Not A Zombie - Television Tropes & Idioms

This is Real Life. Everyone knows zombies are make-believe creatures, they're only "real" in the movies. If you see a "zombie", odds are it's one of your friends with poor taste who insist on scaring you, or someone who has been in an accident of some kind. So when a zombie outbreak starts, it's unsurprising that most people will chafe when confronted with something that should not be. Still, most have the presence of mind to back away from a smelly, shambling man who is missing limbs and moaning for brainssss!

That is rarely the case. There will always be one person who misidentifies the living-impaired with a regular, if badly hurt, human. There's two variants of this, with differing levels of idiocy involved.

Someone is walking through the deserted area, when they see a moaning, pale-looking body lying face down on the floor. Said body may already be bleeding or even missing large, fairly visible chunks of flesh, and may already be ghost white or putrefying green, but the character in question will never notice (or ignore it). Instead, they will run right up to the body, put aside whatever weapon they're carrying, and promptly try to hoist up the apparently distressed individual (often accompanied by dialogue like, "Are you alright?" or "Don't worry, I'll get you out of here."). Hilarity Ensues when the putrefying face of the obviously-a-zombie is revealed, and promptly tries to eat the character's head. This is generally the first zombie that the character encounters, so they tend to survive.
Someone (usually a law enforcement official), points a gun at a zombie and orders them to freeze, or threatens them with pepper spray or arrest or something if they come towards them. They usually fail to notice the fairly obvious fact that the shambling mess of entrails in front of them doesn't have anything like a rational mind left to respond to commands, and assume they're not threatened by the gun (technically true). In general, this is a situation somewhat peculiar to zombie movies involving both Genre Blindness and a lack of common sense, when a character simply doesn't notice extremely obvious signs of something being deeply amiss with the people they are dealing with, up to and including, shambling, moaning, cannibalism and rotten flesh.
- Depending on the officer/character's learning curve, he might fire a warning shot, notice no effect, shoot the zombie, notice no effect, then get suitably freaked out and do one of three things: hightail it out of there, use "lethal" force, or get eaten by refusing to believe it's a zombie. In real life, officers are rather constrained in this scenario by being trained to use "escalating force" when facing an "unarmed civilian."
  - Note that there is, however, no such thing as a "warning shot" used by most law enforcement officers. Most police are only supposed to say "stop, or I'll shoot" when they mean it.
  - Hehehe. "Unarmed" (disarmed?) is an entirely reasonable state for a zombie.

Generally, any character who thinks a zombie is Not a Zombie is also prone to having Zombie Infectee behaviour or becoming one. If he doesn't accept that the creatures outside are zombies, he can't very well become one after being bitten, now, can he?

Contrast: Most Definitely Not A Villain, Paper Thin Disguise. Not to be confused with "not called a zombie".

Examples:

Video Games

It happens in the opening sequence of Left 4 Dead, with a Witch. Bill realizes what it is and try to leave quietly without antagonizing it but Louis freaks out due to an oncoming horde, rushes into the room to warn Bill and Zoey and accidentally triggers the Witch's Berserk Button.
Resident Evil has played the second type throughout the series. However its averted in the first game when the Player Character realizes that the zombie isn't human (the fact its encountered killing and eating a former colleague helps, of course).
- It's a big subversion in Resident Evil 4 when Leon (who knows all about zombie outbreaks) takes down his first enemy and realizes "It's not a zombie!"
- Resident Evil 5, Chris Redfield, you IDIOT. Sheva presumably has an excuse, but Chris does the whole type-1 thing.
Something like this happens when the player first runs into a Despoiled in Wolfenstein. BJ blows up the Nazis' Black Sun machine, causing it to release a shockwave that vapourises everyone in the room except himself and one particular Gestapo officer. The guy stands in place for a few moments, writhing in apparent pain, and BJ walks right up to him, presumably to force him to surrender. Imagine his (and the player's) surprise when the Nazi suddenly turns around and roars, revealing his skeletal face.

Film

Happens near the beginning of 28 Days Later, when Cillian Murphy wanders around an eerily deserted London, then enters a church and finds a priest who is... a bit ill. Our hero doesn't recognise this at first, but then he has been in a coma for 28 days.
The first zombie we see in Night Of The Living Dead is supposed to look like just some random person wandering around the cemetery, until he attacks the girl. Doesn't help that in the colorized version he's green.
- Actually there are different colorized versions in the one I saw he was still white as snow
There is a scene in the first Resident Evil movie where the guy turns round and sees his sister — at first glance she looks just a bit worse for wear...until she tries to chomp on his neck.
- RE: Degeneration has both examples. Angela, Greg and the security guard in the airport at the beginning of the movie all try ordering the shambling corpses away from them to no avail. Later, the fantastically dimwitted Angela also slings a gray, moaning and clearly undead man over her shoulder to carry him to safety— not ten minutes after Leon has told her about zombies.
  - Degeneration also plays with the trope by prefacing it with an instance where the aggressor is just a man in a zombie mask.
Shaun Of The Dead has several examples before they catch on;
- When Shaun and Ed are walking home from the pub they see a zombie eating someone (they think they're a couple making out). Another zombie follows them but they mistake its moans as an attempt to join in with their drunken singing.
- The following morning when (a hungover) Shaun walks to buy a paper and encounters several zombified people he usually interacts with (not noticing some blood and pushing a zombie tramp over when he gives him some change).
- Finally he realizes what's going on when they encounter a female zombie in their garden, who they at first think is drunk.
- There is also a comic strip which was created for publicity, which reveals the female zombie was infected when she tried to "help" another zombie up.
A scene added to the Doom movie's DVD release had two marines come across a naked female - who promptly turned around, revealing herself to be a zombie.
In Plan Nine From Outer Space, characters can somehow identify the zombies immediately, even though they don't look all that zombish.
Averted in Return Of The Living Dead. The first group to encounter a zombie knew about the chemical, and the first animated corpse they encountered was one they already knew to be dead. The second group encounters a zombie so horrifically rotted, and screaming for brains, that there isn't much question.
- Not really this trope, but a rather funny instance of this comes up in The Return of the Living Dead. Freddy and Frank are being looked over by parademics, when they have the following exchange.
Paramedic #1: You have no pulse, your blood pressure's zero-over-zero, you have no pupillary response, no reflexes and your temperature is 70 degrees.
Freddy: Well, what does that mean?
Paramedic #1: Well, it's a puzzle because, technically, you're not alive. Except you're conscious, so we don't know what it means.
Freddy: Are you saying we're dead?
Paramedic #2: Well, let's not jump to conclusions.
Freddy: Are you saying we're dead?
Paramedic #2: No conclusions.
Paramedic #1: Obviously I didn't mean you were really dead. Dead people don't move around and talk.
The Silent Hill movie contains an odd example. Cybil spends way too long waving her gun at a zombie in an effort to convince it to lie down on the ground. Keep in mind that it's a Silent Hill zombie we're talking about here - a violently twitching, shambling monstrosity with a straitjacket of skin and a giant vertical slit for a mouth. I guess she wanted to cuff it and take it downtown for questioning.
The Dawn Of The Dead remake features this - and to make matters worse, the zombie is a little girl.
Most of the characters in Quarantine do this. What makes in a WallBanger is that they keep doing it throughout the movie, even after being flat-out told what's happening by a CDC man.
Happens in Zombieland. Columbus has a flashback to his first encounter with a zombie. It was quite distressing for him, since it was his attractive female neighbor whom he had a crush on, and he nearly got bitten due to his reluctance to attack her, and the comical things he tried to use as weapons (such as a bag of cotton balls).

Live Action TV

In DeadSet, a group of people stop and pick up a person who is being attacked by a zombie. Of course, nobody seems to care that a human being was eating him and are totally shocked when he starts biting them.

Literature

In The Zombie Haiku Book, the writer notices one of his coworkers eating spaghetti in her car. The poem after that is him realizing A:) that's not spaghetti, and B:) There's something very, very, wrong with his coworker.
In World War Z, "The Great Panic", in which the growing zombie pandemic overwhelms the ability of governments worldwide to cope with it and results in the deaths of two-thirds of the human race, occurs in part because few people were able to cope with the idea that the walking dead were just that.

Web Comics

When Mark first encounters the zombies in Real Life in Weregeek, he doesn't believe in them, assuming they are a follow-up RPG to the vampire coven to which he's been just introduced. He is partly right: these are not real zombies but they also have nothing to do with role-playing.

Web Original

The second variation is played very straight in the Choose Your Own Adventure-esque story Dead Ends, near the beginning.

Western Animation

A classic:
Doctor: Well, your temperature is only 55 degrees, you have no pulse, no heartbeat, and your eyes are all puffy and sticky...
Mortician: Oh no! You mean...?
Doctor: Yeah, I'm afraid the two of you have pinkeye.
"Homer, you shot the zombie Flanders!" "Flanders was a zombie?"
Fred Jones is probably the one dude nobody could call stupid, for falling prey to this trope. How many times have he and the other Scooby-Doo characters faced monsters that were fake? So it's not really his fault that he stubbornly tried to pull a real zombie's mask off in Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island, muttering various potential suspects' names as he did so. When its head came off in his hands and he insisted it must be animatronic, however, even Daphne and Velma called him out on being in denial.