What Makes Zombies Scary

Hello Everyone Morbidly Deceased Here

1. The Ones You Loved
The undead are stupid, slow and rather easy to get around, thus the only factor likely to stop you from killing them is the fact that, well, they were once human. There will always be that doubt that maybe they are still human, that they are simply trapped, and that doubt will always stop you. But there will always be those few zombies that are worse than the rest, they're not stronger, they are not faster, no: they were once the ones you loved. 

2. Alone With A Monster
In the beginning of an apocalypse, most TV shows, movies, and literature will show the beginning of the apocalypse as a horde, when in reality, the first time you will probably see a zombie is in your own house, or office, or gas station, some place closed in, some place where it's easy to get trapped. Stuck in a place where something wants to eat you and, assuming the apocalypse has just begun, you probably don't know how to kill it. Worse yet, when you're left in the dark, or searching a building, you don't know where it is, where it's "hiding," now a zombie's slowness no longer matters, they can jump out at you, and even worse, bite you, endgame. 

3. Surrounded By Monsters
While one zombie alone in the open isn't that scary nor dangerous, a wall of undead shambling toward you however, that will stop you in your tracks. Often times in the open, zombies will be found in hordes, they congregate around noises, or scent depending on the source material. When the next trigger is set off, the zombies that were simply wandering will now all be moving in a horde towards it. The thing about hordes is that simply, you're best bet is running. Attempt to shoot down a horde, you risk getting flanked by more dead shambling toward you, attempt to blow it up, they will still keep coming, you try to set it on fire, well, check out my blog post Fire!, for that particular crash course. There is no stopping it, and watching a wall of dead mow down the living at the beginning of the apocalypse will teach you to avoid these swarms.

4. Eaten Alive

They're are many horrible ways to die, and honestly, in the apocalypse, you'll be lucky if you die from a bite. Zombies have an incredibly gruesome way of getting rid of people, eating you alive, well until you pass out and die, or just die, that's when the pain ends. Drowning is awful, burning is dreadful, but being ripped apart piece by piece as several hands dig into and several mouths rip off you're flesh, that's a whole different hell. Here you are being devoured by the very thing you've been trying to run away from, the very thing that's killed the one's you loved, and now it's about to claim you too, and your death won't be kick, and it definitely won't be painless.

5. No End In Sight
If any realizations going to crush what hope you have left, it'll be the though that in the end, there might be no end, the zombies may rot into the dirt but the humans that survive, the higher the chance of another large scale outbreak begins. It's the horror that lingers, a force that could exist as long as humanity still lives. The military might be able to save you, although if you believe most zombie fiction, the military rarely survives, but is it enough? No, not without a cure, and if society falls, a cure will not be possible. If humanity survives, the undead will always haunt us.

6. The Pain You Know
This one i'll admit is probably not as obvious as the previous reasons, but there will always be a slightly chilling feeling to seeing a zombie with a knife buried in it's chest or it's arm hacked off, or it's jaw missing. We can relate to that, much more than we can relate to seeing the same thing on a vampire or werewolf, because we know what that mean on our own terms, and that's the subtle horror of it.

7. The Uncanny Valley
For those of you who don't know about the uncanny valley i recommend this video by Extra Credits here: Extra Credits - The Uncanny Valley. Zombie fall perfectly into this valley, they look human, but not enough that instead, they would naturally freak you out. When they first turn, they'd look close enough to human, but instead they now lurch at you, try to eat others, and are making raspy growl. They look human but clearly aren't anymore, that makes a huge difference.Sometimes the scariest things are not the twisted monstrosities, but instead, a dark reflection of yourself, a glimpse of your future, a look at what will happen to you too when you lose you're humanity.

I was going to do a little bit more, explaining the human side of the horror, how a world gone mad making humanity just as bad as, if not worse than, zombies, but i'll save that for another week. Come back next Friday when I talk about "The Strain" two words, vampire apocalypse...

That's All For Now...