It’s just fiction, but you’d be amazed how much damage human teeth can do.
You won’t be biting through bone (and idgaf what myth someone’s heard about fingers and carrots and only stopping because your brain won’t let you go hard enough), you won’t even get through a joint in one bite.
But! We have enough bite force and sharpness to get into muscle and pull out pieces. Helps if you gnaw and use head movement to help, but we can even manage it with thicker skin than humans have. You’d be amazed what a drunk country boy will do to a dead animal if they have access to them before they’re processed and there’s a bet going. Not me, but I’ve seen someone go through cow hide and into meat. Wasn’t easy, or fast, but it got done.
The real issue is the extent of decay involved. While most of the support for teeth isn’t from anything fleshy, the process of decomp does loosen them slightly. It’s pretty damn slightly though. The bigger issue is bite strength.
See, the kind of zombie matters, but the ones that look rotten would have weakened response from the muscles of the jaw and face, assuming actual decomp takes place. So, the kind you see on the walking dead and its spinoffs would eventually become ineffective, no matter how secure the teeth are in the jaw.
That being said, there’s also examples in fiction, including the walking dead, of zombies lacking any muscles that would allow movement of a given body part, but still moving. There’s scenes in the walking dead of zombies where you can see bone where muscle is supposed to be, moving arms in a way that would require the missing muscles. That isn’t unique to TWD, but it’s usually the easiest example to look up for the curious.
There’s also non rotting zombies, more like the resident evil viral zombies. They may be mangled and/or damaged, but they’re mostly intact, so biting would be perfectly possible in theory (individual zombies might have damage in the jaws that would make it impossible if real).
I can go on a lot more about how zombie fiction functions on a realistic level (or doesn’t), but the generic attention span online has likely already been reached.
NO sarcasm in this but please go further this is probably going to be the most interesting thing today as my last day of work.
Don’t do it don! We still are recovering from covid. Whatever zombie virus you are planning to release, just think about it okay?
DON’T RELEASE IT!
Don’t know if you thinking of me commiting suicide or something but my contract is up. And still haven’t picked a place to go yet. I just counted and have over 100 offers.
Okay, everyone please remember that this is by request. This may take multiple comments, and it might take me a day or two to finish up, assuming I don’t have stuff get in the way.
So, zombies.
They aren’t actually entirely fiction. Back in the era of slavery in the “new world”, multiple religions and practices ran into each other. Enslaved peoples from multiple African regions, and the indigenous peoples of the Americas and islands, were forced to convert to christianity. Those indigenous peoples and the African peoples didn’t exactly stop believing what they believed, but they applied camouflage to those beliefs of christian mythology.
Thus arose the various syncretic religions often referred to as “voodoo”, though there are at least three major branches of the general heading.
One of the practices of some of those religions is what we might call magic. Now, whether one believes that ritual and spells and such can do anything, those practices exist, it is a factual thing.
One of the many “spells” is turning someone into a zombie. There are people today that are “zombies”. That they have never been dead, and the only thing that changed was maybe a bit of brain damage from the use of toxic and psychoactive substances on them is irrelevant to this. They believe they’re zombies and so do other people. That’s the word for people in that situation, and all of the other versions take their name from that.
From there, you go to white folks discovering zombies. The first zombies in movies go back to the thirties. And that’s really when the journey of the zombie starts in the kind of terms we’re talking about for this. There are much older “undead”, in pretty much every culture, but the Haitian origins of the word zombi are the root of all modern zombie fiction, if not always intentionally.
But the original movies were pretty much just an exaggerated version of the real world zombies. Now, those were based on books like “the magic island”, but it wasn’t until film took up the idea that things would diverge significantly.
From there, it wasn’t until George Romero that we had the first major change to the overall fictional zombie. Night of the living dead exploded zombies into broad pop culture. This was in part due to how the movie was released, imo, but that’s too tangential to cover.
This is where we get to the
brainsmeat of the subject.Post Romero, zombies caught the imagination of the world. The idea spread like a zombie virus until each new writer of a script or book added their own imagination to the mix. Now, there’s so many versions of zombies that you might well not be able to call some of them zombies at all, if compared to the origins.
However, there are still some general categories of zombie.
Magical, where the zombie is created by some variety of spell, ritual, deific intervention, or otherwise supernatural cause. You’ll run into this mostly in books rather than movie.
There’s pathogenic zombies where a virus, fungus, bacteria, prion, or an imaginary microbial life form causes the zombie to rise, or the human to turn.
There’s “chemical” zombies, where some (usually unnamed and mysterious) substance causes the event. This includes radiation zombies.
And there’s the parasitic/symbiotic zombies. This is when a complex and possibly intelligent life form takes over the dead or living body. Might be alien, might be an insect or something similar.
There’s arguments to be made for more types than that, or that some should be combined, but this is my essay lol.
There are, however, two main sub divisions of each of those: slow and fast. You’ve got the shambling zombies and the fast movers. Some of the fast zombies are faster than a living human could be.
There’s also the transmitted vs single event subdivision, where the ability of zombies to make me zombies is or isn’t present, but you really don’t run into zombie movies or tv shows where they can’t transmit the “infection” in one way or another. The genre of zombie fiction relies on the idea of a zombie apocalypse much heavier than it did in the past, though, so I don’t consider it a main subdivision the way speed is. If you include books, it becomes a bigger factor, but zombie books don’t have the cultural weight as movies and serial shows currently.
Okay, so we’ve got that down, and I still haven’t addressed the realism of those things on a physical level. I’m going to cover that in a second comment as a response to this one. Again, folks, please remember that this is something Don asked for, and is in response to that.
I have never been happier to ask someone to expand on a comment…no sarcasm. Quick question how do you know so much about zombies? And also ever thought about writing a movie because just this comment alone I would watch the shit out of.
I’m a movie geek, and love zombie movies. Same with books, and d&d. So I’ve always been fascinated with the genre. Plus, I’m insatiably curious about things like voodoo and the belief in magic that humans have, so when I discovered that the zombie fiction had a basis in reality, I kinda went crazy reading everything I could about it.
I actually have written books. The fantasy series that I never finished had a lot of necromancy and the undead. The series I’m currently working on is about a necromancer lol. But I’m pretty mid-tier as a writer, so nothing ever sold well. I’ve got some fans, but we’re talking maybe a few dozen people lol. With that level of popularity, nobody would make a movie I scripted.
Most of my fans are accidental tbh. My old fantasy books for the trilogy I never finished got out via soulseek, and some of the people pulling an entire library actually read an unknown author, and some of those liked it enough to email me to ask about the third.
Seriously, even after the rewrite of those two books, they’re kinda mid. Great ideas, meh execution. My more recent stuff is better, but still not the kind of thing that can break through the sheer numbers of people cranking out fiction these days.
Yea well all authors had written books that no one believed in. And now the publishers kick them selves for not buying it or not promoting it. Keep that faith mate I am sure that at sometime you will be at the top of the NYT bestsellers.
Then there are the magic zombies, like from World of Warcraft, or Game of Thrones, and they’re powered by magic, so they can completely rot away and still walk around. I wonder, in WoW, do the undead eventually rot away and become the skeletons that we fight in various zones?
I’m going to address my take on that, since Don asked for more
Ever seen a skeleton? Where the teeth rotten away?
If a scull is missing teeth they were likely gone before death already.
Yes I have…if you want to know but don’t know how they rise from a grave and still have perfectly white teeth…as seen on The Walking Dead and some movies.
I don’t know where you stuck here, mate.
Teeth don’t rot. Thats your answer. Teeth stay the same for a long, long time.
Yea but either they are pearly white or they are very sharp.
I guess you answer then is that SCIENCE FICTION ≠ SCIENCE
Zombies are not real and so are their extra white, sharp teeth. I can’t explain to you how there are dead people walking around either, because they don’t do that irl.
Don dickle you listen here and you listen good mister.
The teeth stay in the head, they stay white, and they stay sharp. As they crack from use they get even sharper.
Teeth are the part of the body most resistant to decomposition—that’s why they often use dental records to identify remains.
Although this is correct, it is shocking how fast they can decompose, or rot, once cavities set it. I have a dentist phobia and am losing most of my teeth these days. I wouldnt imagine many zombies have regular dental checkups. Luckily, I can get dentures. Imagine a zombie “Hold still, Im trying to get my dentures in”.
There isn’t much sugar in brains, so their teeth may last longer than the average alive human.
Because fuck you, thats why 🍿 Ya wanna quibble or ya wanna be a staw 💫?
—Movie makers
Depends on the media. Some have no teeth at all
Suck zombies just aren’t scary
That was the nickname of one of my exes.
I forget in what series or movie it was, but they captured a zombie and pulled all its teeth, making it completely harmless. Probably in Walking Dead somewhere.
Teeth (whole jaw) and arms. Michonne did this to travel around as their smell would cover hers so other walkers couldn’t detect her.
their smell would cover hers
it’s funny how in later seasons, zombies lost all sense of smell, (probably because of ageing? but new zombies were the same I think)
The smell didn’t matter at all, if you just wore a dried up zombie skin head mask. Then you could be part of the herd. They could hide right next to a zombie herd passing through in the ditch. You could get really close to a zombie from behind.
Zombies basically just turned into extras in that series. Poor fellas got nerfed hard.
In world War z the movie, North Korea is safe because every single citizen had their teeth all pulled as soon as the infection started.
Definitely not fiction, zombies are real and they’re coming for your brains.
Um, yea, it’s all “just fiction”
Yeah I don’t really understand how any of this isn’t fiction 😂
It really depends on the specific fandom, but my favorite excuse isn’t that their teeth are sharp, but moreso that they don’t feel pain so they bite a lot harder than would be comfortable for a normal human.
I would like to see a movie about that or at least a couple of episodes of some Zombie tv show.
You should read The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks (Mel Brooks’ son) it’s a great little book with a ton of practical advice for if zombies were real it’s super fun. It takes a very realistic approach.
