Do people ever actually hide zombie bites?

I was enjoying the smooth styles of "Weird Al" Yankovic's new album, and a line caught my attention: "If I get bit by a zombie / Probably not telling you."

That's from "Tacky," his parody of Pharrell's "Happy," which details all manner of gauche things. The remark about zombies comes at the very end, and the way he tosses it out indicates an expectation that this is a familiar grief in popular culture. And it sort of is; I've heard it mentioned at least a few times. But the thing is, I've never actually seen it come up in pop culture, and I think it's a Dead Unicorn Trope.

In zombie stories, it's almost always the case that getting bit by a zombie means you will become one. Someone who's been bit needs to be destroyed before they can die and reanimate, and it would seem like the standard act of a coward to be bitten, hide it, and then die and regenerate in the middle of an unsuspecting group of the living.

I've never seen that happen, and in fact I've only seen it come CLOSE to happening a few times. I've seen all of George Romero's zombie movies except for "Survival Of The Dead" and the remake of "Night," Zack Snyder's remake of "Dawn," read the first three compilation volumes of "The Walking Dead," seen the second and fourth Resident Evil movies, read Mira Grant's Newsflesh trilogy, and seen and read a number of less culturally significant works centered on zombies.

This. Never. Happens. At least, not in my expansive (but hardly complete) studies. Both of the "close" examples I can think of come from the remake of "Dawn of the Dead." One guy gets bitten near the very end in a battle with the film's fast zombies, and doesn't mention it for a few minutes. This is less hiding and more a side effect of dealing with more pressing problems.

The closet example I can think of comes earlier in the movie, when another character's wife gets a nick. Because the bite is so small, she takes most of the film's runtime to convert, and since she's extremely pregnant, she spends that time in a makeshift maternity ward. She's bitten early enough in the movie that the characters don't know about zombie bites, and when they do figure it out, it's her husband, not her, who hides the bite.

TV Tropes doesn't actually have a trope page for this, but I just wanted to ask everyone if it's something they've ever seen. I put this here rather than YKTTW because, as I've said, I don't think this is something that's actually showing up in fiction.

The trope does exist, and it's called Zombie Infectee. Rather, that's the general trope, which includes among its variations cases when someone is infected but doesn't realize it and when someone knows they're infected but hides it because they don't want to be killed by their companions — or force someone they love to kill them.

The latter often intersects with Secret Stab Wound.

edited 19th Jul '14 6:21:59 PM by Fighteer

Yeah, there's a bunch of "hiding it" examples on Zombie Infectee. Off the top of my head, I can recall it happening in The Last Of Us, World War Z (the novel, haven't seen the movie), the Resident Evil movies, and Shaun Of The Dead.

edited 19th Jul '14 8:35:57 PM by NativeJovian

I feel like the examples from Shawn of the Dead (which I have seen; that was a pretty egregious oversight on my part when I was listing stuff) don't really count. Pete tells Shawn because he doesn't understand the significance and Ed is similarly candid. Shawn's mom hides the bite but (as the trope page explains) only because she "didn't want to be a bother." That seems like poking fun at the trope itself, which comes back around to the idea of this being a Dead Unicorn Trope.

You're probably right about World War Z; I haven't read the book in a few years. I did just see the movie (which, as you may know, is completely different) and there are no examples there. This is largely because, in the movie, conversion happens over a period of seconds.

Come to think of it, I think there might be a correlation between the speed of infection and the speed of the zombies. In 28 Days Later, the not-actually-zombies move very fast and convert in under ten seconds. In World War Z (the movie) protagonist Ben Affleck actually times the period out to 12 seconds. The remake of Dawn of the Dead might be an outlier; the speed of conversion is shown to be proportionate to the severity of the bite.

Isn't the genre as a whole rife with examples that don't really happen outside parodies of it? I mean, the genre is easily ridiculed, which is part of the charm, so I wouldn't be surprised if things people claim happen all the time actually don't.

That said, I've seen this particular trope here and there.