Basic Trope: Civilization is attacked by the living dead (or similar) and begins to break down, resulting in a fight for survival on the part of the main characters.
- Straight: The recently dead are animated and begin to attack the living, turning those they kill into zombies as well. As civilization breaks down around them, Bob and Alice barricade themselves into their house and fight for survival against the surrounding zombie hordes.
- Exaggerated: Every single thing that has ever died ever comes to life and attacks the living. The entire world falls to the zombies, except for Bob and Alice, who must fight their way through the zombie hordes armed only with a crowbar.
- Downplayed: A zombie apocalypse has broken out... in a small, isolated town. Life outside the town continues as normal.
- Justified:
- A virus designed to attack enemy cities by the government or a Mad Scientist has accidentally broken out, infecting the surrounding areas.
- An amoral military organisation created zombies as bioweapons and intentionally unleashed them on a small city to test their effectiveness.
- A powerful necromancer has used an ancient curse to revive the dead.
- A crashed spacecraft has been infected with a strange extraterrestrial microbe, which has spread on Earth.
- There is no more room in Hell.
- The zombies were constructed in a laboratory, and carry a virus that it can spread.
- A very slutty demoness who sleeps around with people gives them an STD that turns them into zombies.
- It's All Just a Dream.
- Inverted:
- A single animated corpse must try and elude the living people who are trying to destroy it.
- The undead in the story are actually good-aligned Revenant Zombies who are rising to help the heroes defeat the Big Bad.
- The undead ironically are what caused the rise of civilizations and society as humanity was forced to band together and organize to not be killed in their sleep by them.
- A small group of zombies must take shelter to hide from the aggressive, numberless living.
- Subverted:
- The zombies turn out to be thinking, feeling creatures with a society all their own, they are satisfied eating only most, not all humans, and the embattled hero realizes he was just provoking a defense mechanism by slaughtering them.
- Every human who ever died is coming back to life and walking around for food... they just need some food, medicine, and bedrest to heal back to their normal selves. The living are just panicking and shooting them on sight out of fear, this results in the 'zombies' attacking them out of self defense and the people who died revive shortly after. The movie stops when everyone agrees to stop killing each other.
- The zombies were just coming upstairs for a wedding.
- The zombies are dispatched easily and society proceeds as normal.
- Doubly Subverted:
- The celebrations were premature; the undead threat revives and finishes the job.
- The "wedding" the zombies were coming upstairs for is actually a ritual to empower the necromancer who raised them.
- Parodied:
- The zombies do immensely silly things. Like song and dance routines
with a dash of slapstick. - Instead of moaning "braiiiiins..." they moan "sssseeeeeex..."
- The zombies do immensely silly things. Like song and dance routines
- Zig Zagged:
- Society falls to Zombie kind, having a few humans fight through it. While Zombie society settles in, there is a human outbreak, which overthrows the Zombie society leaving a few Zombie survivors to run for their lives. It's actually all the evil plot of the secret government who release different viruses that control death by enacting or counteracting it. The humans and zombies must band together to save the world from these the nefarious schemes.
- Alternatively, the plot switches from a desperate survivor trying to flee the cities from the rampaging hordes to The Men in Black dealing with small outbreaks out in the boondocks on another country.
- (Continued from Reconstructed) Among the survivors out in the boonies is the Crazy Survivalist that does have 50 caliber machine guns, just for this kind of situation.
- The zombie problem varies greatly depending on the area.
- Averted:
- While a few corpses do come to life and attack the living, there aren't enough to threaten civilization entirely.
- It looks like civilization is about to collapse, but the undead threat is overcome and defeated.
- They're only a minor threat, compared to everything else.
- Outbreaks are dealt with swiftly.
- The Dead rise, but don't attack anyone. Instead they try to get on with their lives.
- The Dead rise... but most of them are stuck in their graves and can't hurt anyone. The freshly dead already have police looking at the bodies and don't get very far.
- The Dead simply aren't organized enough to pose any real threat, ie not forming groups or hordes and mostly just wandering out by themselves.
- The zombie apocalypse takes place in a medieval-fantasy-based world. Civilization survives because enough people have armor, weaponry, and training to take down the undead threat—or, conversely, the undead threat is nothing new to them, as they are used to fighting monsters, and civilization merely sees the zombies as a different sort of monster.
- Enforced:
- "Okay, we have a tiny budget, not many resources, and only a few actors who can actually act around here. Get some meat, pale makeup, extras (just a bunch of friends of ours) and fake blood though, and I think we've got enough to make a zombie flick..."
- "Everybody loves zombies — let's tap into that market!"
- "Hi, I'm George A. Romero."
- "Hi, we're making a tribute to Romero."
- "If I want to make a political film, might as well do it in the vein of Romero."
- "Hi, this is Capcom."
- Lampshaded: "Okay, does anyone feel like they're in a Romero movie?"
- Invoked:
- A Mad Scientist / necromancer releases into the wild something which will raise the dead and cause them to feast on the living.
- The Conspiracy releases a zombie virus hoping that it will destabilize civilization enough for them to take control.
- Exploited:
- The Conspiracy didn't release the virus, but they're not above taking advantage of the fact that everyone's being distracted by it.
- Unscrupulous people take advantage of the breakdown in society to set themselves up as warlords ruling petty kingdoms however they like.
- Defied:
- The Secret Anti-Paranormal Government Agency keeps a close eye out for anything of this nature and quashes any potential rising of the undead with terminal force.
- "We may be dead, but This Is Reality, not a horror movie."
- Discussed: "I've been hearing weird rumours from the No-Go Zone... they're saying the dead are coming back to life."
- Conversed: "Hey dude, have you got your Zombie Apocalypse plan all worked out?"
- Implied: The story is set After the End and the only surviving information about the cause of the apocalypse are a few scattered documents mentioning a virus and attacks from Monstrous Humanoids.
- Deconstructed:
- The corpses that have come back to life are not immune to the same factors that affect corpses in Real Life — rigor mortis, decomposition, muscle decay, etc. Limbs and various extraneous parts of the dead drop off or fall away, and they are very slow and mostly have very poor balance, being practically incapable of standing upright. As their brains are dead, they have no control over themselves at all. As such, they fall apart and are practically no threat.
- Another alternative: while the zombies do pose somewhat of a threat, government response is swift, crushing the zombies efficiently with superior firepower and tactics. Even organized civilians easily avert a crisis.
- People can think logically. Zombies are bewildered by doorknobs and stairs. People just go up a couple floors and throw garbage, while the zombies wail forlornly at their feet.
- The zombies are immune to decomposition, can only be killed by taking out the brain. However, the zombies can't get very far because they are limited to their own two legs, so anyone with a car or even a bicycle could get away.
- A cure develops long before they are a threat.
- Zombies have no qualms on what state the flesh is in; dead, rotting, decomposing meat is still meat. As such, they start infighting and cannibalizing each other, heavily diminishing their numbers and making them much easier to fight off.
- Reconstruction:
- Although The Virus might not technically kill its victims, it reduces them to unthinking, savage creatures of pure bloodlust who still retain human urges, drives and body control. As such, they are a very potent threat.
- The virus itself slows down decomposition and, while stripping away everything else, manages to keep its host body working enough to pose a threat to humans.
- ...Or, they decay rapidly and pose no threat... unless there's a whole mob of them.
- It's not just zombies - they sometimes turn into mutants that make BLACKLIGHT look pleasant. Bioweapons are on the loose. There's been experimentation going on, and somehow, those experiments have been released.
- While helicopters and 50 caliber machine guns are an insurmountable obstacle for the zombie hordes, the survivors are all civilians out in the boonies who do not have access to them. While all the survivors need to do is hold out while the military prepares to move in, the zombies possess inhuman strength and an ambush predator cunning, and ammunition is scarce. The tension lies in not "can the zombies be contained?" but "can the survivors hold out long enough for help to arrive?"
- It is a new disease and nobody is immune (and/or mutate quickly), so it causes serious damage before stopping it.
I hear Odessa, Texas is still intact! We'll pick up supplies at the Zombie Apocalypse page and head out west from there!
