MovieChat Forums > Warning Sign (1985) Discussion > The infected people were kind of lame

The infected people were kind of lame


This movie was better than I expected. I liked the realistic depiction of the laboratory environment, the containment procedure and the building of tension in the first half of the movie. What I didn't like was the depiction of the infected people. I mean, it was not at all clear what the infection was supposedly doing to the people. The infected people acted almost normal, but they attacked all the intruders for some reason. They seemed to have retained rational thinking, ability to speak, only their faces were somewhat botched up. I wonder why the filmmakers didn't make the infected into some mindless zombies (which would have been a logical road). Or alternatively, the infected could have just died and be done with it. As they were, they did not add much to the movie.

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Well, I think the filmmakers wanted to stay away from the zombie chichè and the common over-the-top gore and endless scenes of zombies stumbling around doing nothing. The Borna virus, which the film briefly mentions, is a real virus and although it didn't cause effects as severe as the ones in the film, the virus has infected people in the past and caused Borna disease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borna_disease
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC88987/ Borna disease has been associated with some mental health disorders and "crazy" behavior, largely because it replicates in the nervous systems of warm-blooded animals and acts as a neurotoxin.
Warning Sign has nothing to do with zombies, it was just labeled as a zombie movie upon its DVD release as a marketing thing because of the zombie subgenre's popularity. The filmmakers probably could have just had all the infected people turn into zombies, but then they would be using the same worn-out thing that a number of other films have already done before.



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