It’s the night of ghosts and ghouls, magic and monsters, and of course, costumes and candies. Let’s pray that it’s a night without the zombie apocalpyse, for the sake of those poor souls still unprepared.

This week wraps up the warehouse exposition segment of Episode One, so ready yourselves for some action and violence in the upcoming weeks as we begin to see more of what makes the post-apocalypse what it is. In preparation, I present the first of two parts on how the Night Zero team created its unique brand of zombie, and why turning the rulebook on its head created a new breed of faster, scarier, and more awesome terror.

… So the addition of an escape clause is pretty much unheard of in the world of zombie fiction, I’ll admit that. The idea that there is some counter-attack, that a bite or scratch is not a guarantee of infection, has very serious ramifications to the genre, in particular to the element of why zombies are scary. Over the past few years I’ve met with a lot of people, zombie fans and unprepared alike, and compiled a cross-section of why zombies are, in fact, a scary thing, and while it was rarely listed as a primary reason, the inevitability and irreversibility of infection plays a major factor in the other reasons people listed. Reasons such as “there is no way to overcome their numbers,” that “you may have to kill someone who loved you,” and things of that nature. Inevitability plays a huge factor in the speed and scope of the apocalypse, and that’s a serious precedent to fight.

From a production perspective, however, that manner of zombie is perfect for a one-time story (such as a movie or novel), but poor fodder for an ongoing serial like Night Zero. Now of course there are many, many zombie comic books out there, and some have been going on for quite some time. But two things happen in those series, neither of which I was wild about for ours. The first byproduct is that your character collection is always very small, a band of survivors that is constantly on the move and on the defensive. New characters have to be regularly introduced so that they can be killed off, or brought in as replacements for older characters that have died. The second byproduct is that, the longer the series runs, the less plausible it becomes that any one character has survived for so long without the slightest scratch, bite, or splatter, EVER. The longer they live, the less believable it becomes, even in terms of zombie-apocalypse believable.

For Night Zero, I wanted to have a wide cast of characters, each with their own histories and objectives, and I wanted the freedom to move between them and tell all their stories. This first serial episode, “Ashes,” focuses on two such characters, and their bosses and enemies, while other vignettes and short stories expand the world with tales of other survivors. Allowing the characters to have close calls, gruesome fights, and near-defeats, but still carry on to tell the tale, greatly improves the freedom we have to explore the world. But in order to do this, and do it right, the most important decision came down to how Night Zero was going to do its “zombie” thing.

Over the past few years, the zombie genre has exploded in films and comics, and new ideas and implementations have broadened the horizon that was once strictly a Romero/Russo landscape. I wanted to avoid the “living dead” aspect, and focus more on the primeval human elements that drive us to destroy. Why bother with a corpse, inexplicably driven to kill a human, when you can explore a human, driven by their most basic instincts, driven to kill other humans in a gruesome display of dominance and power. With that came the natural decision to build on infection-based zombies, rather than animated corpses. A curious side effect is the blurred line between an angry person and an infected one (which serves some delightful plot points later on). When dealing with a virus that selectively shuts off and hyperactivates various brain chemicals, you create a very gradual transition from emotional human to terrible monster, rather than the moment-of-death that a living-dead zombie requires before the changeover.

This new style of zombie, more ’28 Days Later’ than ‘Dawn of the Dead’, still keeps the overwhelming-numbers and could-be-your-loved-one terror of the classic Romero zombie, but adds the element of logic and process solving… not going to be driving any cars or programming computers, but able to open doors, climb buildings, and even (in some cases) set traps and coordinate attacks. At the cost of a percentage of numbers (only persons specifically infected become part of the mob, as opposed to absolutely everybody who has died), the scare-factor is bumped up tenfold by their ability to run after you, and run fast.

Next week… how we took this “new millenium” zombie and turned it on its head to create the SCRATCHERS.