The walkers on The Walking Dead have become an iconic group of TV villains,
but they didn't get there by doing anything they want on the screen. Here are the rules
walkers have to follow to keep their inherent walker-ness intact on the hit AMC series.
Shortly after you die in The Walking Dead's universe, assuming your brains remain intact,
you rise as a soulless carcass and feast upon the warm,
wet flesh of the living. But unlike undead creatures from other, similar media, walkers
in The Walking Dead must drag themselves forward with an exhausted vertical crawl.
They can pick up a tiny bit of speed at the sight of a possible meal, but under no circumstances can
they run or even really jog. If a walker propels themselves with a velocity roughly equal to what
zombies pull off in Zombieland, then that walker is moving way too fast. And hey, that's just fine.
Walkers aren't frightening because of their athletic prowess. You never have to worry
about a single walker chasing you down, even if that walker won multiple sprint
championships during their pre-walker days. Most of the time, walkers only become a threat
once they've gathered in large enough numbers to overwhelm a potential victim or victims,
or in the occasional instance in which they successfully sneak up on their prey.
Both of those things are definitely frequent enough to make walkers a
major threat, even if they aren't going to be chasing anyone down anytime soon.
Walkers are not effective or efficient predators. They're not fast, strong,
smart, or well-equipped with any offensive tools except their rotting teeth. They have
no capacity for cunning or any skill with long-term planning. Most of them aren't
even aesthetically pleasing, in a manner that might be useful for luring victims into traps.
Their appearance is quite to the contrary, in fact: Most walkers are so disgusting to behold,
they make you want to run screaming in the opposite direction.
"These things ain't sick! They're not people! They're dead!"
Too bad for the walkers, but these circumstances work out splendidly for those of us here in the
real world. Hordes of grotesque and gruesome undead are visually distinctive in a way that
sticks with the viewer long after the TV has been shut off. We tune into programs like The
Walking Dead because we want to see the menacing hordes of the undead, and we want to see them
hideously disfigured. In the world of The Walking Dead, walkers are terrifying,
and in a world where a zombie apocalypse hasn't happened yet, that's exactly what we want.
Walkers possess several qualities that inhibit their people-eating abilities
while enhancing their entertainment value. For example, in most cases,
you can hear them coming from long distances off, due their apparently compulsive need to make weird
barfing noises. Sometimes walkers make very loud barfing noises, and sometimes
they lower the volume of their barfing noises to a very quiet level. But one truth remains,
regardless: Walkers will make uncomfortable, guttural noises, no matter the situation.
They practically never stop making these noises, even though they don't seem to serve
any purpose for them. In fact, it gives away their location
and offers potential human meals plenty of time to run away. However,
it does add ominous ambiance, and The Walking Dead wouldn't quite be itself without it.
Walkers can't talk, scream, or sing in their hideous version of the afterlife,
but they don't need to, because those horrible, hissing moans of theirs haunt our dreams.
Look, if you don't absolutely love completely uncooked, literally fresh-off-the-bone human
meat, then you've got no business being a walker. It's basically their whole deal.
Walkers lead boring, bland lives, if we're being honest. They indefinitely roam about with
no purpose or direction, until their limited abilities of detection pick up on one of the
dwindling number of humans who have not already been converted into walkers. They only really
want one thing, and it's the thing that keeps the danger of the show going: The flesh of the living.
The gang of sympathetic survivors on The Walking Dead often find themselves in life-or-death
conflicts with groups of malignant fellow humans. While these plots unfold, walkers
are regulated to the background, sometimes in a quite literal sense. Some critics don't like this,
but unless you just want the walkers to eat people over and over and over,
it's the way it has to be. If the walkers were the only villains on the show, it would just be a
constant buffet of human meat. Feasting on human flesh is literally the whole gig for a walker.
This is basically the only rule that applies to both walkers and humans: If your brain dies,
you die. No exceptions. It doesn't matter whether you get shot in the face or head,
or whether someone pierces your grey matter with a blade or pointed object.
A swift blow of blunt force could also do the trick, as long as it punctures the protective
bone layer and squashes the wrinkled ball of goo within. In any of these cases, that's the end of
the story for you. You can no longer claim the status of "undead." You're just….well, dead.
The good news for walkers about this rule, though, is that they can survive virtually
anything up to this point, including having their head flat-out removed from their body. Take a
walker apart any way you like. As long as they still have a brain working in their head, they'll
just watch you do it, which might be all the more reason to kill the brain and get it over with.
It's simple strategy: Any walker hoping to sink their diseased, blunted teeth into a still-living,
screaming person needs to find themselves a crew. A single walker might get lucky and stumble
upon an injured human or a very stupid child every now and again, but most of the time,
a walker on their own is basically just a sitting duck for the next human survivor with a weapon.
Sticking with a large group doesn't mean a walker definitely won't get their brains bashed in at
some point, but hanging with a crowd demonstrably increases their chances of finding a person
and actually getting a meal out of the deal. People who see a herd of walkers get scared,
run away in a random direction, and sometimes find their way into a dead-end
where walkers can descend upon them. If you're a walker doing the lone wolf thing, though,
you're just as likely to end up with a machete through your head, so stick with your friends.
As far as options for the afterlife go, walkerhood is kind of boring. You stumble around looking for
fresh meat and, if you find it, attempt to shove it in your face until there's no more meat.
Apart from that, you're just killing time until someone comes along and caves in your skull.
"You told me you handled them easily. This is easy?"
"It's easier than some things."
Being a walker certainly limits your options, but at least it's easy and low-pressure. Among
walkers, there's no hierarchy. Walkers don't have walker bosses who tell them what to do.
Walkers don't get a reward for eating somebody — they just immediately resume looking for a
new person to eat. So whether they eat one person in a week or 12, it doesn't make any difference.
It doesn't matter if you're a successful walker or a failure as a walker. Walkers don't really
compete with each other. In fact, if it wasn't for the inevitable violent demise, total loss
of cognitive function, and endless craving for flesh, being a walker would be a pretty relaxed
gig. They're comfortable living in the moment — the awful, bloody, post-apocalyptic moment.
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