Zombies as Complete Monsters

I know most depictions of zombies have them as "just doing what they were made to do" I was wondering how one could turn them into truly vile detestable things rather than something one could sympathize with. So I made my zombies attack people with an almost sadistic glee and a slasher smile upon their face. Many behave like they are gods and though they can sometimes number in the thousands, each individual is its own monstrosity.

Unfortunately, I can't get around the fact that they seem like the product of someone's (something's) doing which would take the monstrousness off of them and onto said individual. I'm trying to avoid this by having no such individual. Is this a good way to go about it?

Have it be a willing transformation by a cult. Or something.

That's actually something I'd like to avoid since it would limit the zombies to a localized area rather than a global problem. It does give me a good idea of a cult who advising people to kill themselves which only excarbates the problem.

Supernatural would definitely be the better way to go about this. It's hard to keep a zombie intelligent if you're using The Virus, or anything else biological (such as a parasite). Of course, an extraterrestrial parasite could cooperate as a hive mind, keeping the zombies intelligent as well. Just a thought :/

In all honesty, I've never sympathized with zombies. I've never registered them as even human.

Even if you could never sympathize with them, you can never really blame most depictions of them for doing what they do.

True. They're just...monsters. Snakes bite, birds fly, zombies hunt out the flesh of humans to feed/add more numbers to themselves.

I think the only way to pull this off is to have them willingly "awaken the darkness in their hearts for ultimate power" or something. Otherwise, it's just a large group of people being Brainwashed and Crazy.

Yes, most works depict the zombies as natural disaster. You can not hate zombies there, as it would be like hating earthquake or volcano.

OP: How much "classic" do you want your zombies to be? For example, in Crossed, the author pretty convicingly depicted the infected as Complete Monsters but they had very little simmilarity to the "classic" zombies.

edited 17th Dec '10 1:51:47 PM by Drakovicz

Another example of this type would be Black Gas.

The problem with having it be something they chose to become is that if they're doing it, they were probably a Complete Monster before, right?

Well, my zombies do have some classic elements in that they are reanimated corpses and it seems to only take effect in human beings. Places where I stray are their heinous actions, they can't die (adding to their God complex), and the fact that their bites don't infect. Otherwise, they're pretty close to classic zombies.

Are they intelligent? Are are their dog raping actions just an unthinking automated processes? (or better said, something that comes just from being a zombie, like decaying flesh, slow movement, etc... and is not a conscious decision)

edited 17th Dec '10 2:43:30 PM by Drakovicz

You might want to look in to Chinese Vampires for inspiration. In short they are corpses that spontaneously came back to life because the dead person wasn't content in the afterlife and wanted to cause trouble and mayhem. That's right they came back to life through sheer desire to be an asshole again.

I think having a complete monster zombie works better if there is just one or a few of them. You can't really call a horde of interchangeable monsters a complete monster. No when working with a revenant zombie you have one very powerful supernatural asshole out to cause trouble.

It's hard to say how intelligent these zombies are as there is no activity coming from the brain yet their actions are far too deliberate to be merely instinct driven. Kinda like the body is going but is lacking a moral compass of any sort. Most of the time, the zombies don't even completely kill their victims and just leave them to die on their own. After all, thousands of people die every day from other non-zombie related causes so why over do it?

You could have The Virus be sentient, and controlling the infected. That could make it a Complete Monster.

That actually reminds me of The Crazies in which a virus brought out a person's most psychopathic nature. Unfortunately, there is no virus in my zombie story.

EDIT: There is a virus but it's merely very contagious, can thrive on necrotic flesh, and simply kills without reanimating the host.

edited 17th Dec '10 11:00:57 PM by SandJosieph

I've cooked up some scenes, some of them showcasing the monstrous things these people will do and others that are simply meant to be scary. Remember, these zombies are dead silent and have a sinister grin upon their faces.

• A boy and his sister are trying to escape from a zombie and hide in a closet. The zombie is unable to get the door open so it nails the door shut to keep either of them from getting out.
• During a party a recently zombified girl limps into a ballroom dragging a bloody ax and starts to hack away at the guests. Her boyfriend tries to restrain her but she "seduces" him into killing himself with her ax.
• A major flood kills thousands which results in the dead dragging survivors and rescuers into the water as they are being pulled from the flood.
• A family is passing by an aquarium where a woman has apparently drowned. As her face comes into view the sinister smile all zombies have can be seen upon her lips.
• During a riot a zombie tears a girl away from her parents and proceeds to beat her to death. After the girl is dead, the zombie tosses her limp body back to her parents. The undead child then reanimates and kills her parents as they start to mourn over her body.
• A gravekeeper zombie knocks people out, dumps them into holes it has dug, and then buries them alive.
• A zombified cameraman cuts open a news reporter's throat and films her choking to death for the world to see.
• An undead gunman kills all it comes across execution style.
• Thousands of bodies drifting down a river open their eyes and smile when a man approaches the edge of the water.
• Dead guards shoot hundreds of unarmed inmates, who then go on to kill the inmates they are locked up with.
• A school bus driver is killed by undead gunmen as she is making her rounds. When she reanimates, she drives the bus (barely) in front of an incoming train.
• A zombie is riddled with thousands of bullets and yet still keeps its horrific grin even after the top of its head is blown off.
• Zombies surround a barricaded home their mere presence slowly drives the family inside insane and they kill each other.
• An amputee getting killed by his own reanimated arm.
• Zombie golfer clubbing people to death with its nine iron.
• Undead foundry workers roasting people alive above a giant vat of molten metal.
• Recently killed soldier killing his squad mates.
• Zombie girl throwing her boyfriend in front of a bus when he proves too persistent in living.
• Thousands of hands rising up from a marsh as a boat drifts on by.

And now for a Bad Ass moment from the human side: The military getting the brilliant idea of using those flail machines used to clear minefields against the undead.

have them willingly become zombies, and have the zobification process involve a morel event horizon (example:in order to become a zombie, they must kill and consume someone who emotionaly depends on them)

that said, this story sounds really interesting, I would really like to see where it goes.

The best way I could see something like this happening is they were controlled by a collective intelligence. Therefore any action a zombie commits could we traced directly back to the intelligence.

edited 13th Jun '15 10:23:53 PM by randomtroper89

Possessed corpses. They sound like daemons to me...

If it is collective, have it caused by a hive-mind-like fungus. Happens to ants all the time.

The problem with zombies as "evil" is that they're usually too unthinking to be considered truly evil. Though I don't usually find them to be sympathetic at all. In a serious zombie story, zombies tend to be (at worst) hilariously ineffectual villains.

What I do, to get around this, is to make the zombies something of an abomination in and of themselves. Their very existence is a slight against goodness. They're a sort of anti-life which only exists to cause suffering and pain.

In my story, zombie-ism comes from an God Of Evil (The gods of the setting are actually Precursor Hypercomputers. Nonetheless, the story treats them as legitimate deities. This particular one happens to be something of an AM-Expy). The pathogen is actually nano-tech, which cuts off a victim's connection between their brain and body (still alive and conscience, mind you) and takes over control for them. The result is a creature that only feels hatred. No thought, no fear (usually), no survival instinct, only unending sadism. Thus, all of them are mindlessly, suicidally evil.

The first Diablo had a bit of lore you might like. :) The manual entry for the zombies went like this:

"Zombies are formed from the corpses of men executed for the most depraved and degenerate crimes against the innocent. They are driven by both the hatred that consumed them in life and the undead hunger for mortal flesh."

How about this: Becoming a zombie causes a reanimated corpse to have an urge the carry out the very worse ideas they had in life (my inspirations being accounts of people suffering from paranoia^note They often describe it as getting ideas they know are complete nonsense, but being unable to dismiss them). As in they think "Hey I could do this...wow, I have a sick mind" and as a zombie they think "I do this...".

For example, the soldier might have thought "Wow! I could shoot everyone in the back!". Their zombie self has no reason not to. The undead child could be following the behaviours from a temper tantrum. The girl at the party could have seen the axe while she was angry and fantasised attacking everyone after convincing her BF to join her.

You can't make zombies, as a group, qualify for CM-status. Speaking as somebody with a long, long involvement in that thread, we'd cut them on the basis that if every member of a group acts the same way, then none of them can qualify for the trope.

You could, however, make an individual zombie qualify, provided you gave he/she/it some personality. In fact, it's already been done. Ob, the zombie king from The Rising is a thoroughly revolting, utterly depraved SOB who deliberately causes the apocalypse in order to summon something even worse than himself (implied to be Satan) into the world.