Nightmare Fuel / World War Z

The novel

• From the horrific images of armies crumbling under endless tides of graying, mindless ghouls to the insane tale of the French military's battle against the zombies in the Paris Catacombs, World War Z has no shortage of chilling apocalyptic imagery. And that's not even getting into the hair-raising, often tragic tales the various survivor interviews weave. And the bomb that tears your lungs out through your mouth. Which actually exists. Too bad zombies don't need lungs.
• North Korea. Most of the first half of the book is horrific, but North Korea in particular...it's the fact that even twenty years on, nobody knows what happened to them all. From there it has to make you wonder what would happen if they are all zombified in hiding, and what would happen if they ever got out.
  • This fanfic does a good job of giving you the idea of what might have happened to the North Koreans. So much for Kim Jong-Il's plan for "saving" his country....
    Terry Hughes: "...that water.....It told us so much."
  • Even if the North Koreans aren't infected, it'd be pretty nightmarish. At least living on the surface they have some hope of escaping across a border or growing some food for themselves; imagine how much worse it'd be underground, where the dictator controls all the food, water and air. Especially if the stockpiles start running low before the ones in charge are ready to leave...
    • The narrator of the chapter in the book talks about that, and mentions that the NK population might still be alive down there, now ruled by a tyrant controlling not just their lives but the very air they breathe and the sunlight above them. "Kim Jong had always wanted to be a God..."
    • The fanfic linked above nods to this, when the person being interviewed muses about the possibility of even some North Koreans remaining alive in their tunnel complexes. He begins to muse about what they must be doing for food after having been underground for over a decade... before deciding that he'd rather not think about it.
  • The leadup to the disappearance, as documented by South Korea's military. About a month before the outbreaks started, North Korea started to behave oddly. All diplomatic contact with the outside world was broken off, all visa requests were denied, it seemed like the North was preparing for war... except there was LESS troop movement, not more. Military frequencies began to go dark, satellite imagery showed not just military but even civilian movements became increasingly rare, even in the cities. Even South Korea's spies and electronic surveillance on the other side began to vanish. Finally, one night, the NK units patrolling the border went into their barracks... and were never replaced. The lights in the barracks shut off, and that was the last anyone saw of them. Shortly after, World War Z raged at its height, and the South Koreans no longer had time to constantly monitor the North. The North Koreans were simply never seen again, and the survivors don't want to look for them, afraid of what they might find.
• The story of one of the men that has to go down onto the sea floor to find any large groups of zombies that are still wandering around under the sea. He comes across a wreck from the war, goes down to check it, and falls down through the floorboards, into a room full of zombies. They all grab at him with their arms but he's saved by the fact that he's wearing one of those old-timey diving suits.
  • Comes with a Suspiciously Specific Denial on the interviewee's part that heavily implies recurring nightmares. "If I ever had a recurring nightmare, and I'm not saying I do, because I don't, but if I did, I'd be right back in there, only this time I'm completely naked... I mean I would be".
  • Divers working on offshore rigs were occasionally ambushed by zombies. Some were torn apart in the water, others were killed by the bends as they tried to escape.
• The story of the war against zombies in the sewers of Paris. The gases beneath the city forced the soldiers to wear restrictive gas masks or fume hoods to even breathe, the tunnels themselves are a pitch-black maze full of unstable sections that can collapse at any time, and zombies ready to grab you and drag you to a watery grave at any moment are everywhere.
  • It's noted that they had to almost exclusively fight hand-to-hand since guns could have caused gas explosions. This often resulted in them being inches away from the lethal jaws of the zombies, which sometimes included their reanimated friends.
  • The interviewee relays a particularly disturbing scenario of hearing another squad being attacked and running through the tunnels to help them, bashing their heads on the low ceilings as they went, crawling through the toxic muck on their hands and knees, being forced to backtrack upon entering wrong chambers or taking wrong turns - all while hearing the sound of their screams and zombies moaning from all directions thanks to the acoustics. All too often, they arrived to find nothing but blood and bone - and their own reanimated friends, who they would have to slay in close combat as mentioned above.
  • The Hospital. The French survivors started throwing their infected and their zombified ex-friends into this place after things began to get ugly. By the time an advance team accidentally broke through into it, there were at least three hundred zombies in there, just waiting to spill out into the Paris tunnel system.
• North Platte being invaded by a horde of zombies.
• The survivors in Canada turning to cannibalism out of desperation. The interviewee did say the soup smelled good, though... "By Christmas Day, there was plenty of food."
  • That entire segment counts. It's downright horrifying to see how a camp of normal people managed to devolve into desperate, paranoid psychopaths, starving and freezing to death.
• Alang, India. People attempted to swim out to ships and could see as people right next to them were dragged under by submerged zombies. Many were trapped between the zombies coming from inland and the underwater ones.
  • Alang also has a much more mundane form of horror in the form of several captains' behaviour, with some boats demanding to take only young women for heavily implied unsavoury purposes, or captains refusing to take people of the "wrong" race or caste and threatening violence toward any who try to board.
• The truckload of infected refugees heading to Kyrgyzstan. It's a rich Chinese businessman and his driver heading to Kyrgyzstan with the businessman's relatives in the trailer, but it's very obvious that the relatives are all zombies at this point, since they're moaning and thrashing enough to rock it side to side. It's implied that the businessman has lost it and is in complete denial about what's happened. There are also hints that what happened in Kyrgyzstan afterward was bad even by the war's standards, but we never find out what.
• The parents killing their own kids in the church in the Midwest.
  • The fact that the scene is described (or, more accurately, acted out) by someone with the mind of a four-year-old makes it worse. Poor Sharon...
  • She even mimes one of the mothers picking up up a child and swinging said kid, head first, against the wall.
  • Then there's this bit, which makes you glad this is a transcript instead of an actual recording.
    [She turns to Doctor Kelner.] Can I? [Doctor Sommers looks unsure. Doctor Kelner smiles and nods. I later learn that this room is soundproofed for a reason. Sharon mimics the moan of a zombie. It is undoubtedly the most realistic I have ever heard. Clearly, by their discomfort, Sommers and Kelner agree.]
    • The audiobook lets you hear the moan, as well as Sharon's cheerfully oblivious recollection of everything that happened.
  • Why does she have the mind of a four-year-old? Well, she was the only survivor from the church, and after that she had no human contact for at least ten years. She is one of the "ferals," children who effectively never grew up because they were orphaned and spent their entire adolescence alone. Sharon is one of the lucky ones; she may never live independently, but at least she can talk.
• The book before it, The Zombie Survival Guide, is even worse.
  • The Chapter on a total zombie apocalypse kept one up a few nights. Imagine being the last known humans in a world filled with undead. It combines two things that will freak anybody out: Complete isolation/loneliness and zombies.
  • The part of the guide that has recorded events of zombie contact had some pretty scary ones - the one where an entire ship and the slaves chained in lines it were zombies pretty much lampshaded it by explicitly telling you to imagine the horror of the possibility of being a slave on the far end of the ship while one on the close side was bitten, killed and reanimated to bite the slave closest to him and repeat the process, watching undeath approach you with each person...
    • Not to mention wondering if the person on the other side of you is going to figure out their only alternative is to kill you before the infection spreads that far...
    • Actually, given the time-lag between biting and turning, most of the slaves would've died of thirst before the infection reached them. More likely, a single zombie from the crew managed to enter the hold, but was physically unable to feed for some reason (e.g. one of the living crew might've driven a blade through its throat and left it, blocking its esophagus), so just kept biting one victim after another.
  • Or the order of Samurai devoted to fighting the undead who required their new members to spend the night locked in a room full of gibbering severed heads.
    • Though the book acknowledges that the heads probably weren't actually making any noise, given that severed heads would have no lungs to produce sound with. Heads that are silent except for constantly snapping jaws aren't a huge improvement, though.
  • In the back of "The Zombie Survival Guide" there are blank pages that are laid out like journal, with places to fill in the place, time, location, distance from the person, specifics and the action taken, so the reader can keep track of attacks near them...making it even more like a real survival guide.
• Brooks has stated that one of his fears is that of a zombie, a creature that comes for you for no reason, could not be reasoned with, and is unstoppable. He neatly conveys this to the reader through one of the stories, where it's noted that no human country can be 100% devoted to war (due to elderly, babies and the disabled)...but zombies have no such handicap.
• The people receiving infected organs via transplants and transforming into zombies days, weeks, even months later.
  • The implication of all those women being infected after receiving donated eggs and/or sperm is even worse.
    • Are you thinking that those women got pregnant with zombie fetuses? Don't worry, according to the zombie survival guide, all zombies are sterile so none of those women could have gotten pregnant. But they all died or turned into zombies though.
• The baby zombie, still tied up in the carrier, snapping at the woman as she passed by during the crashed pilot's story.
• "Closure, Limited", a short story based in the same canon as World War Z but that Brooks published for an anthology, has him interview a company that attempted to find loved ones that had become zombies, "pacify" them, and then return the remains to their living descendants for proper burial. However, the impossibility of some of these assignments has led to them taking random zombies and giving them post-kill plastic surgery to make them look more like the victims being sought. The ending has the owner of the company give Brooks an opportunity to kill a zombie himself, and the closing scene is of Max leveling a pistol at the zombie's head.
• Even putting aside the zombies, the chapter that points out that something as ubiquitous and simple as root beer depends on international trade can be nightmare inducing if you consider that it wouldn't take a zombie apocalypse to shut down that kind of thing. In the civilized world, nearly everything you depend on, down to basic food, is the result of national or international trade. Bread, milk, meat. A disaster that takes down infrastructure will mean within days people will be starving. People starving becomes people rioting, and it will only get worse when processed foods just run out. Look at your community and think about this: Almost nobody around will know how to do something like process an animal for meat. If there's even meat to be found.
• The ongoing, largely unseen conflict against secessionist enclaves the US government had in parallel with the " Road to New York". The book doesn't elaborate much, leaving it mostly to imagination, but it is clear the rebels were dealt with in a swift and extremely violent manner, the army using against them all the armor and weapons that were unused against the Zombies. The worst part? A lot of those secessionists had a point, claiming that US had abandoned them and not the other way around, which was more or less the case.
  • There's a very quick reference to tanks rolling out toward the Black Hills, in Wyoming and South Dakota. If you know much about that region's history—particularly the religious importance of the Black Hills to many tribes, but also the broken treaties, the wars against those tribes, the American Indian Movement—it's easy to guess who the secessionists in this case were. Whether the government's choice of action was necessary or justified, in the context of a zombie pandemic... well, we could argue all night.
• There some pretty horrific scenes in Recorded Attacks, a graphic novel set in the same universe. Not only does it indicate that zombie attacks actually go back practically to the dawn of human history—the first known one being in central Africa c. 60,000 BC—but the zombies aren't the only monsters skulking around in several of the stories. An outbreak in St. Lucia which nearly wiped out the local whites was successfully stopped by free blacks and mulattoes working together with slaves, and a few days later the Europeans came back and had all the freedmen executed and the rest sent back to the plantations after an ostensible slave revolt with the outbreak of "tropical rabies" basically being a footnote. Then there's Project Cherry Blossom, an effort by Imperial Japan to weaponize zombies for use against China and the Allies—none of which went according to plan—and was then co-opted by the Soviet Union and culminated in them nuking their own men to snuff out the infestation. But the grand prize goes to the cossacks who became separated from the tsar's armies during the Russian expansion into Siberia and happened upon a local Asiatic village: after a warm reception by the natives, the cossacks massacred them and spent the next few weeks burning through the Siberians' food supply, and when that ran out they turned to another food source. When that ran out just a quickly, they turned to grave-robbing to find more food, uncovering only one fresh corpse, which was conspicuously bound and gagged. After subduing the zombie, all but two of the cossacks roasted and ate it, too—the only abstainees were one who was convinced that the flesh was cursed (he wasn't wrong, since zombie flesh is toxic and it quickly killed all the other cossacks) and one who was too sick to try...because he was bitten in the process of subduing the zombie. He would later succumb to the infection and attack the former the following morning. That last cossack, the one believing it was cursed, only managed to escape because his reanimated pursuer froze stiff while chasing him.
  • It gets worse. Fast forward to 1998 where an acclaimed film director called Jacob Tailor decided to set out to a remote village in Siberia in order to photograph a preserved Sabretooth Tiger specimen, finding out that they had also managed to recover the frozen body of the infected Cossack as well. After returning to Toronto for a breather, several of Tailor’s film crew went back to prepare the bodies, only for them to mysteriously lose contact and vanish. Roughly three weeks later the director and the rest of his entourage return to the site only to find the aftermath of a bloodbath, and then proceed to witness a mob of at least thirty six infected people, some of which were the missing crew members, mauling the pilots of their helicopter before turning their unholy appetite upon them. What follows is the director and what’s left of his film crew fighting for survival as they’re besieged by the voracious horde in a nearby farmhouse, only figuring out the secret to killing them after one of the zombies grabs the broom handle they were using, breaks it off, and after being kicked back down the stairs ends up accidentally impaling another zombie in the eye with it. Then it transitions into a Moment of Awesome as they then proceed to use this newfound knowledge to methodically kill their attackers in a seven hour battle using only their wits and some melee weapons.
• The Decimation the Russian military uses to restore discipline. Russian soldiers were ordered to do highly objectionable things without explanation (like shooting zombie children without being told what zombies were) and were totally cut off from their families, so many brigades mutinied. The brass responded by rounding up every member of every brigade where a mutiny had taken place and splitting them into groups of ten. These ten had to vote on which of them was to be executed, and then they had to carry out the executions themselves on pain of death. They couldn't shoot their comrades, either - no, they were made to beat them to death with sharp rocks. After that, the troops were bound together by both fear and guilt, willing to do absolutely anything and rationalizing it as Just Following Orders.
  • Some truly horrifying Truth in Television with this: This was a real punishment for any Roman Legions that were found to have failed egregiously enough in battle- except that they would draw lots, so not only was the punishment truly nightmarish, it was also random. The caveat of 'groups of ten' mentioned in the book is likely because historically, this punishment was carried out on 10% of the soldiers in the legion.
• China Lake. We're never shown or told what was done there, beyond oblique references to "those sick fucks at China Lake" and extremely high suicide rates among the researchers there.
  • Considering that the real-life China Lake is a weapons testing and development station, it's been speculated among fans that it was something like the Body Farm, with weapons being tested on zombies. While sound in theory, consider what it would be like to actually live there, spending your days mutilating dozens of not-quite-dead zombies with all manner of weapons before trying to get some sleep with a head full of echoing gunfire and visions of gore and mutilations - all while the dead constantly moan. And then you have to get up and do it again, and again, and again...
• In an interview with the astronaut, he mentions that they got to watch the Three Gorges Dam collapse. For reference, this is a dam whose reservoir is so large that it slowed down the Earth's rotation, and it's located upstream from cities like Wuhan, Nanjing and Shanghai. Even from space, it looked like a raging brown and white dragon, engulfing everything in its path, with people unable to escape thanks to the zombies. Nobody knows how many died, and more than a decade afterward, they're still finding bodies.

The film

• The film suggests that North Korea survives by pulling out the teeth of all its citizens.
  • The ex-CIA agent pulling out one of his own teeth in front of Gerry to demonstrate.
• The film's frequent Jump Scare use.
  • On the same note, the uneasy presence of nothingness in a desolate area. You WILL cringe during this type of scene.
• Segen getting her hand chopped off. The fact that not much blood is shown somehow makes it worse, since the camera instead focuses on her reaction.
• The airplane sequence. Good grief, the airplane sequence. Being attacked by zombies is bad enough, but to have it happen in a small enclosed space thousands of feet in the air with no way to escape is even worse. And it got kicked off because a single zombie got on the plane.
• On an earlier flight, Gerry sees a nuclear bomb go off.
• The rooftop scene. And the fact that the lead zombie is Tommy's father – a man who moments ago was quiet-spoken and concerned about his family – turned into a mindless zombie trying to EAT his own child.
  • The scene before it, where they're all arguing with each other, then zombies start slamming against their front door, Tommy's father looks up with an expression that just screams "Oh, Crap!"
• The zombie invasion of Israel is animalistically efficient.
• The way the zombies are animated. You know the use of the word "tides" up in the novel's section of the page? It's taken to a literal conclusion here. The zombies, in large enough amounts, don't swarm. They flow. They become an unholy tidal wave of flesh that tumbles after any healthy human being in range.
  • The zombies that manage to climb over the Israeli wall throw themselves from it in a rain of living corpses. The ones that survive keep crawling after humans even with their bodies hideously mangled and broken.
• The fleeing garbage truck plowing through the streets. Not just because of the damage, but there are usually guys hanging off the back to quickly gather trash. Can you imagine being the driver, watching your buddies being ripped off and eaten?
  • A closer look reveals that the driver is an infectee who is struggling to escape from his seat belt.
  • What made this scene worse, for Scottish viewers at least, was the place that scene was filmed, George Square, Glasgow, a year later, this exact scenario happened (obviously minus the zombies), a garbage truck driver blacked out or had a seizure, and plowed through a crowd of Christmas shoppers killing some of them, making this scene nightmarishly Harsher in Hindsight.
• "The train is in the station!'
  • What is the most terrifying aspect of the transformation from man to zombie is this: You're conscious for every second of it, and it is clearly painful. Those twelve seconds? There's no doubt that they feel like twelve thousand years of absolute agony. Perhaps worse is the psychological aspect of it: You're fully conscious and aware as the virus takes over your body and mind, and overwrites you, transforming you into nothing more than a vehicle to transport the virus to other hosts.
• The fact that the infectees aren't like typical zombies. They don't eat flesh, they just bite down hard enough and long enough to ensure the virus has spread then move on. You don't even get the time afforded in most zombie films by the zombies stopping to eat their latest kill, they're right back on your heels before you've had time to breathe.

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