17 months later, a woman named Susan is working her way through a mostly abandoned town on foot, after having bought food; she has armed herself heavily to fend off the undead.

Though the undead seem somewhat bewildered and eager to please, she catches one trying to siphon gasoline from her car; she chases him down and shoots his gas canister, setting him on fire.

He pours her a glass of milk, but covertly slips poison into it before she drinks it; they then have sex by using Susan's pistol as a strap-on, as he is unable to achieve an erection himself due to being dead.

After experiencing difficulty in explaining his scripts, McCrae decided to shoot an example of the tone and style that he was attempting to convey; that project became Shatter Dead.

"[4] G. Noel Gross of DVD Talk called the film "an esoteric zombie odyssey that plods along like a Euro-horror epic punctuated by violent ejaculations of carnage.

It lacks sustained tension and resolution, and directs too much energy away from its fascinating conceptual possibilities in favor of trite exploitation concerns".

In Patterson's analysis, the zombies represent a challenge to the social order, including heteronormative concepts of sex and gender, and Susan lashes out at them so violently because she fears this change.