Zombie Cliche Lookout: Is It Safe?
One classic trope in zombie fiction is when everyone assumes that and area is completely free, only to have one quiet zombie pop up and take a bite out of one of the survivors. The longer the scene is established as “safe”, the more effective the scare is when a zombie pops up out of nowhere. Not that I’m saying that’s going to happen here of course. We’re just setting the scene, so to speak.
About this Episode:
A bit of a boring episode, I suppose, but I needed to show the passing of time. The idea is that the last few episodes were happening near dusk, so we’re only talking about a fairly short period of time here. Just long enough to really show that the zombies have been completely pulled away.
I had originally edited this to give each episode a successively more blue color cast to make it seem more like night. It didn’t look right, unfortunately. I kept tweaking the mix and opacity, but I couldn’t quite get it right. So we end up without any sort of color tint. Ah well.
Discussion Question: Zombie Walk
A bit of a logistical question today: how far away would a zombie have to be from a potential food source before they “forgot” about that food source. Or, more specific to this story arc in the comic, if you were leading some zeds away from your safe house, how far would you have to lead them before you could be reasonably sure they wouldn’t return.
Don’t forget the lesson we learned from Shaun of the Dead (which I had completely forgotten about until Greg reminded me); don’t just assume you gave them zombies the slip, because the price of screwing up is likely the death of your entire group.
Typo alert: “take a bit out of one of the survivors.” bit–>bite 😀
Also, there is no mouseover text. I suggest “Nobody to see here, just dead zeds, move along please!” 😀
Done and done, thanks.
Are you fishing for ideas on how long the zombies follow the truck, Dave? 🙂
I remember in Wold War Z (the book of a simular name that is obviously not related to the movie at all 😀 ) astronaughts stranded in space watch one zombie in desert chase an animal into a sand dune and then dig for it for days…
Of course that’s part of the charm of the genra, your heroes being stalked by monsters that don’t give up.
Saddly the undead hardly survive hard science settings, after all if your brain matter is ROTTEN then your memory would be rather shot to peices, not to mention complex tasks…like moving…reconizing your surroundings and senses…
But since we cant have a ‘Night of the living dead who…layed their limply because they were too dead to move about’ and make it interesting I would say that the above explenation at least explains why zombies shuffle around bumping into things. They forgot the obstical was there…
Now, INFECTED style zombies, people who are still alive but are driven crazy buy illness or parisite, those exist in the realm of possibility (if not plausibility) and I imagine they would follow you until something shiny came along to catch their attention.
Yeah, that’s not really going to be a happy marriage between real science and zombie stories, but I’m pretty okay with that.
I could never imagine a zombie just stop walking. Because it forgot what it was doing.(that would be silly to see)
I think it would keep going,doing the same exact thing forever, until something else catches its attention.
There’s a scene in “the walking dead”,
Where walkers are going after a character, and he throws a Molotov cocktail over and behind them.
Then the walkers turn around and go after the fire.
I really don’t think that they would forget food right in front of them, just because they heard a noise behind them.
What do you think?
Can you distract a zombie that already sees you?
I would say no. 🙂
That’s a good point, and requires a bit more clarification on my part. I don’t mean that the zombies would actually forget about the prey, but that they would no longer be able to track it.
When it comes to the truck, I envision then slowly drawing the zeds away, and once they have a good distance, speeding up and losing them. Do some turns along the way to get them pointed in the right direction, and you may have lost them.
Oh boy… It took me months to get the blue “day for night” effect you talk about, so I easily imagine what you’re talking about here. I have to say I prefer the blue effect better over the dark one.
Anyway, I’m fine with this episode. Not boring at all. Smart use of the 4 panels actually.
Thank you!
And, yeah. In my head this was going to be a super-easy color tint change. In reality it looked absolutely awful.
There’s only one thing that worries me about the front of the house, and then only slightly: It’s not boarded up, like the interior shots would show! Either Ted went to a lot of trouble to install one-way glass for his external windows, or Dave forgot that detail when shooting the episodes.
Either way, hopefully Dave will address that somewhere along the storyline! 😀
The scene is actually pretty good in the sense that we dont know whats going on in the house. My thought is the family was going to run the moment the zeds were gone. Istead all we get is…
Silence.
It makes me wonder if they got in and all our beloved characters inside have been eaten off screen! D: