This idea sprang from my other zombie post and the accompanying feedback.
Premise: A wealthy man is stricken with a fatal illness and is unable to find a cure in modern medicine. He turns to the occult for his salvation, particularly a necromancer. His brand of zombism is supernatural is origins. The series will center around his attempt to maintain a normal life and keep his secret his hidden. His employees helps him hide his illness as well as supply him with “live food”. There will be power plays by opportunistic friends and family members. It’s essentially Dynasty/Dallas with Zombies.
Symptoms: The infected will retain their intelligence and are effectively immortal (save a traumatic head injury or incineration). They are virtually indistinguishable from the living. The remnants need to consume flesh in order to retain their intelligence, stave off decomposition, and trigger regeneration. If a zombie goes too long without feeding he or she will revert to a ravenous feral state. The “illness” is spread through bites. The “sickness” infects every living thing bitten, so animals are not immune and the same symptoms apply to them as well. Scavengers will be infected if they feast on zombie flesh.
Images are courtesy of Comic Art Community (http://www.comicartcommunity.com/gallery/index.php)
Through the Shattered Lens 
I like this, especially the idea of taking a sort of soap opera approach to the whole thing. Plus, doing it as a tv series, you could bring in all sorts of supernatural elements to go along with the zombie. Would the main character still be pretending to be dying or would he announce that he had somehow been cured? Here’s the idea that popped into my head — what if, after dealing with the necromancer, he then brought in a fake faith healer and claimed that faith healer had healed him? And then you could kind of have this rivalry between the very real necromancer and the fake faith healer.
I have this character that I’ve been carrying around in my head for a while, a sort of supernatural, multi-dimensional secret agent/assassin. Her name is Emily Bonheur, appears to be in her early 20s though she’s actually almost 100 years old, and she basically wanders from situation to situation, guided by a cosmic force that’s as much a mystery to her as it is to those that she deals with. To a certain extent, she’s based on the Emily played by Cinzia Monreale in The Beyond. I may devote a full post for her but, anyway, whenever I thought about the type of situations that Emily Bonheur would appear in, they were situation simialr to the one you outlined above. 🙂
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Great ideas, Lisa Marie! Emily Bonheur could be the person who introduces the necromancer to the ailing billionaire or be the necromancer herself.The faith healer element works well because it would explain his “miraculous” recovery.
I was toying with the idea of the protagonist attempting to replicate the procedure scientifically for a profit. His attempt incurs the wrath of the necromancer.
My other idea would be to outing the protagonist as a zombie and turning him into a fugitive. His eventual fall from grace could be the catalyst for the zombie apocalypse.
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Emily, or at least the way I envision her, would more liklely be attempting to kill the man. 🙂 BUT — nothing says that your Emily would have to necessarily be my Emily, it’s all a simple matter of a name change. 🙂
When I think about it, I see both the Necromancer and the faith healer as women, both representing the two warring sides of your protaganist, the light and the dark. It would be ironic if the necromancer — having the powers she boasts of — was actually the light while the faith healer — being a fraud — was the dark. And what if the faith healer decided to actually learn the ways of magic as a result of her rivalry with the necromancer. Being used as a fake actually causes her to become authentic. I’m a huge fan of moral ambiguity. 🙂
Another thing to consider — is our zombie okay with the idea of having to consume flesh or is he tortured by it? Is he like Dexter, only trying to consume the guilty or is he just mostly concerned with survival?
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Oh okay so she could appear after his secret is revealed and he’s at the cusp of despair and unleashing his curse.
I saw the faith healer as a pastiche of the 700 Club host and those TV evangelist types, people who use religion to further their agenda. I haven’t given much thought to the necromancer. I originally envisioned him/her as a means for the zombie to cheat death.
He’s a businessman and a believer in survival of the fittest so he would consume those he viewed as rivals, threats, or expendable. There will be instances where he has a crisis of conscience i.e. at the throes of hunger and the only available sustenance is a friend or neutral party.
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He should have a really devoted secretary or something, someone who is secretly in love with him and, for the 1st season finale, he ends up eating her.
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This is very good. I like the origin of the main character’s salvation/affliction. And LMB’s season finale concept is intense. Even if that was a joke, you should actually write that. Have them actually fall in love and be devoted to each other, and then have him eat her, in spite of himself.
The series scope could be reigned in, at least at first, so as to be more of a character-study and a chronicle of individual survival. Since, at the beginning of the story, the main character is the alpha zombie, the series could play a bit like “Dexter”, wherein the main character is an unlikely lone protagonist with a secret. As you’ve established it, the audience would be in on the secret, and would want him to prevail, even though he must do terrible things in order to do so,
Part of the pathos would be his struggle to remain the only one of his kind – a zombie with a conscience. (When he eats his fiancé or wife at the end of the first season, it is because he had gone too long without feeding, and was in the referenced feral state.) He has to be constantly disciplined and vigilant so as not to let the infection spread. This would require him to follow proper procedure every time he feeds, in accordance with the biological rules you presented. But throughout the series, there could be near-misses, or even actual transmissions. But they would be isolated and controllable (for awhile).
The character’s efforts to prevent both his secret and his bio-agent from getting out could be major themes of the series. If you unleash the infection right away, with people and animals spreading it all around, you soon have nowhere to go. You have a typical zombie movie scenario very quickly. The character’s struggle to prevent that, and the horror of both his preventive acts and the incidences in which they fail, along with that of the things he must do to sustain himself, could provide plenty of narrative material for multiple seasons, as well as time to gradually build tension and anticipation up to a hells-a-poppin’ final season/episode.
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I think a nice twist that the necromancer adds is that he might not be the only one… there may have been more like him.
He’s not a nice person prior to his cure (imagine Gordon Gekko). His affliction and need to take human life humanizes him transforms him into a more empathic person.
KO, I was toying with the idea that the family pet or mansion staff is the first infected or he reverts to the feral state during a kidnapping attempt. He bites one of the kidnapper and kills and consumes the rest. While torture will not kill him the intense physical damage also triggers his ravenous state. The next episode deals with his search for the survivor.
His personal assistant would be aware of his situation and she would organize the clean up effort. She is his Pepper Potts/Mercy. She sacrifices herself to save his intended meal (a family member or his fiance). Her loss will shake his world.
He must kill his prey before he devours them to prevent the transmission of the curse.
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Well thought-out. It involves many complexities and contradictions, and it creates an interesting amd unusual vehicle for an analysis of human nature.
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