I have a really difficult time suspending disbelief enough to buy into the idea–on The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead–of a Romero-less universe, where not only the term “zombie” but the concept of the dead returning is totally foreign. At the least, I thought when I watched the first mini-season of FTWD, wouldn’t you figure that you should run from or incapacitate someone who was ill and trying to attack/bite you? …I appreciate the impulse to try to help someone who’s sick, but I can say for certain that even in a world without zombies prominent in the zeitgeist, I would stay away from anyone who tried to bite me.
Also, why don’t they assume it’s rabies? Or does rabies not exist in this universe either?
That said, I thought about what would happen if things were inverted–if people in our world, so heavily saturated with zombie TV, movies, and books, started to get sick and become violent. In all likelihood, we would say, “Aha! This is the zombie apocalypse. We must shoot these people in the head!”
…and then it would turn out that they were not zombies at all, just sick with some kind of violence-inducing virus (or on bath salts) that might not even be communicable.
So that thought experiment helped me suspend my disbelief slightly more. Though with Fear the Walking Dead, it’s difficult. Those characters are making ludicrous decisions even for people walking around in a zombie-free collective consciousness.
I assume there’s someone whose job it is to determine what monster will be starring in popular culture next–like someone predicting trends in fashion. We’ve been through wizards (no, not a monster, but anyway), aliens, and vampires recently, and now zombies, so–back to ghosts? Time for werewolves to shine again?
