How Was The First Zombie Created in ‘Army of the Dead’?

Warning: Graphic violent content & spoilers ahead

Zack Snyder’s 2021 film ‘Army of the Dead’ has spawned a cottage industry of Quora questions. Okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration. But the fact is – fans have been left with a lot of questions unanswered. And one of the first things one wonders about the flick is – how was that first zombie created?

In the film, it takes only one Zombie to turn the entire city of Las Vegas into flesh eating un-dead humans. But the viewer is never explicitly informed how he came into being. However in the beginning, it’s made pretty clear that he is being handled by the U.S govt/military and was being moved to a different facility. He is referred to as ‘payload’ and the military guys don’t even know what’s in the container that they are moving.

While the on-ground officers are not aware of what the savage-looking thing is, their top bosses are well aware of just how lethal he can be. One can only assume that the first Zombie was a result of some deliberate experimentation and that he either killed the creator or the creator died due to some other accident or maybe even suicide. Because whoever was responsible for the creation is definitely dead in the film, otherwise top U.S government officials wouldn’t have been looking for a sample of one of the alpha zombies to recreate them as “war weapons”.

There is also another possibility – that the Zombie is an alien. When two of the guarding officers are playing a guessing game of what the ‘payload’ in the container could be, one of them says “it’s an alien”. Also, those theories do make sense, because unlike all the regular zombies, when the first Zombie is shot in the head, there’s some blue blood that splatters from his brain. So the alien theory by some fans can be quite right.

The biggest explanation as to why Snyder did not reveal the origins in ‘Army of the Dead’ is pretty simple – viewers can look forward to the origin story of the Zombie Zeus in the sequel. Zack Snyder has already told the world that he plans on making a bigger/crazier sequel to the film. The climax definitely left a lot of scope for a follow-up story – Vanderohe is shown with a bite at the end and he is heading to Mexico city in a private jet. We can expect some Mexico mayhem in the next one!

This article was inspired by a Question on Quora.