Most zombie movies feature shuffling hordes which prefer to eat brains but also generally eat any human flesh available. Because in most movies (pretty much everything but the 28 Days Later series [1]) zombies move slowly they rely on flocking to be dangerous.
Generally the main way of killing zombies is severe head injury, so any time zombies succeed in their aim of eating brains they won’t get a new recruit for their horde. The TV series iZombie [2] has zombies that are mostly like normal humans as long as they get enough brains and are smart enough to plan to increase their horde. But most zombies don’t have much intelligence and show no signs of restraint so can’t plan to recruit new zombies. In 28 Days Later the zombies aren’t smart enough to avoid starving to death, in contrast to most zombie movies where the zombies aren’t smart enough to find food other than brains but seem to survive on magic.
For a human to become a member of a shuffling horde of zombies they need to be bitten but not killed. They then need to either decide to refrain from a method of suicide that precludes becoming a zombie (gunshot to the head or jumping off a building) or unable to go through with it. Most zombie movies (I think everything other than 28 Days Later) has the transition process taking some hours so there’s plenty of time for an infected person to kill themself or be killed by others. Then they need to avoid having other humans notice that they are infected and kill them before they turn into a zombie. This doesn’t seem likely to be a common occurrence. It doesn’t seem likely that shuffling zombies (as opposed to the zombies in 28 Days Later or iZombie) would be able to form a horde.
In the unlikely event that shuffling zombies managed to form a horde that police couldn’t deal with I expect that earth-moving machinery could deal with them quickly. The fact that people don’t improvise armoured vehicles capable of squashing zombies is almost as ridiculous as all the sci-fi movies that feature infantry.
It’s obvious that logic isn’t involved in the choice of shuffling zombies. It’s more of a choice of whether to have the jump-scare aspect of 18 Days Later, the human-drama aspect of zombies that pass for human in iZombie, or the terror of a slowly approaching horrible fate that you can’t escape in most zombie movies.
I wonder if any of the music streaming services have a horror-movie playlist that has screechy music to set your nerves on edge without the poor plot of a horror movie. Could listening to scary music in the dark become a thing?
You might want to listen to some Dark Psytrance. Some of the artists on that scene focus on “cineastic” (and definitely scary) soundscapes. I, for one, dislike that approach because I think the central thing about music is it’s immaterial subjectlessness and self-reference but if your looking for frightening music to listen to in the dark, Dark Psy is definitely worth a try.
Tom: thanks for the suggestion. I’m not about to listen to that as the scary music isn’t my thing, I’d rather have Zombie movies with the soundtrack of typical war movies. But I’m sure that some people reading this will find it useful.
As an aside I think it would be good to have movies released under a CC license with separate sound track files to allow them to be remixed.