do zombies have to breathe? if you watch the zombies in pretty much any zombie film, they are breathing (it would take a lot of time to shoot otherwise, as your actors would keep passing out). but, zombies are dead. dead things don’t need oxygen. but do reanimated dead things? in movies such as lucio fulci’s “zombi 2” and more recently “land of the dead”, zombies can function just fine underwater, suggesting that they don’t need air. perhaps the breathing motion is just a habit left over from life?

why do zombies have to eat? again, they’re dead. is eating human flesh a compulsion? a pleasure? a necessity? perhaps they do need food, being reanimated ang all, but if so, they are a poorly planned creation. i mean, mindless as they generally act, they will run out of food quickly and starve. (please, do not respond to this referring to the movie 28 days later. yes, those “zombies” needed food or would starve to death. those zombies were also not zombies. they were infected.)

how much brain matter has to exist? or is it a certain area of the brain? the generally accepted way to kill a zombie it to destroy the inside of it’s noggin via bullet, wooden stake, hatchet, cricket bat (it is called a bat?), or whatever happens to be laying around. sometimes this is a huge mess leaving no bit of brain larger than an altoid, sometimes it’s a wee little pointy thing, probably killing off less brain cells than your average frat party. so how much brain or what section of brain do zombies need to remain functional?

do zombies continue to rot after reanimation? zombie film makers all seem to agree that zombies will come out of the ground looking pretty nasty (though often surprisingly clean), but there seems to be some disagreement as to whether the decomposition continues. i’m going to go with yes for two simple reasons, 1) they are dead, and 2) it’s more entertaining.

would zombies eventually die when the brain rots? sort of a mix of the last two questions. i would assume that if the zombie continues to decompose while wandering the countryside chewing on idiotic men and topless women, it’s brain continues to turn to mush as well. now, if destroying the brain does indeed kill the zombie, will the brain eventually rot enough for the zombie to fall dead in it’s tracks?

would zombies eat carrion? human carrion, i mean. they generally start chewing on a living being, but continue to eat once the person dies. but how fresh does the corpse have to be? if the zombie is full, would he be able to return to the same corpse for a midnight snack? is the corpse still a meal an hour later? a day? a week?

would zombies eat cooked corpse, or are they wholehearted believers in the raw food fad? there are often explosions in zombie films. now and then they take out more than zombie. if a person were to be nearby and happened to be cooked to the point of, say, medium-rare, would it be an excellent zombie feast, or a waste of food? i ask this because, if i recall correctly, most non-insect carrion eaters (such as vultures) will not eat cooked food.

would zombies eat animals? this one really goes back and forth. i have no opinion, nor any ideas on either side of this argument.

brains...it seems to be generally accepted that zombies eat brains. why? i cannot think of any movies where the zombies were particularly interested in brains. i don’t think they’d turn them down, but they seem very happy with flesh and innards.

do zombies who used to be vegetarians get sick? i know that if you don’t eat meat for an extended period of time, then you scarf down a porter house, you get very ill. does this carry over into the zombie kingdom? or does your stomach start anew as though death were some sort of reboot?

the place to be - i have decided that the place i want to be when a zombie outbreak takes place is somewhere in asia. perhaps japan. why? one word: cremation. of course, that will only work so long, then the eastern european zombies will show up. at around that time, i will be grabbing a plane to australia or hawaii. i figure by then they will have killed off a lot of the zombies there, and given how far it is to another large land mass, i don’t think new traveling zombies will be showing up. i suppose i should start teaching myself to surf and like seafood.

to do your own research, i highly recommend some of these zombie favorites (picked for showcasing different types of zombie actions):

night of the living (1968) – classic zombies
zombi 2 (aka zombie)(1978) – underwater zombies
dawn of the dead (2004) – speedy zombies
return of the living dead 3 (1993) – zombies who remember their past and do not eat loved ones
dead alive (1992) – humping zombies
dead and breakfast (2004) – zombies who remember their past and do eat loved ones
plan 9 from outer space (1959) – zombies who don’t do much of anything

and for the lighter side of the walking dead, try:

shaun of the dead (2004)
buttcrack (1998)

* this work in all it’s crappiness is dedicated to jamie