Line #29 WMG/ShaunOfTheDead


1	[[WMG:The Zombification process accelerates as the disease develops.]]
2	Shaun's stepfather needs hours to turn into a Zombie; Shaun's mother, only an hour or so; Ed, only several minutes.
3	* No, it can be explained by Max Brook's Hypothesis; there are different rates of "burn" which is regulated by where you are bitten. We never see where Phillip is originally bitten, but after he is bitten in the shoulder he only lasts (+ -) as long as Ed whereas Shaun's Mother is bitten in the wrist so she can last a while, but not too long.
4	** Phillip's comment of "I ran it under a cold tap" and his sling would imply that the bite was on his hand or arm.
5	** He can be seen with his arm in a sling.
6	* It's possible that the rate of zombification is different for different people.
7	** Yeah. Maybe it's based on metabolism or blood type.
8	*** Amplification works that way in the ''Literature/{{Newsflesh}}'' universe, with the patient's body size, general health, age, and activity level all influencing how fast the process goes.
9	* In addition to the above, while Barbara and Phillip got relatively mild bites (at least the first time around in Phillip's case), Ed got part of his neck bitten out, and Phillip's condition worsened significantly after his second, more savage biting; both Phillip and Ed changed more quickly because they were bleeding to death, so they died sooner and reanimated quicker.
10	* This could be a simple case of RealityIsUnrealistic. While in some tv shows or movies the doctors will say that X disease has an incubation time of Y time period, and then stick to that through the rest of the story (unless RuleOfDrama requires a shorter or longer time) most real diseases do not adhere to such simple time tables. Three people can be infected with the same cold virus and have not only wildly different times of the virus taking hold (and showing symptoms of said cold) but also recover in many different times. Biology doesn't seem to like time tables.
11
12	[[WMG:Shaun's original plan would have worked]]
13	We take Pete's car, we drive over to Mum's, we go in, take care of Philip (sorry, Philip), then we grab Mum, we go over to Liz's place, hole up, have a cup of tea and wait for this whole thing to blow over.
14	This would have worked- Shaun's Mum wouldn't have been bitten, Liz's place had security doors, was off the ground and had supplies, and the whole thing did blow over in a fairly short time. If only Ed hadn't moaned about it, they would have been OK. And if he'd known that Liz had taken up smoking again, he could have been persuaded. It just goes to show that Shaun's hidden talent is as a zombie survivor.
15	* Additionally, Ed wouldn't have been bitten, and David wouldn't have been ripped apart by the crowd.
16	** And Dianne wouldn't have needed to eat her boyfriend's leg...
17
18	[[WMG:Shaun of the Dead takes place in the Dawn Of The Dead universe]]
19
20	The United Kingdom survived the zombie apocalypse but America and the other countries fell. In the end, the UK is the last country standing.
21	* In addition, ''ComicBook/VForVendetta'' takes place in the same universe. All of the world but the UK has collapsed, and the UK has become a dystopian place ruled by a dictator.
22	** Seconded. Also, the Zombie illness ''is'' the Saint Mary's disease.
23	* Jossed, because at the end there are scenes from a Japanese Zombie-Tv-GameShow. The UK is not the last country standing, the USA is the only country which failed. Everywhere else the people stayed at home and led the government successful handle the crisis, but in the USA every idiot grabbed his gun and went out looting, which was the real reason for the collapse of society.
24	** More likely the USA had absolutely no problem with the zombies. Thanks, second amendment!
25	*** True, the USA survives thanks to their guns. That being said, I do feel sorry for our friends in the North in the SOTD Universe.
26
27	[[WMG:Shaun is immune to the zombie virus.]]
28
29	This is just a possibility, but considering he had his mouth wide open while inflicting a can of cricket-bat whoop-ass on Mary (and in the immediate-following scene is shown with splatters of [[RunningGag red]] on his torso and the lower part of his face), it's not too far of a stretch to imagine a drop or two of infected blood could have flown in his mouth. Go and watch the movie again with this concept in mind.
30	* Healthy human saliva defeats the virus! Oh if only more people had just licked the zombie bites!
31	** Or everyone has an immune system and can counteract minor contact with the virus. If there was even a virus. It's never explained.
32	* Or it doesn't infect like that. Perhaps the virus only infects once it is in the blood. Lucky Shaun didn't have a canker-sore.
33
34	[[WMG:Running a Zombie bite under a cold tap cures the infectee.]]
35	Phillip was bitten long before Shaun and Ed got to his house. He shows no noticeable difference from his normal(Admittedly, already zombie-like) disposition, and his hand isn't bleeding the way the other zombie bites are. He doesn't even seem phased until he gets bitten a second time. Clearly, this whole outbreak could have been averted if more infected ran their injuries under a cold tap.
36	* That's actually perfectly reasonable. It's warm weather in the northern hemisphere when ''Shaun of the Dead'' takes place, and as far as I can recall, nobody else immediately iced their wounds. It's certainly reasonable that whatever causes zombification (a protozoan? A slime mould that breeds primarily in liquids that contain similar enzymes to those in saliva? A curse designed by the original inhabitants of Britain to combat the Romans, who would be [[UsefulNotes/WorldWarII too weak to survive the winter if they attempted to follow the northerly rearward advancement of their target populace]] but needed to be weakened and confused?) dies when it reaches temperatures of less than, say, twenty degrees Celsius. Phillip running near-freezing water over the bite before the cause got too far from the surface killed some and weakened any possible survivors enough that his immune system could destroy them.
37	* This also can help to explain why the Zed infection did not spread as quickly as it did. More than a few people probably followed "motherly advice" and ran cold water over the wounds of zed infected bites or scratches to cleanse the area. So those that did so, found if not a cure, at least a way to stop and/or slow the infection and allowed scientists to come up with something more permanent. At least if they did... seems the zed are still around in the world after the apocalypse occurred.
38	* Might explain why the pandemic is under control in less than a year.
39	* This also explains why Pete turned, he turned in the middle of having a ''hot shower'' he thought he was coming down with a cold, which you take a hot bath or shower to fight off, unfortunately, the hot water just sped up blood flow and circulated the virus even faster, remember the night before (4AM specifically) he only complained of a headache, but apparently turned at some point a few hours later.
40
41	[[WMG:This is the same universe as VideoGame/Left4Dead]]
42	And it turns out that Britain is just plain better at containing the infection than America.
43	* Well if American Infected moved as slowly as British Infected, then we wouldn't have had such a problem. By the way, how did you guys do that? Do you think it was the coffee/tea difference? Both have caffeine, but I think coffee has a bit more.
44	** Left 4 Dead's zombies are {{Technically Living Zombie}}s, so they have the better cognitive ability and don't rot or decay. It's heavily implied that Shaun of the Dead's zombies are actually proper, real dead men walking, so they're brain dead and don't have particularly good muscle strength. Ta-da.
45	** Green Flu in America was a mutated version of the plague in the UK. While the British plague focused on killing the person's cognitive functions while boosting resistance with a little to no incubation time, Green Flu focused on incubation and swapping out some of the energy dealt by the brain and using it for stamina and further mutation. Thus, Britain has a disease that kills lots in its first incarnation but is easily dealt with otherwise, and America has an insidious disease that can take weeks to make you into an undead if you are unlucky and has mutated infected that can think. ''Shaun of the Dead'' would be very different if both diseases were the exact same.
46	** As for coffee and tea, despite what second-rate sitcoms might imply, Britians do not live on tea alone and coffee is just as popular in Britain as it is in the states (generally speaking it's drunk less often throughout the day, but made much stronger).
47
48	[[WMG:No matter how many zombies there are, they can't kill something that moves faster than a jog.]]
49	* Shaun rushes, or more of jogs, through a crowd of zombies outside the Winchester, comes back without even a bite. David? Simply flails and gets torn to bloody shreds. Literally. Dianne? Does pretty much the same as Shaun, and she comes out okay. Somehow.
50	** There is a literal example of a jogger doing that in the movie. In Shaun's "normal day" sequence, the jogger is jogging as normal; in the "first morning of the apocalypse" sequence, the same jogger passes Shaun as he runs away from the zombies. He is the only living person in that sequence, excluding Shaun.
51	* Maybe their zombie brains can only perceive slow-moving things.
52
53	[[WMG:Ed isn't real.]]
54	* He's just [[SplitPersonality a manifestation of Shaun's more immature alter ego,]] as, throughout the film, he barely does a thing within the company of any of the other characters besides Shaun. And even then, he mostly just spends his time coming up with increasingly more immature and self-gratifying decisions that wind up putting everyone in more danger, ranging from [[UnreliableNarrator finding a noisy building to hide in, to "looking after" Barbara and Philip while taking Philip's Jaguar for a spin.]] At the end however, by the time Ed is "gored and infected" it signifies that Shaun has been through enough that he's grown out of the ego that held him back for so long, and by the end, he is a much more responsible man with a more stable relationship with Liz, even keeping his game console and "Ed" in the shed for old times sake.
55	** By extension, this could also mean Pete isn't real, either; Pete is the manifestation of both Shaun's desire to mature, get a better job, and move beyond his current rut, albeit at the cost of having a more abrasive and aggressive personality. The Ed vs. Pete conflict is the manifestation of the two conflicting directions Shaun's life can take; at the Winchester, when Shaun tells Pete to leave Ed alone before shooting Pete, that shows that Shaun has taken a third option as we see in the epilogue: the "improved" Shaun, living in a neatened-up house with Liz, takes time out to visit Ed i.e. he grows up but still has fun.
56
57	[[WMG:Philip wasn't actually infected.]]
58	At least, not until he was attacked next to the car. He seems perfectly normal up until the second bite, and reanimates fairly quickly, just like Barbara and Ed do later. Maybe he was just attacked by some druggie or crazy person and would have been fine if it wasn't for the zombies outside.
59
60	[[WMG:Shaun of the Dead takes place in the same universe as zombie land]]
61	Going by an above WMG that explains America was the only place that collapsed, let's look at zombie land it's basically become survival of the fittest.
62
63	[[WMG:SOTD takes place in the Walking Dead universe, and shows how a government and population would actually cope.]]
64	They manage to save the day and restore everything, using the zombies as manual labour. 'Keep Calm and Carry On' indeed.
65
66	[[WMG:[[Series/{{Spaced}} Tyres]] wasn't a zombie.]]
67	[[AttentionDeficitOohShiny We all know that he tends to regard]] [[MundaneMadeAwesome random noises as music]]. [[{{Cloudcuckoolander}} He just thought he was at a rave outside the Winchester]]. The zombies ignore the heroes as they imitate the zombies, so why not Tyres as well? Additionally, Tyres is the only one who notices Shaun and co. as we see him glance over at them, whereas the zombies just stare around blankly.
68
69	[[WMG:The tabloids are not reporting on the ZombieApocalypse]]
70	"NEW SUPER-FLU SCARES PUBLIC", "HAVOC", "MUTILATED REMAINS", "GM CROPS TO BLAME", "GM CROPS BLAMED" are not related to the incoming zombie apocalypse at all. They are just the tabloids being tabloids.
71
72	[[WMG:The zombies' intelligence will increase further.]]
73
74	[[WMG:Shaun and his AU counterparts are all their universes version of TheChosenOne.]]
75
76	Shaun, Nicolas and Gary are all the same person, but each a different version in an AU, they are being "Tested" by something to combat a greater threat by being put in an "impossible situation" by the being testing them, their survival isn't just because of luck, it's BecauseDestinySaysSo.
77
78	[[WMG:The zombies can learn to function like normal humans again.]]
79	In the television show, a woman still considers herself as married to her zombified husband hinting perhaps that he still has some of his original personality left. After being zombified, Ed is still able to play video games and we can see him responding to Shaun. If the zombies get an alternative food source and some assistance, they can probably be rehabilitated. Of course they won't ever be the same as they used to, but there is still hope.

Context WMG / ShaunOfTheDead