The Biology of B-Movie Monsters (2003)
49 comments
·March 28, 2025medymed
Zombie physiology also seems a stretch—-how do organisms with so many open and often bleeding dirt-covered wounds maintain hemodynamic stability in the face of inevitable septic shock and/or blood loss? A movie where a virus just makes infected people seem normal and very friendly but want to furtively bite other people to spread disease and then have delayed onset terminal sickness, like a subtle version of rabies, would be terrifying and more plausible.
gwd
In "World War Z" (the book), the scientific "questions" regarding how the zombies work are brought up but not answered. For instance, in the book, the zombies freeze solid in winter and when spring comes thaw and just start going again. The fact that ice crystals normally rupture cell membranes is brought up as a question of how this is possible; but no attempt is made to answer the question, because that's not the point of the book.
cainxinth
Wood frogs can survive freezing solid. Their liver produces glucose to flood all cells, prevent cell freezing, and protect against dehydration. Ice forms around cells and organs but not inside them, preventing lethal damage.
Terr_
In other words, the problem is "lampshaded": The author indicates to the audience that they are well-aware something doesn't make sense, in a way that encourages the reader to ignore it going forward.
IAmBroom
In Demon, the third in John Varley's Gaia trilogy of sci fi books, the (alien-manufactured) "zombies" were animated by colonies of worms that fed on the soft tissues of the corpse, and simply replaced the actions of the lifeless muscles. They thus had very human outlines, and if anything, far more horrifying looks than half-rotted corpses.
They also didn't last very long; they were meant as disposable remote-controlled troops.
jhbadger
The "original" (in the non-Vodoo sense) zombies shown in George Romero's "living dead" movies made no claims that the undead were scientifically explainable -- it was later movies like 28 Days Later that tried to rationalize them as infected, living people, to their detriment, I think.
gherkinnn
In 28 Days Later the infected starve to death, I can't remember them being overly supernatural.
It is The Walking Dead in which the zombies are basically immortal but useless. Unless the plot requires otherwise. After Season 1 it is a terribly written show. Don't get me started.
goatlover
28 Days Later is scarier because the infected, living humans can chase you down, climb and open doors, and the infection spreads much faster. I always wondered what The Walking Dead would have been like if the survivors couldn't clear out a prison full of zombies with hand to hand weapons. 28 Years Later is coming out this year, and they going to show what happens to humanity stuck in the UK that's been overrun by the Rage virus and presumably quarantined all this time by the rest of the world.
jhbadger
To me that makes it more boring though. The interesting part about the Romero movies is that the survivors underestimate both the zombies and their fellow survivors. They think because they can deal with individual zombies that they are safe. But they forget that zombies in mass are dangerous and that even more than that, their fellow survivors might be not be friendly.
dhosek
There is a passing mention of a radioactive satellite falling to earth in the movie, so there is an attempt at providing some explanation.
null
hnlosers
[flagged]
sharkjacobs
lmao damn get his ass
You're not wrong per se, but you are in comments of an article about applying rigorous scientific analysis of "B-Move Monsters" in exactly the way that you're criticizing? This is kind of the most appropriate place for someone to bring up this kind of thing, maybe go back to the comment section of a cinema sins video if you want to dunk on nerds for being too nerdy about art
hnlosers
[flagged]
hydrogen7800
The first section about "The Incredible Shrinking Man" reminded me of "Life At Low Reynolds Number", with the concept of "scaling".
>It helps to imagine under what conditions a man would be swimming at, say, the same Reynolds number as his own sperm. Well, you put him in a swimming pool that is full of molasses, and then you forbid him to move any part of his body faster than 1 cm/min. Now imagine yourself in that condition: you're under the swimming pool in molasses, and now you can only move like the hands of a clock. If under these ground rules you are able to move a few meters in a couple of weeks, you may qualify as a low Reynolds number swimmer.[0]
[0]https://cooperlab.wustl.edu/PracticalAdvice/Purcell%201977.p...
yesfitz
Always (usually) fun to read an expert talk about their field as it crops up in unusual places, at least when it's done without an ego. I've avoided the YouTube clickbait "real bank robber reviews movies" videos, but maybe I shouldn't.
Meta: Unfortunately, even the earliest snapshot of this page on the Wayback Machine doesn't contain working images: https://web.archive.org/web/20040624122432/https://fathom.li...
Renevith
If you're looking for some good quality "expert reviews their field as represented in movies" videos without too much clickbait, Vanity Fair has a long playlist of them that I enjoyed: https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZ2lDrDpOLrusAYQFq2yVHf...
Mistletoe
I've always loved this one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7qSiEKntQA
Alex Honnold Breaks Down Iconic Rock Climbing Scenes
damnitbuilds
I always thought that the Hulk running fast and landing too gently makes him appear too light:
alabastervlog
You can see similar issues in the recent American Godzilla movies. In the first one, Godzilla seems huge and heavy. In the later ones, they keep making it faster and more agile and the result is that it seems light and small (and extremely fake) no matter how many buildings fall over or ships get sunk.
bitwize
That could be because Japanese audiences complained that in Godzilla (2014), their favorite kaiju had gotten fat.
voidUpdate
I often think this when there's meant to be a big heavy thing moving around. I think it's one of my problems with Pacific Rim 2 vs the first film. In the first film, the robots were slow and heavy, in the second they were nimble and didn't have any of the weight behind them
0cf8612b2e1e
The new director started somewhere how he did not like how big and bulky the original robots were. Which was the entire point of the movie! They are beefy tanks. It felt as real as you could imagine building sized robots to be.
ViktorRay
The camera does shake when he lands to give the impression of a hard landing.
He probably should have also had a crater or something show up on the road when landing. Maybe that was a limitation of the CGI of the time though. If so maybe the camera shaking was a way to deal with that CGI limitation in order to make the Hulk seem like he had weight.
Terr_
Or superheroes picking up a car, when really they would just be ripping the bumper off it like soft cheese.
bediger4000
I worked as a stress analyst in aerospace for a while. Lots of good insights here about buckling of thin walled structures, with respect to arthropods and how to attack giant arthropods.
staplung
Another scientific bit that's almost always ignored in the growing/shrinking trope is that the pitch of one's voice would change. The incredible shrinking man would presumably have an inaudibly high pitched voice. His own cilia are shrinking too so it'd be interesting to work out if he could hear himself.
Variants like the Hulk also seem to violate the conservation of mass but it's amusing to imagine using that property to make an infinite power source. Put Bruce Banner/Hulk on one side of a teeter toter and a mass between that of Banner and the Hulk on the other, then get Banner/Hulk to alternate forms. Profit!
wrp
I highly recommend the books by Mark Glassy, The Biology of Science Fiction Cinema and Biology Run Amok!: The Life Science Lessons of Science Fiction Cinema.
fumufumufumu
Just the title reminds me of this wonderful talk
Godzilla: History, Biology and Behavior of Hyper-Evolved Theropod Kaiju
noob_justasking
For Jurassic park, I always wondered about how quick these adult dinosaurs must have grown. The large ones must have been, I don’t know, atleast 10 years? But then the park must have been much older than that. Is there some average or maximum kilograms per year that an animal can conceivably grow?
Jiro
Mothra is a naturally large creature, not a small creature that was enlarged.
adrian_b
The point was that insects cannot be enlarged much, because their skeleton, joints, respiratory system and circulatory system are optimized for small sizes and they no longer work at big sizes. Also their nervous system becomes too slow at big sizes.
To be able to live, Mothra would have to only look from the outside as an insect, but to have internally a structure like a vertebrate (and even that is limited in the achievable sizes).
In general, when analyzing the differences in structure between arthropods and vertebrates, the solutions used by the former are better at small sizes, while those used by the latter are better at big sizes. Even if there is an overlap in size between the biggest arthropods and the smallest vertebrates, neither vertebrates can be made as small as the smaller arthropods nor arthropods can be made as big as the bigger vertebrates.
api
Now do space opera!
The Expanse is probably the most realistic of fast-paced battles in the stars space opera, and I've seen analyses that show that the Epstein drive is at the edge of what physics would possibly allow. But those UN, MCRN, and Belter ships would need something you don't see at least in the series (or described in the books): heat sinks. They'd have to have radiators or they'd melt. Even if the drive was insanely efficient (like >90%) it would still generate hundreds of megawatts of heat at those power outputs. I suppose you could cool with propellant, but that would greatly reduce your specific impulse. To jet around the solar system like that would require very high specific impulse, meaning tiny amounts of propellant emitted at relativistic velocities.
Speaking of propellant velocity: those Expanse fusion rockets would not look like blowtorches. They'd look a bit more like the "laser beams" depicted here -- rocket plumes that look like straight lines because they're made of particles accelerated to like 3-5% 'c': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8vh2ER3ao4
Edit: ... and one more big inaccuracy: a torch rocket is also a death ray that would be horrifically effective even at very long range. The scenes where "they're trying to burn us up with their drive plume" would have to take place at much longer range or they'd just be dead. If you were near a ship all you'd have to do is flip around to hose your enemy down with X-rays and superheated plasma. You'd also never fire up one of those things anywhere remotely near a space station like Tycho unless you wanted to at least give everyone on board cancer. You'd have to use conventional rockets to get well clear before turning on the fusion drive.
No space opera I've seen gets this right. Any sufficiently powerful space drive (fusion/antimatter torch, let alone warp drives) is a weapon of mass destruction. Does Star Trek ever even examine what happens if you point the Enterprise at a planet and say "warp 9, engage!"? In The Expanse if the belters wanted to stick to Earth and Mars they could do simpler things than throwing stealth rocks if you really think about it. Those drives would be insanely deadly in many different ways.
It's one of the reasons I think war in space is gonna be rare. If it happens it's basically mutually assured destruction (MAD) given the power involved. Even a chemical rocket can generate velocities that make an impact have a yield comparable to a small nuclear device.
For All Mankind is almost space opera and is probably the most realistic.
IAmBroom
More generic space-opera problems:
Flying through an asteroid field looks a lot like flying through empty space. They aren't that close together, or they would pulverize each other into dust (and also coallesce into planetoids).
Entering the solar system of Sol doesn't involve close flyby's of any planets. Realistically, until you got close only Jupiter would even be visible on your video screens (everything else would look like stars - dots of light).
Laser anything doesn't involve bolts that flash; for that matter, laser light isn't really visible from anywhere but the path (unless you have smoke machines filling your universe). One ship shows a glimmer at the exit port (mostly from excess heat); the other shows a glowing meltdown point L/c seconds later. Very unimpressive to observers.
yencabulator
Larry Niven's books have lots of mentions of drive torches being "accidental weapons" that those in the in the know know to be such.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WeaponizedExhaus...
thrtythreeforty
A Deepness in the Sky alludes to this, if I recall - something about it being bad for your health to be around a starship's torch, but I forget the details, and anyway it's never a plot point, just world building.
chuckadams
The color text in Mass Effect goes a bit into the heat sink issue, in that the stealth systems on the Normandy couldn’t remain active indefinitely, since it would cook the occupants. Never comes up in game since flying the ship isn’t really a mechanic, it’s just a cutscene. Would have been neat to have a scene where everyone is slowly baking while hiding from the Reapers. Probably even got written and didn’t make the cut.
andrewflnr
I'm working on a story that gets... closer! At least, using star drives as weapons and the general MAD dynamics that produces are relevant to the plot. Also pervasive use of self-replicating bots as tools. No mention of radiators, though. They could be there in the background, I guess.
hyperion2010
In case you haven't see it. https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/
api
Oh yeah. A classic awesome site. I read once that the authors of both The Expanse and For All Mankind have cited that site as a source. Probably other hard SF too.
null
LaB was my PhD advisor! A thoughtful, creative, and curious scientist and a teacher extraordinaire.
For a slightly longer form take from Mike on B-movie monsters see:
LaBarbera, M. 2013. It’s Alive! The Science of B-Movie Monsters. Univ of Chicago Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo178413...
For more about Mike and his impact on the biological sciences at the Univ of Chicago see: https://mag.uchicago.edu/science-medicine/life-aquatic