The 10 Most Overused Tropes & Cliches In Zombie Fiction, Ranked
Even though they have an unhealthy affinity for eating human brains (and other body parts), zombies are still immensely popular in today's literature, films, and TV shows, as well as computer games. They're mostly portrayed as flesh-eating, mindless killing machines, some of them, however, have slightly different traits. Zombies most usually appear in horror, but they also found their way into different genres, such as romance, sci-fi, or comedy. Simply said, whenever there's a zombie, the audience gets entertained... most of the time anyway. Considering how prevalent they are in today's culture, there are some really overused tropes and cliches concerning zombies.
10 Heroes Don't Notice The Zombies
Zombies are usually stealthy in the films and can sneak up on their unsuspecting victims. It shouldn't work like that, though. After all, zombies are creatures made of rotting flesh, and rotting flesh stinks horribly. Unless the heroes have a really serious case of cold going on, they should be able to smell any zombie long before the deadly creature jumps up behind the next corner and tries to eat them.
9 Replacing Body Parts
Losing a limb or a two used to be a problem in the real world and still is. Not so much in zombie stories, though. When the hungry zombie horde tears off the limb of one of its wannabe victims but fails to kill the said victim, other heroes usually help the injured person by installing a gun or something of the like instead of the missing limb. What's more, they make it look overly easy, considering most zombie apocalypse survivors usually aren't medical professionals.
8 Hero Gets The Girl
Falling in love and finding the right partner can be difficult and time-consuming even in the best of circumstances. Let alone when zombies are wandering around and are killing people, threatening to wipe humankind from the face off the Earth. Luckily, the heroes usually seem to end up in a group where couples have the possibility to form. And they sometimes spent more time discussing their relationship than fighting for the lives of the entire planet.
7 Superhuman Strength
Technically, a zombie is a dead person. And unless the zombie is being revived by some kind of magic or something people can't comprehend, a dead person should never be superhumanly strong.
The dead body doesn't work as well as the living body does. So, in other words, an individual zombie should be no match to a healthy human being when it comes to fighting.
6 Heroes Can't Outrun Zombies
Speaking of what zombies - aka dead people with rotting bodies - should and shouldn't be able to do, there's also the matter of their speed. When a body is in a bad state and it doesn't hold together as it used to when its owner was still alive, its owner shouldn't be able to develop a superhuman speed, or even any fast speed, really. That doesn't stop the sprinting zombies from appearing, though.
5 They Rarely Ever Miss
As any gun expert will confirm, shooting somebody in the head, let alone somebody who's moving, is almost impossible to do for someone who never held a gun in his or her hands before. The head is relatively small in comparison to the rest of the body and hitting a small target directly where the shooter wants to hit it is no easy task for someone who has no idea how to handle weapons. Yes, lucky shots do happen but not as often as the zombie stories would like its audience to believe.
4 The Place Of The Catastrophe
There are many places where zombies could attack people or spend their time. However, they usually seem to come to several locations which are more prominent than others. Malls and supermarkets are one such place.
It makes sense for the zombies to go there since humans tend to congregate in shops as well, because of the canned food and other goods they can use. Still, it'd be nice seeing more different places in the zombie stories.
3 Hiding The Infection
In many stories, zombies infect other people by biting them. Sometimes the characters confess to being bitten, but more often than not, they hide their injury and pretend like nothing bad is happening. It doesn't make sense on more than one level since they're just putting the lives of others in danger this way, but then again, they're probably just too scared and want to protect their own skin. Nevertheless, the truth always comes out in the end and the consequences usually aren't pretty.
2 Evil Army
The army should be helping people during the crisis, zombie apocalypse included. Unfortunately, in a lot of zombie stories, the army is another bad guy, alongside zombies themselves. The army is usually portrayed as an organization full of greedy, often stupid individuals who throw setbacks into the heroes' journey and sometimes decide to use them for their own evil goals. Yes, there can be rotten apples even in the army, but it's difficult to believe that every single soldier and general and others would be this way.
1 Heroes Have No Idea What They Face
To be fair, this doesn't happen only with zombies but also other supernatural creatures. Even if they stare people right in the eye and act in their stereotypical fashion, people still don't realize they're facing zombies until someone gets bitten/eaten, and only then do they react the way they should. One would almost think there are no zombie books/films in fictional worlds, but that's highly unlikely, considering these fictional worlds are usually based on the real world.