I struggle to find either cliché occurrence of zombie outbreak particularly believable:
1. The 28-days-later fast rage zombie shit spreading through the city like wild-fire is the most scary and believable.
But if people turn within seconds of being bitten then how does the plague ever become global? You're not going to miss a raging zombie in your plane or boat and if it gets out you sure aren't staying on course till you reach another nation.
Also if they're pure rage, why don't they attack each other?
2. The slow lumbering zombie shit where it takes hours for you to turn once bitten. Kinda the opposite, I can see how it could easily spread from country to country, but how does it spread and decimate any population in the first place? Slow zombies where people become zombies after ages, surely quite easy to manage after the first outbreak. Slow zombies are only scary if there's tons of them, and how'd there ever end up being that many when you can just walk away from them?
How do the majority of people get converted in the first place? If they get mobbed by zombies surely by the time they've become a zombie themself they'd be fully eaten.
Walking Dead made things interesting in that dying from any cause would zombify you, that made things a bit more interesting. But never saw the appeal in a series that desperately wants to be like GoT 'wooooo, anyone can die!'.
I hope 'The Last Kingdom' will not be shit, it's already aired on BBC America but I'll watch it with mates when it airs on BBC2
28 days is a good movie but is incredibly low budget. One day Danny Boyle and Cillian Murphy walked into a pub and after ten pints of lager they decided to make a zombie movie... zombies aren't really zombies, not because they are fast and shit but because "actors" are paid like 50 pounds a day for doing their role of raging monsters. When real actors take the stage (military base) movie becomes a lot better. Sequel or 28 weeks is mostly crap movie with way higher budget. It makes no sense whatsoever but can pass for semi decent action movie. Maybe Danny will return to make 28 months in the future, who knows.
Why they don't attack each other? Ask fucking Danny Boyle mate, I have no frigging clue. Raging monsters in I Am A Hero are pretty much the same raging, fast monsters like in 28 days but they do in fact attack each other if there isn't living human present. Also that novel goes deeper into subject when one of the protagonist gets infected but not fully so you can understand a thing or two about a virus. Something Fear The Walking Dead was supposed to do but ultimately failed.
Romero zombies make sense in way their brain is rotten and their motor functions are slowed down, that's why they crawl and also why they can't see well (fucked up brain being the reason for it). They are boring however, because in their slow crawl you can hear them muttering brainz brainz we eat brainz. After Plants vs Zombies, good old Romero's zombies will never be the same in my eyes
As for spreading the disease. It spreads fast because of human nature. At first no one takes it seriously because zombies don't exist. Just another bite, crazy person, drug addict... even when considerably evidence that something ain't right is presented people still refuse to believe in it because it is supernatural shit. Only military takes it seriously but they can't do much unless they wipe out whole areas. Because of inertia of your average joe and his great numbers, zombie virus spreads fast. There's a movie called Contagion by Steven Soderbergh which shows how quickly a virus can travel around the world.
Now you can argue how that makes no sense and how we would bring it down to its knees even before it leaves zone where it originated. You can use Ebola as example, was a huge craze and we eventually put down that fire. But don't forget that Ebola is known virus for few decades and when it first struck it couldn't spread fast because of its nature. When it mutated two years ago which allowed it to travel distances, we were already familiar with it. Imagine if Ebola back in the 60s had same traits as strain from two years ago. Would be the same as with Spanish flu, maybe worse.