by Mark Murphy

Created on: September 21, 2007

One of the words I focused on in this title was, "effective". Does this mean effective as a scary movie entitiy or effective as a "real world" flesh eater? For this article I'll go with the idea that the idea is how effective a hunter/killer a fast zombie is.

Putting aside the fact that rotting meat and brain matter cannot sustain fast movement for any length of time without damaging itself beyond use, a fast zombie is much more effective than a slow one.

Fast zombies can hunt and kill at a much faster rate than slow ones. This in turn would create other zombies at a faster rate, which would lead to even more fast zombies and increase the killing/zombie creating at an exponential rate.

Faster zombies are much harder to escape or evade. They move faster, bite faster, think faster and process their surroundings at a near-live rate or better. They also seem to be better problem solvers than their slow moving undead cousins, which are probably an evolutionary dead end. (Sorry, that one was too easy to pass up.)

As far as scare factor goes, fast zombies have a decisive edge over those pokey bags of meat. We've all seen movies where even people with average athletic abilities have danced around in rooms dotted with slow undead. Their best tactics seem to be lurking in wait for unsuspecting victims or gathering in hordes to slowly storm a house full of holdouts, and even then they take a large amount of casualties. A slow zombie is no match for the average adult. Things start leaning to their advantage around the 3-to-1 ratio or better. Fast zombies, on the other hand, can make short work of an above average adult. A group of 3 quick moving zombies could take out an average block, if you factor in the additional zombies created in the fracas. After the initial shock and hysteria of finding out zombies are walking the earth, everybody from national militias to Girl Scout troops would be organizing slow zombie hunts. Fast zombies however, would be out to kill immediately and would do so much initial damage that re-organization would be nearly impossible. Not that Girl Scouts aren't efficient killing machines, it's just that they would lack the specific training for hunting this sort of prey.

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