rare ingredients. And heaven help the intrepid hero it’s got to be applied to! If said ingredients are available, “well, there’s only a slim chance it might work” or something equally irritating.
I don’t know if any heroes came back from zombie bites, but maybe there’s a good chance a zombie might miss or just scratch the surface on the first bite. Good god, are they always so precise until they come across the hero character? 😀
Hah, that they are. They’re like Stormtroopers.
Or it’s just a false protagonist that we’ve been following all along… which is a tiresome twist, to be sure, particularly if the “new” lead has nowhere near the development nor audience investment of the previous one.
Extremely tiresome. I remember people raving about that in Death Proof for some damn reason and just couldn’t comprehend how that was so brilliant, but that’s generally my response to the praise heaped upon Quentin.
At least they found a cop.
I’m a glass half-full kind of person.
A positive outlook is going to be essential for survival in the undead world. Good on you, Mary.
Stewart really is a little twerp, isn’t he? Not only is he oblivious to a zombie sneaking up on him and moaning, but when Sam warns him about it, he goes and trips himself up rather than deal with it! Granted, the helmet makes killing it a little harder, but he’s got a blade not a bat. Just poke it in the face!