Basic Trope: A graveyard produces a seemingly unending succession of undead.
- Straight: A Badass Preacher shelters in a rural church in the middle of Nowhere, GA, as waves of hundreds of zombies pour forth from the small churchyard surrounding it.
- Exaggerated: A single coffin spews forth thousands of undead.
- Downplayed: Fridge Logic suggests that there shouldn't have been quite as many corpses as there seem to be zombies.
- Justified:
- Rather than waking the dead, a portal to hell has been opened up under the graveyard.
- The graveyard is the site of a mass grave, and the sheer evil of the atrocity that created it is what provided the dark energy that allowed a Necromancer to wake the dead.
- The magic causes the dead to re-compose under the ground, so everyone who was ever buried there is being reconstituted from the bone fragments and dirt they've been reduced to.
- The graveyard is very old and as a result it's wonky.
- People have been buried on top of each other to conserve room (Truth in Television in some parts of Europe, though only after a long while).
- It was a plague emergency mass grave. Which also makes the zombies extra dangerous.
- Inverted:
- We only actually see about three zombies over the course of the film, but at daybreak there are hundreds of corpses littering the grass.
- The count of undead is exactly accounted for down to age, sex and rough cause of death of the real world location.
- Subverted:
- There are stories of thousands of dead walking the earth at night, but these turn out to be exaggerations.
- Bob's crew notice that there are more zombies than graves. Then they check the village for survivors and find out Ned massacred the whole town after the graveyard proved inadequate.
- Double Subverted: "Uh, Preacher? Turn around, Preacher..."
- Parodied:
- The zombies and the zombie-slayers start playing Scooby-Dooby Doors with open sarcophagi.
- The zombies are actual clowns.
- Zig Zagged: A huge number of zombies rise from a grave site, but it turns out that under the grave is over a catacomb, only for it to be revealed that the catacomb only had a small family crypt inside.
- Averted: There are only a handful of corpses still intact enough to raise from the dead — although unless subjected to Kill It with Fire or the Chunky Salsa Rule, they can always be re-raised.
- Enforced: Graveyards are the Mook Maker for zombies in a Survival Horror game, and are simply spawned there whenever the AI deems it appropriate.
- Lampshaded: "Was Nowhere, GA by any chance built on an ancient Indian Burial Ground? Because there are way too many bogies for a 150-year-old town"
- Invoked: Ned the Necromancer spent years stealing and re-burying corpses into a single graveyard so that when he cast his reanimation spell (which has a limited radius) it would affect the largest number of corpses possible.
- Exploited:
- Ned maps out every mass grave in history and plans his evil plots using them for geographical convenience.
- The heroes use the constant supply of zombies to do cheap level grinding and item farming.
- Defied: After all the zombies are raised, the graveyard becomes silent as the truly dead and no more come out.
- Discussed: "Go through the graveyard? Are you crazy? There's no telling how many hundreds of zombies are there!"
- Conversed: "With so many zombies pouring out of graveyards, you'd think that any survivors of the zombie apocalypse would insist on cremation."
Back to Clown-Car Grave. Only one troper per plot, please.
