Why did Alice lead the survivors through the graveyard in Resident Evil: Apocalypse?

Question

After meeting/rescuing the survivors in the church, Alice walks with them while explaining some of the situation. She leads the group through a graveyard.

At this point, Alice already knows that the T-Virus can reanimate the dead, so it seems like walking directly through the graveyard - where there would be a concentration of reanimated dead bodies - would be a terrible idea. As one would expect, they are attacked by infected rising out of the graves.

The reasoning for taking this route is not explained within the film itself, but is this explained in any of the supplemental materials (commentary, etc)?

Related question: how would those who had already been buried have been infected by the T-Virus? Most of them showed fairly advanced decomposition.

Answer 1

Of course, the real answer is the one @ewanm89 hints at in his comment - it gave the filmmakers an excuse to film a massive zombie scene and show off Alice's fighting.

In-universe, Alice never explains her reasons for going through the graveyard; most likely it was just supposed to be the "back way out" of the church. However, your question itself may have least stumbled upon a legitimate justification for taking this path:

Related question: how would those who had already been buried have been infected by the T-Virus? Most of them showed fairly advanced decomposition.

It is known that the T-virus can reanimate dead people, and gives them a strong desire to kill and devour living tissues. As far as we know, it is transmitted via the air or via the exchange of bodily fluids (particularly saliva from bites). As you pointed out, this makes it seemingly unlikely that corpses buried in the ground would have a vector of infection. Most living people tend to avoid graveyards, making it a poor source of victims for the already-animated zombies. And if anything did reanimate from the graves, we'd expect their bodies to be so decomposed as to be nearly harmless. This last bit turns out not to be true, given how the T-virus works, but remember that no one in the church knows much about the virus yet.

Given all of that, especially in an emergency situation, it almost makes sense to risk the lesser-traveled back path through a graveyard than trying to run out the front door.

Answer 2

Most of the movie versions of RE' have chunks taken directly out of the games that had been around for a good 10 years before the films.

This scene was a redo/re-imagining for plot reasons of a part of RE: Code Veronica. In which remains of prisoners were buried in shallow graves as a means of disposal.

Answer 3

In actuality, I think the graveyard wasn't such a bad plan. There aren't that many people walking around the graveyard, so you're not very likely to run into the undead. In addition, any dead people are buried six feet underground in a wooden box. It probably wouldn't be as easy for them to dig out as it was in the movie. Unless of course Raccoon City has the laziest gravediggers in the world, who just bury people one foot underground.