Not a Zombie

"What? I could have sworn that was a tacky pirate zombie costume!"

This is Real Life. Everyone knows zombies are make-believe creatures, they're only "real" in the movies.^note For now. 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 — well, only exists "in fiction". Still, you'd think most people have the presence of mind to back away from a smelly, shambling corpse of a man who is missing limbs and moaning for braaaains!...

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

1. Someone is walking through the deserted area, when they see a moaning, pale-looking body lying face down on the ground. 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 (well, hopefully) the first zombie that the character encounters, so they tend to survive.
2. 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, they 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". Bear in mind that even if they do go for the "lethal force" option, they're extremely unlikely to go for the necessary head shot — aiming for the center of mass stops most humans just as well, and the risk of missing (potentially hitting a bystander) is greatly reduced. A shot to the center of mass will generally not stop a zombie, unless the officer in mind plans on using extreme cases of overkill and restocking on ammo.
   
   This is further complicated by the existence in real life of living people who dress up as and pretend to be zombies, often in sizable hordes. Expect this to start coming into play in fiction now.

Rule of Perception is strongly tied to the trope, since the horrific stench you would expect a reanimated corpse to give off almost never comes into play, even in situations where the smell should by all rights be quite overpowering.

This is often easily survivable with Slow Zombies, as you've got a minute or two to realize something's up. Fast Zombies are not so forgiving, and probably only main characters will get away with this.

Generally, any character who thinks a zombie is Not a Zombie is also prone to having Zombie Infectee behavior or becoming one. After all, 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 Mistaken for Undead, Most Definitely Not a Villain and Paper-Thin Disguise. Not to be confused with Not Using the "Z" Word, where everyone acknowledges that the zombies are undead, they just don't want to use the usual term for them; and Totally Not a Werewolf, where a non-human of one type (let's say a Jiang Shi) gets mistaken for another similar one (a zombie) rather than for a living human.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• In One Piece, during Luffy's first encounter with a zombie in the Thriller Bark Arc, he identifies it as 'an old man with a big wound', much to the annoyance of everyone around him, who had realized that it was a zombie right off. This is, of course, immediately following a scene where he shoves the zombie back into its grave. This is flipped in the next scene, where the group encounters what they think is another zombie; turns out this one really is just an old man with a big wound.

Comic Books

• In the Chilean comic Zombies en la Moneda, a group of “frikis” attends a comic convention, where numerous people are cosplaying as zombies. They point out how some of the zombies are attacking each other, and even laugh at how bad their costumes are, as well as the fact that the "zombies" are fast. Of course, the zombies are real.
  Zombies never run!
• The Walking Dead: Justified, as according to Word of God, Night of the Living Dead (1968) was never made in this setting, so the pop culture idea of zombies as cannibalistic undead created through a virus never existed. To the survivors of this setting, a "zombie" would either be an African myth, or an obscure movie monster, such as the ones seen in White Zombie; i.e undead slaves created through magic.

Films — Animation

• Resident Evil: Degeneration has both examples. Angela 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. Before her stint at the "inefficient force" approach, 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. Greg doesn't bother with the "warn the zombies not to approach before shooting them with nonlethal force" bit, blasting them square in mid-torso with his machine gun without the slightest hesitation, but ignores Leon's instructions to aim for the head, so all he succeeds in doing is wasting ammunition. Degeneration also plays with the trope by prefacing it with an instance where the aggressor is just a man in a zombie mask. This does give the victim a small bit of credit when it turns out that the next one is the real deal.
• In Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island, Fred at first assumes that the zombies are just people in costumes and rattles off potential suspects as he tries to pull off a captured zombie's "mask". In his defense, this was the case for every one of the dozens of other supernatural creatures he and the other Scooby-Doo characters have encountered over the years, so it was a reasonable assumption. However, once the zombie's head comes off in his hands, he insists that it must be animatronic and Velma and Daphne tell him he's in denial.

Films — Live-Action

• Happens near the beginning of 28 Days Later, when Jim wanders around an eerily deserted London, then enters a church and finds a priest who is... a bit ill. Our hero doesn't recognize this at first, but then he has been in a coma since before the sudden outbreak. It helps that these aren't the slow rotting corpses of traditional zombie movies, but instead living, breathing, fast humans whose behavior has been modified by a literal Hate Plague.
• Living Dead Series
  • The first zombie we see in Night of the Living Dead (1968) is supposed to look like just some random person wandering around the cemetery, until he attacks the girl. Doesn't help that in one colorized version, he's green. In the remake, the first zombie does look like a walking corpse but he appears out of the blue and no one has time to react. The second one however, does appear to be a fairly normal man in a swanky outfit... Until he starts to skulk around and ends up revealing a huge autopsy scar on his chest.
  • In the original Dawn of the Dead (1978), a woman encounters her dead husband while a SWAT raid is taking place. Believing he's still the man she'd fallen in love with, she rushes into his arms... and gets a healthy chunk bitten out of her neck and shoulder by the briefly confused zombie.
  • The Dawn of the Dead (2004) remake features this in the prologue. A zombified little girl attacks the husband of the main woman protagonist; said little girl is missing a good chunk of her upper and lower lips, which prompts the husband to yell out to his wife to call for an ambulance. Unfortunately, as the husband does so, he decides to get up in the little girl's face to properly examine her wounds. Three guesses what happens next.
• Resident Evil Film Series:
  • Resident Evil (2002):
    • There's an entire sequence where the Umbrella soldiers confront a horde of zombies, who they think are just survivors gone crazy; while most of the zombies look perfectly normal outside the shambling, there are a few with clearly broken bones and blatantly gaping wounds. One of the soldiers encounters a single zombie beforehand and gives several warnings before firing.
      Soldier: Stay down. I'm warning you, stay down! Come any closer, and I'll fire. I mean it! [shoots the zombie 5 times]
    • There's a scene where a 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.
  • Resident Evil: Apocalypse takes it to its logical extreme. When the city itself finally gets its first wave of zombies, the cops start arresting them getting bitten repeatedly in the process!
• 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).
  • And Pete just thought he was being mugged by crackheads.
  • Finally they encounter a female zombie in their garden, who they at first think is drunk. They realize what's going on when she gets impaled on a pipe and gets back up.
  • 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.
  • Inverted when the audience is treated to a shambling, moaning creature...Shaun is Not a Morning Person.
  • After they've caught on, Shaun ends up fleeing the horde in a car and ends running over a pedestrian. He meekly reverses gear and waits to see if the crippled-looking guy is alright. He breathes a sigh of relief when he realises that it was just another zombie.
    Oh, thank God for that.
• 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.
• Subverted in Wasting Away were the protagonists are not aware that they are zombies, likely because they still perceive themselves as normal human beings with only the 'sober' uninfected seeing their true undead nature.
• Averted in Plan 9 from Outer Space. Characters can somehow identify the zombies immediately, even though they don't look all that zombie-ish.
• Also averted in The Return of the Living Dead, albeit more justifiably. The first group to encounter a zombie knew about the Trioxin chemical that reanimates them, and the first corpse they encountered was one they already knew was dead. The second group encounters a zombie so horrifically rotted, and screaming for brains, that there isn't much question.
• 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 monster we're talking about here — a violently twitching, shambling monstrosity with a straitjacket of skin and a giant vertical slit for a mouth.
• Most of the characters in Quarantine (2008) do this. What makes it mind-boggling is that they keep doing it throughout the movie, even after being flat-out told what's happening by a CDC man.
• 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).
• The Crazies (2010) opens with David killing a guy he thinks is drunk, but is surprised to find out he had a blood-alcohol content of zero.

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. The word "zombie" is also extremely rarely used, even once it's clear that's what they're up against. Slang terms like "Zack" or "Zed Head" are used, and occasionally "the living dead", but never "zombie".
• This was actually a major plot point in Obsidian Butterfly, the last Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter novel: the apparently comatose skinning victims in the hospital were actually all inert zombies. Although in this case, it wasn't because people didn't believe in zombies, it was just that these zombies had been so well made that they still had all their vital signs.
• Pride and Prejudice and Zombies has this happen to Charlotte. Elizabeth is the only one who notices this, and that's only because she already knew. This is despite several fairly revolting scenes such as the dinner at Rosings, where Charlotte eats her own bloody pus.
• In Galaxy of Fear: City of the Dead, Zak's new friend Kairn is killed and then quickly made into a zombie. Zak has been dreaming of and was menaced by some decayed specimens, and thinks Kairn is different — and he is, he recognizes Zak, speaks to him, doesn't stagger, and smiles. Even though his friend is slowed and dulled, twitches at intervals, is sallow-skinned and unhealthy looking, and oh yes admits to Zak that he is dead, Zak doesn't really believe him and is surprised when Kairn leads him into a trap.
• Justified in the second Resident Evil novelization when Leon encounters zombies for the first time. He realizes quite quickly that they are zombies, but continues to aim his weapon and order them to freeze because the realization that he's caught in a Zombie Apocalypse scenario is sending him into a panic. Unlike what usually happens in visual media like games and movies, Leon does notice the horrible smell given off by zombies before he actually sees any, which helps to clue him in that something is rotten in the city of Raccoon.
• In the second and third books of the Old Kingdom series, Nicholas Sayre believes that all the dead and reanimated people a necromancer helped him find to work on his science experiment are merely suffering from some sort of leprosy.
• The Troop: Tim briefly mistakes Patient Zero for a waterlogged zombie when first seeing him, but shakes himself out of it. He's proven right. While the infection has a lot of zombie-like qualities (Horror Hunger, for instance), it's actually caused by a genetically modified tapeworm.

Live-Action TV

• In the Community episode "Epidemiology", when military "taco meat" turns party guests into zombies en masse, this trope is played straight, as characters assume the zombies to be simply people on some kind of drug — until Troy averts it with "Holy crap, Leonard's a zombie!". The Dean threatens Troy with pepper spray later, thinking he is a zombie.
• In Dead Set, 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.
• Lampshaded humorously on Supernatural in the episode "Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid", in which part of a small-town cemetery (namely the most recent) are brought back from the dead as seemingly normal humans. Naturally, however, the brothers are suspicious and while visiting one of the first to pop back up, Sam (alone), finds the said woman alone in the house, laying on a bed, pasty green, and whispering, motioning for him to come closer. Sam, genre savvy, sighs and moves slightly closer. She continues to motion for him to come closer and he asks sarcastically if she can just "tell him from over there." Well, she continues to motion for him to come closer and he gets right up next to her, and sure enough, she wants him to put his ear by her mouth, whispering hoarsely. He sighs and says aloud "I know I am going to regret this," and leans in, and shizzam! She goes full on apeshit zombie on him and tries to eat him. However, he was expecting all this and shoots her in the head. Oh, and during the struggle he lands next to the badly mutilated corpse of her husband.
• The Walking Dead (2010): In the intro for the pilot episode, while looking beneath a car Rick sees a little girl's feet shuffling along. However, once he sees her fully after standing up and she turns to his voice, he realizes she's a zombie, and promptly blows her head off.
• Castle did a zombie episode. Turns out, the murder was not committed by a zombie, but by a member of NY's zombie subculture, which Castle was upset to learn existed and he didn't even know about it!
• In Death Valley, following this trope is briefly standard police protocol as part of an effort to make sure only real zombies and Zombie Infectees are put down by the police. Protocol is changed after Deputy Chief Ribbings, the man who made the policy, becomes infected while following it.
  • A downplayed example is used in the same episode, when they see a person nodding their head, and refusing to listen to commands, in an area with a reported zombie attack. Just headphones.
• In The Bite, a pair of men host an internet show where they watch video shot in people's homes (this is during the COVID-19 Pandemic) and judge the room behind them. They do a follow-up on one man who's become a zombie in the meantime. They fail to notice this, but they do comment that he's added some color to his rather bland room, a spray of blood spatter. Later, one of them becomes a zombie himself and the other again fails to notice...with fatal results.

Video Games

• Dead Island 2: After the rest of the able-bodies survivors flee the crash site, the Slayers see what they believe to be another survivor standing on the other side of the clearing and go over to ask them for help with the injured survivors. They don't recognize that the person is actually a zombie until it's turned around and grabbed them.
• Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare plays the "law enforcement" part straight except, of course, John Marston isn't a lawman. John first calls the zombie on its unruly behavior before incapacitating it with a tap on the head. He then grabs his gun and starts shouting commands to stop. When gameplay resumes the objective is to blow the thing's head off. Justified to a terrifying level in that no one at the time the game is set in would have even a vague concept of what a Romero style zombie is.
• Resident Evil
  • Resident Evil has played the second type throughout the series. However it's averted in the first game when the Player Character realizes that the zombie isn't human (the fact it's encountered killing and eating a former colleague helps, of course).
  • Resident Evil 2 reproduces both examples word for word, with Claire (the civilian, Type 1) and Leon (the cop, Type 2) meeting their first zombies in the opening cutscenes.
  • It's a big subversion in Resident Evil 4 when Leon (who knows all about zombie outbreaks) takes down his first enemy and realizes, despite not appearing or acting like a normal human, "It's not a zombie!" though this may have also been done to lampshade to (or even warn the players who aren't aware of the style change) that there are no Zombies present this time around
  • Resident Evil 5: Chris Redfield, you IDIOT. Sheva presumably has an excuse, but Chris does the whole type-1 thing (possibly excused by the fact that hosts of Las Plagas look and behave nothing like a traditional zombie, and Chris had never dealt with them face-to-face prior to this).
• Something like this happens when the player first runs into a Despoiled in Wolfenstein (2009). BJ blows up the Nazis' Black Sun machine, causing it to release a shockwave that vaporizes 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.
• If you didn't know there were Zombies in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, then the first time some loner comes stumbling towards you aimlessly, you might just pass it off as some random drunk Stalker. It doesn't help they can still fire their weapons. Plus, if you were unaware of their presence in the game, you'll be very, very surprised when you run into a random Stalker that can absorb half a magazine to the torso without flinching. Sure, A-Team Firing is in effect, but it's still unnerving when an enemy you've been able to knock off like popcorn suddenly refuses to go down and you have no idea why.
• Played for laughs in Dead Rising 2 in which one survivor you have to rescue is a little old lady, who thinks the zombies surrounding her are mall employees, and complains to Chuck that "I am trying to find a present for my granddaughter and these people are not being very helpful, they completely ignore me!" played even further is that, once you tell her to come to the safehouse she very very slowly waddles forward on her walker, forcing Chuck to pick her up and carry her himself.

Webcomics

• 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.
• Subverted during the "Zombie Ninjas" storyline in The Adventures of Dr. McNinja: when the town has just gotten over a zombie outbreak, the Doc casually stabs an old man in the face after assuming him to be a zombie, only for the old man's granddaughter to run up and cry about how the doctor killed her grandfather. Double-subverted with the revelation that he was a zombie after all. He had died of natural causes shortly before the zombies rose from their graves, and the incident leads the Doc to realize the zombies aren't reanimating to seek revenge as he previously suspected.
• Played with (and Played for Laughs) in Hanna Is Not a Boy's Name. While most folks tend to pick up, at the very least, that there's something off about Zombie (the greenish-grey skin and stitches are probably a good tip-off), a trenchcoat and fedora appear to be all he needs to move around freely, without suspicion. Since Zombie has no desire to eat people though, nobody really suffers from overlooking him.

Web Original

• The second variation is played very straight in the Gamebook-esque Dead Ends, near the beginning.

Web Videos

• Left POOR Dead: They come across a zombie they believe is a polish builder.

Western Animation

• South Park: A classic from the show's first Halloween Episode:
  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.
• The Simpsons: "Treehouse of Horror III" gave us Matt Groening's favorite line of the entire series:
  Bart: Dad, you killed the zombie Flanders!
  Homer: He was a zombie?
• In Gravity Falls, despite his slow gait, his slurred speech, his odd skin color, the "jam" on his face, and other details, when Dipper has evidence that zombies may exist in Gravity Falls, Mabel writes off the possibility of "Normal Man"- er, Norman being a zombie. She's right. He's a bunch of gnomes standing on each other's shoulders in a bad costume. Later, we DO get real ones. Thanks Dipper!

Real Life

• In a promo event for The Walking Dead, a walker invaded a movie theatre. No-one left their seats.
• Humorously, during the filming of Resident Evil: Retribution, several extras in zombie makeup were injured by a moving platform used in the set. Paramedics had a little more trouble than usual diagnosing their actual injuries, owing to the convincing zombie makeup. It would be Playing with a Trope, except Real Life has no authorial intent that way.

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