By: M.L. Lewis

The first rule of battle is to know thy enemy. So before the dead stop dying it’s best to do your research very thoroughly on the zombie apocalypse. Read every book. Study every website. Watch every movie.

Remember, though, when it comes to zombie films the subject material is fictionalized, which gives the writers and directors involved in them a lot of creative liberties. It’s this creativity which creates a lot of misinformation surrounding what would really happen during the zombie apocalypse.

7. Beautiful Landscapes

The vast open fields and well-trimmed lawns are a common sight in these movies. The grasses are just a couple inches tall, the trees and hedges are trimmed back in neat fashion, and there’s not a weed in sight. If you ever saw grass you know this situation is an impossibility.

Grass needs to be cut regularly and weeds need to be pulled daily to keep them from overgrowing. If you have an abandoned house in your community walk by it sometimes, their landscape is unruly and out of control. Now, imagine every house in town looked like this.

6. Cleanliness is Next to Godliness

The survivors in all the movies have perfect teeth and not a speck of dirt on them. Unfortunately, bathing will be almost impossible since there will be no running water. If your lucky enough to get a shower or bath don’t expect hot water since hot water tanks run on electricity or gas lines.

The first thing people will notice would be your body odor as your sweat becomes bacteria breeding grounds. It’s this bacteria that causes your sweat to stink. You’ll start developing nasty ache all over your face and body from oil and grime built up on your skin. As for your teeth, the plaque build up will cause your teeth to become discolor and your gums to bleed.

5. The Fully Stocked Stores

Every store survivors go into, in every film, they appear untouched. Whether it be a gun store, liquor store, or a grocery store it’s like someone pushed the pause button in each of them. The food is perfect, the lights are still working, and nobody is inside of them.

This is also very unrealistic. Stores are the first places people go before a disaster. Look up stores before storms hit on YouTube the shelves are picked clean and people are scrambling around to find one can of food to feed their families. One hurricane survivor said people were flipping shelves and tearing up floorboards of abandoned stores in hopes of finding food.

4. Making A Cure is Simple

This is a common ending in pandemic movies. A disease breaks out and a team of scientists band together and make a fully functioning cure in a week and has it dispersed across the globe in a day.

This is also a scientific impossibility. Making a cure is a real mess. it takes months, if not years, to develop one. To make a cure you have to isolate and kill the virus that is making everyone sick. Then you need to replicate this in large batches and infect a group of test subjects with it to see if it can be used by humans.

After that you get to play trial and error on these subjects in an effort to find a cure that could benefit at least 10 percent of the population. Then once the cure is found you have to make more batches and figure out who gets the first batch of it.

3. The Empty City

It’s always common for our group of survivors to walk through a common city like LA or New York and there’s a strange calm in the air. All the cars are pushed to the side making a nice clear path for the people to walk through. Buildings are covered with ivy. Birds and other small wildlife make a home in the now vacant office buildings with all the windows smashed out.

Truth is this isn’t the way it’s going to be. The government will likely try to stop the spread of the virus at all costs. Which means, they will most likely nuke the red zones like major cities to kill as many zombies as they can.

2. Headshots are Easy Targets

That is one skill I envy most with the survivors in these films. They get headshots spot on, without wavering or missing a single shot. This leads many to believe that headshots are going to be super easy.

The average head is the size of a cabbage, making it the smallest target on the body. Zombie are not going to remain still, so you will struggle to make a clean shot. You’ll also need to consider the psychological damage surrounding taking a human life. It’s not that easy to kill a person; and you’ll suffer emotional damage, physical sickness, and PTSD as a result of this.

1 A strong, well-organized group of strangers

This is how every zombie film starts out. Four or five strangers just stumble upon each other at a secure location and reluctantly agree to work together to fight off the herds of zombies.

Though we may like this band-of-brothers appeal this gives, this will almost never work out in reality. For example, have you ever worked on a group project with co-workers, disastrous right? That would be the most realistic example I have to show you that the band of strangers theory doesn’t work.