Zombies shouldn’t growl or snarl, they should babble a mixture of incomplete word sounds and whole words or sentence fragments. Every zombie should sound almost but not quite like it’s trying to tell you something.
this may not be what you’re saying, but what I’m hearing is that zombies should make everyone feel like they’ve developed sudden onset audio processing disorder.
Like if you could just hear it more clearly, you’d understand what they’re saying, but in reality it’s nonsense and there’s nothing to understand.
And damn if it doesn’t convince so many folks that their loved ones are still in there, they just need to keep them locked up safely in the barn until someone finds the cure, then everything can go back to the way they were.
THIS is exactly what this particular zombie trope is missing. Like we all understand, conceptually, that this still looks like someone they love, but it would be 1000 times more effective if it still somewhat behaved like someone they love.
oooh muscle memory. i’m not into zombie media enough to tell if this has been done or not but. zombies that will automatically reach into their pocket for their phone when they hear a ring, even if it’s dead, broken or lost. zombies that reach up to play with their hair or necklace, the same way your loved one did. zombies that bite their nails. a zombie rolling up its sleeves with perfect practice while looking at you with the utterly blank eyes of a dead animal
This is why I really love The Return of the Living Dead because they introduced not only the whole “zombies eat brains” thing, but they talked. They communicated that they were in pain, and if they ate brains, it would make the pain go away momentarily. It’s what made them so much more interesting and horrifying to me because there was no clean-cut way to kill them, and they’re suffering the whole time, allowing you to actually see them as people again. Also, they were smart!! They could figure out how to solve puzzles! An unstoppable force that you can not defeat.
I just think everyone should know that the only thing I was thinking about when I wrote this post originally is how I don’t understand what my cat is trying to tell me when he says “meow.”
There are a lot of notes here and it’s not my fault, I was looking at my cat and thinking about how he probably doesn’t think like directly in sentences because he’s a cat so his brain is probably more like [thing / concept-feeling] -> (noise type) insofar as his body has the ability to make a sound associated with something that his brain has the capacity to formulate, so I can’t really understand my cat per se, but I wish I knew what exactly his concept-feeling sounds were in more detail other than when he’s begging for food.
