Zombie Research Society
It’s widely accepted that the best – if not only – way to kill a Zombie is to destroy the brain. The logic being that, in the absence of a beating 
heart as the body’s primary drive mechanism, the brain is the Zombie’s power center.
Additionally, it’s universally believed that Zombies possess no greater physical skill or ability than did the person who inhabited the same body during life. For example, a blind man in life would not die and rise from the grave as a undead menace with perfect 20/20 vision. Blind is blind, dead or alive.
Using these two “facts” as a jumping off point, the Morlock Theory of Zombie Paralysis offers an intriguing alternative to traditional Zombie defense strategy. Morlock argues that the walking dead can be rendered harmless by catastrophic damage to the nerves of a spinal cord. Simply put, because the Zombie body receives its instructions from the Zombie brain, a Zombie nervous system must be intact to deliver messages.
Shoot a Zombie in the lungs, and it will keep coming. Chop off one foot and it will hobble at you on the other. Rip out its stomach, and it will still chew on your flesh like nothing’s missing. But break its back or neck, and you just might have a quadriplegic Zombie on your hands, unable to do anything but lie on the ground and moan.
So the next time you think the only way to stop a Zombie is to aim for the head, think again. The back/neck/chest might be an easier target, and just as effective.
I was just watching a zombie movie and thought to myself, couldn’t you cut the spinal cord and disable a zombie. Maybe use them for defensive purposes you could place a bunch of disabled zombies around the perimeter of your base and they would act like alarms and would thin the ranks of living attackers. I think it would also cover up any noise and odour in your base because their smell and sound would drown your base smell and sounds.
this is an exellent excuse to use a sledgehammer as a weapon, because now not only do you have the advantage of no blunting, but severe blunt force trauma can seriously damage nerves, even those protecten by hard to chop bone, and a good blow to the head, neck or upper shoulder could cause either a bone or a disk in the spine to shift or even move completely off it’s normal position, trapping or severing the spinal chord and rendering the zombie a hungry head attached to a dead weight, just waiting to be crushed like a ripe melon with a second hammer blow.
Just to play devil’s advocate here….what if the zombie doesn’t issue muscle commands through the nervous system like a normal body, but through the magnetized blood?
This is combining the theory about the brain moving the blood through magnetism rather than the heart pumping it and this post here.
my only issue with your advocacy is that it kinda relies on pretty much everything we know about heart, brain and blood functions and chemistry being wrong. for one, the brain is does not have enough metal in it to form an electric magnet, let alone all the blood vessels and capillaries which would also need to pulse with magnetic charge to make this work. secondly, if the heart does not pump blood, what exactly does it do?? and why does the blood cease to move around the body when the heart stops beating? and finally, if our blood was magnetically charged then it would be impossible for us to use a compass, because as you should know when a compass is placed near a magnet, or even certain types of metal, it can give a completely false reading. finally, the amount of iron in the blood is no-where near enough to cause a measurable reaction to magnetism, no matter what the X-Men movies might have you believe.
also, how on earth would you transmit a muscle command through magnetism, except perhaps by passing a current through the blood, even though this would be extremely difficult due to the human body’s lack of conductive circuits in the circulation system. even if it was possible to send electrical signals through the blood, why should the blood be magnetised for this purpose? this would hinder the flow of electricity if anything, not be a cause of it.
while I commend you for your imaginative use of theory to predict a possible outcome, a prediction is only as good as the theory behind it and unfortunately your theory base has very little evidence going for it. if you come forward with some extra-ordinary evidence for your extra-ordinary claims then we might be more likely to give your prediction a bit more credence.
(this is not a personal attack on you, I am simply correcting a statement that I believe to be erronious, and I am willing to extend a full retraction should I be proved wrong in the future)
break there neck then kill them simple of that
No it’s not. Even if you decapitate the head, the head itself is still a threat. If you aren’t paying attention you could find a hungry mouth biting through your shoe.
i was talking break the spinal cord not decapitation
And if the head is severed, is not the spinal cord broke as well?
Depending on where you break the spinal cord, you could either have just the head snapping around on a unmoving body or you could have a zombie crawler. Either way, decapitation or just breaking the spine, the head is still active.
I agree with this. Break a zombie’s back, and they could still use their arms to crawl after you. Depending on where the break occurs. Break their neck, and they ain’t going anywhere.
The danger here is to not forget that a paralyzed zombie is still dangerous. No matter where the break comes, they can still bite you if you get careless.
Headcases and crawlers, to me, are more dangerous than walking zombies; depending on the location. High grass, crawlers would be the worst, but there is still a possibility of stepping right on top of a headcase(my term for a still function head).
Intriguing theory, and you may well be correct.
Zombie crawlers are usually depicted as torn in two zombies, with the upper half crawling toward you. It would make sense that destroying the spine would render what ever is below the damage inoperable.
Of course maybe the general being dead effect, explains why zombies move at a slower pace than normal, the dead cells surrounding the nerves limit the amount of or speed of information being passed?
Another intriguing theory- it would certainly explain the lack of speech also; speech requires some of the most complicated series of nerves in the entire body.
interesting idea, possibly the nerve cells have deteriorated faster than other body cells as well, which could leave the interesting situation where the nerve cells are so deteriorated that the zombie is unable to send any signals, or it’s signals are erratic, which could shorten a zombie’s shelf life considerablly, depending on when a nerve cell becomes erratic or unstable after death.
Thanks for addressing my question/theory!! I’m honored, haha.
I’ve said it before, but this is a great blog. Count me in as a fan!