Zombie videos may have been around for a good few years now but that doesn't make them any less scary, and an awesome watch to keep you on the edge of your seat throughout the video or movie.
Here is our review of the scariest zombies, and the plausibility of the scary infections portrayed, that made us want to stop watching immediately on account of how scary they were so well done to them.
I guess um… Why not watch another zombie video now!
I can heartily recommend these ones on-screen right now. If that's not your bag, not your flavour not your vibe right now then scroll down for our list of zombie games.
List of Top 10 YouTube Zombie Videos
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THE WALKING DEAD Cinematic Full Movie 4K ULTRA HD Zombies
- Zombie Escape! Parkour POV Chase
- “Honey's Bad Day” – The zombie apocalypse begins in a small town
- The Best Zombie Movies of All Time from A to Z
- 9 Cool Ideas in the Case of a Zombie Apocalypse
- Night of the Living Dead
- Top 10 Zombie Types in Movies and TV
- Dead Rising 3 Trailer – Annie, Nick Ramos, Steamroller Motorbike
- Primitive Technology: CRAFTING a Zombie Meat Harvester
- 7 Scariest Zombies That Made Us Want to Stop Playing Immediately.
List of Top “10 Zombie Movies
- Re-Animator (1985)
- Zombi 2 (1971)
- Dawn of the Dead (2004)
- The Return of the Living Dead (1985)
- Braindead, aka, Dead Alive (1992)
- 28 Days Later (2002)
- Night of the Living Dead (1968)
- “Little Monsters” (Abe Forsythe, 2019)
- “Cemetery Man” (Michele Soavi, 1994)
The intrigue of zombie video is that this genre forces us to confront death face-to-face. Or rather, death confronts us, looking to scoop out our brains and have us join its ranks.
Sometimes, zombies can bear larger metaphors on their disintegrating shoulders — for our increasingly online yet increasingly isolated post-internet world.
As in “Dawn of the Dead” there are plenty of metaphoric references. But often zombies are just zombies: walking corpses who shuffle around. They remind us that, even if we’re never somehow reanimated, we’re actually going to look like this when we’re in the ground someday. How’s that for an endorsement of cremation?
Before you suddenly rush to make your funeral plans, give a close read to our ranked picks for the greatest zombie films ever made.
Oh! Yes! And, if you’re looking for Halloween costume ideas, expect to find a few ghoulish options here.
But, what we find fascinating is whether a real Zombie could ever really end up walking. Read on for our thoughts on:
Zombies in Videos and Rating Them for Realism
It has different phases. And, of course, back in the day, before people had stethoscopes and things like that, if you had somebody who, again, was very ill with some infection, you listen for a heartbeat or try to feel for a pulse.
It might be very weak. It might not be detectable to the average person. From time to time mistakes were made and people revived in mortuaries. Some may have been for a while thought to be living dead!
There are true stories from outbreaks of the bubonic plague, outbreaks of cholera, and even also yellow fever and other types of infections where these sorts of events have been known.
People have been taken out of their homes, put in the dead cart, going off to be hauled to the graveyard, only to wake up in the cart!
Could Zombies Really Continue to “Walk” for Years?
The human body decomposes rather quickly. So it starts out really from the inside that you have all these bacteria in your gut, in your mouth, on your skin.
Once you die, you become a big food source for them. So they're the body parts that do a lot of the initial decomposing. And there's nothing about this particular virus that would stop that.
In some zombie videos/ movies, they have shamblers that have been doing it for years and years. They are shown still walking around long after the outbreak that made them into zombies.
we might see it in Zombie videos, but in real life, they would all just be bones by that time.
The Real-life Doctor Who Gave Himself Ulcers
Dr Barry Marshall was an Australian scientist who won the Nobel Prize, again, for discovering that a bacterium called Helicobacter pylori causes, gastric ulcers.
People didn't necessarily believe him. So he ended up swallowing a mixture of Helicobacter pylori himself and then treated himself with antibiotics.
Forget the Zombie Videos! – How Quickly Could it Really Happen?
In many zombie videos/ movies, the incubation period is basically instantaneous. When blood goes all over, that is how some blood-borne diseases can be transmitted.
For example, Ebola is a disease that is transmitted by exposure to blood and other body fluids. In this case, potentially even if people aren't bitten, if that blood goes into their eyes or other mucus membranes, they could be infected that way as well. So that part could happen.
But, again, the incubation period would take days for this in real life.
Could the Ideas in Zombie Videos Have Come From Seeing Animals With Rabies?
In animals, at least, rabies does cause a lot of aggression. In humans, a little bit less. It does cause depression. It does cause active biting, because in rabies it's transmitted through saliva, as well.
So, not too surprising that a virus similar to rabies (possibly even called “rage”) could have that similar kind of aggressive, biting. Now imagine a man screaming! Plus dramatic music!
Rabies and mad cow disease are probably the only viruses that we know that are basically 100% fatal. There have been a few people who were infected with mad cow disease. Others do get rabies very occasionally. With rabies, you can get what's called postexposure prophylaxis.
Foxes have been known to bite dogs when they have the disease. If a dog owner is unaware of such an incident it is possible that a human may be bitten and catch rabies that way. There was an incident in Canada when a man was thought to have been slightly injured by a rabid bat that flew into him in a cave.
So if you have not gotten the rabies vaccine before and you've been exposed, go and get treated!
If you have had a bite from a rabid dog or a wild animal or exposed to a bat, you should get the rabies vaccine shortly after your exposure.
Treatment for rabies, when taken before symptoms occur can basically stop the virus from replicating in your body. That would protect you from infection to the point of it affecting your movement.
But, before you ask. No, rabies can't invoke a real life zombie-like behaviour!
Is It Realistic for People to Get Those Yucky Zombie Eye Infections?
Yeah, so some viruses do cause eye infections, so basically a form of conjunctivitis.
In this case, it's infecting usually a different place of the eye that you don't typically see with viruses. Again, we see that with Ebola.
We've seen that a little bit with the current coronavirus also, that some people do seem to have eye infections from that as well.
Is It Likely That Living Characters in Zombie Plots Would Get Infected So Quickly?
So, there are carrier states for various types of organisms. You don't see it as often in viruses, but you do have things like HIV that people can have chronic infection and be infected for a long time and transmit the virus to others.
So, doctors do see that occasionally with blood-borne pathogens, like not only HIV, but hepatitis B virus and hepatitis C virus.
And some zombie videos do try to incorporate some of those aspects of the biology of the virus.
Could Mad Cow Disease Cause Zombie Behaviour?
Some zombie videos and movies might be modelling their scenes on mad cow disease. Is that realistic?
Mad cow disease is the popular name for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, and it basically leads your brain to become Swiss cheese over time.
It can take decades, so the timeframe is pretty unrealistic in zombie movies. Coming back from the dead is, as well. Imagine Columbus screaming and zombies growling!
Mad cow disease can definitely cause behavioural changes, you know, aggression or things like that. Although to the level of chasing people and trying to eat them, I don't think that's ever been established with any kind of prion disease. I would give this one also maybe a five.
Zombies Could be the Result of Human Infection Modeled on Insect Pathogens?
Another zombie movie scenario might be an infection modelled on insect pathogens, where a pathogenic fungus infects the insect, and in real life, this does change its behaviour.
They basically force the insects to go as high as they can up a tree. And the fungus causes the insect to just basically be a host in the next phase of the fungus's life cycle.
Fundamentally you have this fruiting body that will replicate in the insect. It then kind of “pops out” somewhere of their body, from their head or elsewhere. And then that is what sporulates.
And so, when it sporulates, it releases all of the new fungi. Those spores kind of rain down over the colony of insects and can infect all of them. And, so it goes on.
That's how it ends up amplifying. We have had fungal infections that have gone around the world or around a country. We live in the United Kingdom that used to be covered by elm trees, but then they all got a fungal disease and they basically all died. This can happen. The infection can be transported very easily through the air, but in the case of the elm tree, it is spread by a particular type of elm beetle.
So that's kind of the premise of this, that if something was adapted to humans that were like this cordyceps that infects insects, it might happen. The result might be things that pop out of the bodies of walkers! How awful is that?
Zombies Which Transform Into Different Phenotypes
In “The Last of Us” they have a lot of different kinds of phenotypes. Essentially, different types of zombies kind of transform themselves and evolve over the course of infection. Yeah, I would say, I would give this zombie model a very high scariness score in any zombie movie.
How Likely is it That an Evil Scientist's Experiment Might Create Zombies?
“Z Nation” is a model for this. Furthermore, it is completely underrated as far as zombie shows go. Some things in it are at least somewhat accurate. To explain it we do have to tell you that there is a long history of governments doing experiments on prisoners.
It would be actually very difficult to do these experiments on prisoners nowadays. These days there are many more safeguards of consent that governments must follow. But for many years in the past, if you needed some disease experiments done, you went to prisons.
Or, you went to orphanages, because these were places where you could get consent rather easily. Also, this might be being done legally or not and in secret.
So the “Z Nation” movie is actually kind of accurate, although hopefully not anymore. So, you have Murphy, who was injected with this serum. Of course, he gets bitten and doesn't turn.
So, throughout the show, he's kind of not only resistant to the virus but able to control other zombies, which, again, may not be very realistic. But you do have people with perhaps kind of partial immunity to some of these infections.
Could a Zombie Virus be Released by a Plane Crash?
So exactly how it was released during the plane crash depicted is not very clear.
If a water supply was contaminated the virus would be diluted. If the water was used as a town water supply it would be diluted even further before it got spread out to all the people of the town.
You'd have to have a really small infectious dose for this, like one virus for people to get infected. And then, most likely the virus would be killed off in the water because rabies is a virus that needs a host to amplify.
Anthrax has caused outbreaks in some areas of Siberia. One thing is that anthrax is a really hearty bacterium. It forms spores, so it's really stable in the environment.
But again, we don't know how long those virus particles would last. If it's decades or centuries or longer, we're not sure.
Scary Fact of Virus Found In Permafrost
But I do want to kind of put a flip side to this, is that when scientists were trying to study the 1918 flu virus, so the one that caused the last big global pandemic, they found some samples from this that were frozen in permafrost, so one in Alaska and one in northern Europe.
In Alaska in the 1950s, scientists went up there, dug up some of the people who had died and who were, again, preserved in permafrost for many years, took samples of their lungs, tried to grow them in the laboratory, completely unsuccessful. There was no live virus there.
Scary Fact About Bats and Ebola Transmission
In West Africa, we had the Ebola outbreak a few years ago, a really big one. Part of that may have been from the more frequent introductions of the virus into the human population across parts of Africa where they're being deforested.
Now the bats are all in close contact and they're in closer contact with other animals in the forest because there's only this little part of it left.
So there's more potential for transmission of that virus to other animals.
People eat those other animals. People come in contact with that through butchering them or other types of things. And so it can jump into humans. So we see that cycle on and on. So maybe at a four.
We like “28 Days Later” just 'cause it really scares me. I can suspend disbelief for all of the science that's maybe exaggerated or kind of mistold in there, but the story just really freaks me out.
List of Zombie Games
Finally, we can't end this without paying due to the many games that all those zombie videos and movies have spawned. Here is a list of some we found on Wikipedia:
- 7 Days to Die
- Above Snakes
- Alive 4-Ever
- All Zombies Must Die!
- Alone in the Dark 3
- Amy
- Area 51
- Atom Zombie Smasher
- Beast Busters
- Blood
- Blood Drive
- Burn, Zombie Burn!
- Call of Duty: Black Ops (Zombie Modes)