Everything's Deader with Zombies

The brains to make your country thrive in a world where everyone wants to eat it.

Steve: All right. What's with the Zombies?
Eric: Oh them. [...] They only come up here when they're bored.

— Radioactive Panda

There's a Romero-style zombie shambling around, but it's not a Zombie Apocalypse. So what's it doing here? Because zombies are cool. Whether it's to set up a Low Fantasy setting with necromantic Horrors, add an element of comedy, or simply to add variety, some works of fiction feature Zombies in a less than central position. It doesn't even have to have a reason. The zombie is there just because.

This is something of a popular advertising gimmick for games, MMORPG's, and Comic Books these days. Just like slapping Wolverine on the cover adds to sales, an Episode of the Dead, "Halloween Special", or other stunt can drive up sales and give a fun Breather Episode from more plot heavy story arcs.

This could also work if there actually is a Zombie Apocalypse, but it's not part of the main story. It's just thrown in there as a parody or homage with little lasting effect on the plot.

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Examples:

Advertising

• FedEx took it to the max in this commercial which features four survivors, of which one was infected. The security guard, who slightly resembles Francis from Left 4 Dead, wants to brain him but the Asian woman demands they wait for the antivirus. Miraculously, the FedEx delivery arrives unharmed.
• A Starburst commercial has a guy saying that Starburst is a contradiction, being "solid yet juicy". He is then interrupted by a zombie sitting next to him who rebuts him, saying that the real contradiction is "living dead". Why is there a zombie? Where did it come from? Why is it reading a newspaper? Who knows.
• In a Toshiba laptop commercial, an inferior laptop triggers a chain reaction of mishaps involving a power station, a nationwide blackout, and spoiled milk, culminating in a horde of zombies.
• An ad from Puerto Rico for the Toyota Highlander. "Just as they adapted to a world of zombies, the Highlander adapts to your life." Possibly the most off-topic ad ever.
• There's a "turn off your cell phone" advisory that runs in certain movie theaters depicting a Too Dumb to Live woman talking on her phone who nearly gets caught in a Showdown at High Noon, and a battlefield, before finally being overwhelmed and devoured by a horde of zombies.

Anime & Manga

• Black Butler, chapter 53. From the setup, one would have initially expected Frankenstein's Monster.
• D.Gray-Man has the Order Relocation Arc, which is started off with a faux Zombie Apocalypse when Mad Scientist Komui gives the Science Team members "Komuvitamin D". Komui created the Komuvitamin D, but it was the ghost that gave it to poor Arystar Krory and started the whole mess.
• The political drama episode of Excel♡Saga (which throws in a lot of things just for the hell of it).
• Is This A Zombie? has Ayumu, a zombie, as the main character WITH A HAREM.
• In Midnight Horror School, there's a soft spoken zombie boy named Zobie who would rather take naps than eat brains.
• The "Thriller Bark" Arc of One Piece has an army of zombies and their creators as the major antagonists. Of course, being One Piece, these zombies are considerably more comedy-flavored than usual.
• The Negative Continuity Halloween episode of Samurai Champloo had zombies in it.
• Sankarea is a zombie in a romantic comedy.
• Sid Barret from Soul Eater; an awesome, blue zombie — with tattoos! Actually, he's only seen alive in one of the first three episodes where the series is running through its Debut Queue, after that he's killed and well... a zombie. He's not just slight comic relief with his "That's the man I used to be" lines, but he's also an extremely skilled fighter and weapon technician.
• The enemies of StrikerS Sound Stage X? The Mariage, an army of Kamikaze Super-Soldier Cyborg Zombies.
• Zombie Land Saga hides its true colors for the first seven minutes... before revealing that, no, it's not a standard zombie apocalypse, the zombies are actually going to be Idol Singers. Much fun is had lampooning both zombie tropes and idol singer tropes.

Card Games

• Topps has a card range called Hollywood Zombies.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! has the field spell Zombie World, which makes all monsters on the field and in the graveyards Zombie-type.

Comic Books

• Blackest Night shows that the only thing worse than a horde of intelligent zombies is a horde of intelligent zombies with Green Lantern Rings.
• Disney Ducks Comic Universe: Carl Barks and Don Rosa Scrooge McDuck stories have Bombie the Zombie, a zombie who chases Scrooge around the world. He's a bit slow, so it may take years for him to catch up after a defeat.
• Hellboy had a small eastern European town beset by a horde of zombies. The townsfolk took care of it.
• The second issue of the Funny Animal Stoner comic Horndog is based around a zombie invasion.
• IDW Comics had a Crisis Cross Through miniseries called "Infestation", crossing Zombies vs. Robots over with Star Trek, The Transformers, G.I. Joe, Ghostbusters, and Pocket God (but not said five licensed properties with each other), with canonical consequences for everyone involved. Trek and Transformers fan reaction has been... about as bad as expected.
• Golden Age Marvel Comics (back when it was usually called Timely Comics) had its super heroes fighting zombies of one sort or another all the freaking time. The Golden Age in general was fond of zombies as antagonists (DC's Solomon Grundy dates from this period, after all), but Timely in particular used a lot of them.
• In The Multiversity #2, the heroes of Earth-7 are turned into zombies and summoned by the corrupted Nix Uotan during his attack on Earth-8. Meanwhile, the previously deceased Optiman can also be seen during a montage having been brought back the same way.
• Solomon Grundy, named after the nursery rhyme.

Fan Works

• Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): This Godzilla MonsterVerse fanfiction, following a heroic Monster X and a new Kaiju war against the regenerated Ghidorah, features an Undead Abomination Virus called the Many, which are outright compared to zombies. They're mainly zombies just because that's cool and because the author is a Halo fan, although the Many do play an important role in the plot and act as Ghidorah's agents.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fangame Story of the Blanks has Apple Bloom stumbling into a Town with a Dark Secret, and all the ponies there were cursed in ages past following a murder, becoming zombies. Apple Bloom barely escapes becoming one herself (if you win).
• Key antagonists in the battle on the Plains of Death in With Strings Attached. Paul loves them because destroying them doesn't compromise his Actual Pacifism.

Film — Live-Action

• In An American Carol, Malone has a vision of the ACLU as relentless zombies.
• During the climactic confrontation, Rumpelstiltskin uses his magic to summon zombies to help him to claim the soul of baby Johnny.
• In Deathstalker II: Duel of the Titans, the ... hero? ... let's say protagonist stops to rob a tomb he's travelling past, and has to fight off a zombie horde for his troubles.
• After being a supernatural Slasher Movie for most of its run, The Dead Pit throws a horde of zombies into the mix.
• Fido, wherein people keep zombies as pets.
• It's only natural for Stay Tuned to feature these since it mostly takes place in Hell which, however, is a satellite TV broadcaster. The "Duane's Underworld" segment takes the cake with Wayne and Garth as zombies.

Gamebooks

• Lone Wolf:
  • Book 2 of the series, Fire on the Water, has a whole ghostly fleet maned by undead as the last obstacle of the story, including zombie crewmates. Since this is just after Lone Wolf gains the Sommerswerd, the ultimate weapon against the living dead, they really aren't much of a threat.
  • Book 6, The Kingdoms of Terror, has evil lordling Roark raising zombies from a cemetery to try killing Lone Wolf, but he quickly lose control and they attack his men.
  • Book 17, The Deathlord of Ixia, is filled to the brink with undead, including Drakkarim Zombies. Unlike previous zombies in the series, those can be very tough, even with the Sommerswerd.

Literature

• Anita Blake. Anita's vampire hunting and police consulting (among, er. . . other things) continually makes making her "day job" of raising zombies much more difficult.
• The Cauldron-Born in The Chronicles of Prydain are reanimated corpses that exist only to slay for Arawn.
• Colt Regan: Demon Hunter contains a section where zombies show up, for almost no reason, which the author will tell you was in there because zombies rule.
• The "Green Men" from The Dark Tower series by Stephen King, though they're actually mutants.
• The Dinosaur Lords, a Days of Future Past fantasy infused with dinosaurs, gets suddenly invaded by Technically Living Zombies partway through book two.
• Discworld's zombies, seeing as they're basically the same person's mind and body, just... dead, aren't usually plot-central.
  • One member of the City Watch, Reg Shoe, is a zombie, for example, and a reasonably okay guy.
  • The only "bad" zombie is Mr. Slant, but that has more to do with him being an Amoral Attorney than a zombie.
  • The novel Reaper Man details an actual zombie apocalypse (or more precisely, an undead apocalypse... with zombies!) caused by Death being fired for taking too much of an interest in his work. Hilarity Ensues.
    • Notable in having a zombie protagonist, Windle Poons, for one of its two main plot-threads.
  • There's zombies in Monstrous Regiment as well, and they're the more classic variety, but still don't eat any brains, they're just restless dead followers of the Duchess. Reg Shoe, who's accompanying Vimes on a diplomatic mission, regards them as an embarrassment (although this is the same guy who gives lectures to graveyards).
• There IS a short story titled "Everything's Better with Zombies".
• The Inferi from Harry Potter are zombies in everything but name (with the Frankenstein monster's Pop-Cultural Osmosis fear of fire).^note It should be noted that Romero zombies are also scared of fire, as seen in Night of the Living Dead when they use fire to keep the ghouls from entering the house.
• There's a Kelly Link short story called "The Hortlak" about a convenience store patronized by the undead; they're not actually carnivorous, but the clerks find them unsettling.
• The Malloreon has a forest full of Raveners (again, zombies in all but name), which the heroes have to pass through.
• Pride and Prejudice and Zombies takes the text of Pride and Prejudice and inserts paragraphs of fighting zombies.
  • Seeing the rights for this book were being disputed by Hollywood, a Brazilian movie magazine parodied this trope by suggesting/creating other stories WITH ZOMBIES: Kramer vs. Kramer vs. Zombies, Undead Poets Society, ZOMB•E, and Gone with the Zombies.
  • And Brazil also saw its own version: Machado de Assis' classic novel The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas became The Undead Memoirs of Bras Cubas.
• Zombies appear in Xanth, but they are simply undead instead of dangerous. They tend to be emotionally upsetting since they are ambulatory beings in a state of continuous rot, but The Power of Love can help them regain their humanity until they are indistinguishable from living persons. The water of healing springs can also reverse the rotting, but that's a less effective and more temporary measure.
• Zombies vs. Unicorns: Team Zombie thinks so.

Live-Action TV

• Angel:
  • In "Habeas Corpses", Wolfram & Hart is being destroyed by a terrible monster, and most of the lawyers turned into zombies. It was a supernatural safeguard against unwelcome intruders. After all, Wolfram & Hart is led by very old demons who do not want to share their secrets. And fortunately for Gunn, they left out the "Bite makes a convert".
  • In "Provider", there was also one guy who was a zombie, and all he wanted to do was hook up with his ex-girlfriend. It's unknown what exactly brought him to undeath. The girlfriend poisoned him. He died. He came back as a zombie. She forgave him for cheating. He forgave her for killing him. They kissed and made up.
  • In an earlier episode, "The Thin Dead Line", Angel and Kate discovered a police chief had raised all the dead cops in a particular bad area of LA as zombie policemen.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer
  • "Dead Man's Party" has a mask that is making a bunch of people come back as homicidal zombies, which had no real relevance to the ongoing plot about Buffy returning after having run away from home. ("Look at my mask. Isn't it pretty? It raises the dead. Americans!")
  • In "The Zeppo", Xander runs into a guy who somehow has the ability to reanimate dead people with a special charm. They still keep their intelligence, but they also keep their wounds.
• The Charmed Ones in Charmed (1998) have to fight against zombies created by a necromancer and Zankou.
• In the Community episode "Epidemiology", the students and staff of Greendale Community College have to deal with a mysterious fever that seems very similar to that of a stereotypical zombie virus. Their memories are conveniently wiped at the end of the episode, and it will likely never be mentioned again.
• The Season 3 Finale of Deadliest Warrior.
• Degrassi: The Next Generation: "Degrassi of the Dead"
• Doctor Who:
  • In "The Web of Fear", the evil Great Intelligence operated chiefly through the body of Staff Sergeant Arnold, KIA early on in the emergency.
  • Similarly, a character in "The Greatest Show in the Galaxy" gets reanimated by the bad guys for no apparent reason except Rule of Cool.
  • The Ninth Doctor, Rose and Charles Dickens team up to fight zombies in Victorian Cardiff on Christmas Eve in "The Unquiet Dead".
• Fraggle Rock: Doc is excited about one of the games for his new computer.
  Doc: Zombie Attack! "Chase the alien enemy zombies from outer space, hurling flaming marshmallows!" Oh, yes, Sprocket! It sounds like a challenge!
• Game of Thrones: Corpses touched by the White Walkers turn into undead "wights" under their control. These wights are resistant to normal weapons but can be destroyed with fire, giving a lot of credence to the wildling tradition of cremation.
• House features zombies in a fantasy sequence during the seventh season episode "Bombshells". House kills zombie versions of Foreman, Chase, Taub and Masters with a cane that doubles as a shotgun and axe.
• The Spaced episode "Art" features Tim hallucinating a zombie invasion at a theatre after spending 24 hours solid playing Resident Evil while on speed, then eating too many Twiglets at the post-show party.
• Supernatural didn't have a Romero-style zombie until the fifth season, although there was a second-season episode with a "classic necromancy" form of zombie. At one point Sam tricked Dean into going on a personal mission by claiming they had to go zombie-hunting, and Dean really seemed to be looking forward to it. Although the victims of the Croatoan virus are zombie-like.

Music

• Iron Maiden and its mascot Eddie. One VH1 countdown said while discussing them that "classical music would sell much more if they had zombies on the cover!"
• T-ara made three versions of the music video for their song "Lovey Dovey" that included a zombie version. It comes complete with a nod to "Thriller" by Michael Jackson.
• The Zombeatles, a The Beatles cover band with zombie-themed parody songs like "Ate Brains a Week," "Dead Prudence," and "Hey Food."
• The Zombies, that had disbanded after two poor-selling albums. And adequate to the name, in a way became famous after 'dying', as one year after the split "Time of the Season" was issued as a single and turned out to be a huge hit, its album Odessey and Oracle, was Vindicated by History, and all this led to some reunions decades later.

Pro Wrestling

• The Undertaker, a wrestling zombie introduced during The '90s which went on to become one of the most successful gimmicks in the business, remaining one of the most prominent wrestlers in WWE even though his presence contrasts sharply with the more normal gimmicks of today.
• It what may have been evidence that the WWE version of ECW was indeed a Franchise Zombie, the very first wrestler to compete was... the Zombie.
• During the month of October, WWE.com has something called WWE Zombies gallery where the superstars themselves were Zombiefied.

Tabletop Games

• Most of the "Deadworlds" (sample campaign settings) of All Flesh Must Be Eaten would have been normal examples of whatever genre they are supposed to represent (anything from a Star Wars knock-off up to a Roy Rogers-singing cowboy-craze Western) except for the Zombie Apocalypse barging in to ruin everybody's day.

Theme Parks

• In The Eighth Voyage of Sindbad show at Universal's Islands of Adventure, one of Miseria's evil minions is a decomposing zombie that nevertheless is able to to hold its own in combat.

Video Games

• Some of the Army Men games have zombies thrown in just for the hell of it.
• Bang-On Balls: Chronicles: The first level of the game. The Viking Invasion, contains random zombies in the graveyard for no apparent reason other than it being a graveyard.
• Borderlands: The first DLC has zombies.
• The original Breath of Fire has a whole town (aptly named Romero) full of the walking dead. Though they don't try to harm you, it still becomes your duty to put them back into the ground.
• Call of Duty: World at War now has four bonus levels featuring — what else — Nazi Zombies. (Okay, one level has you fighting Japanese zombies, but "Nazi Zombies" is more fun to say.) Some of them even goosestep instead of shambling.
• Typically the first Mook you'll encounter in Castlevania games.
• As did City of Heroes. In addition to the Zombie invasions in City of Heroes, there are zombies in pretty much every flavour wandering about as antagonists, or, if you're a villain, as minions. Nothing prevents you from stopping crime and protecting the innocent as a zombie hero either.
• Quarantine Mode in Combat Arms.
• In the Diablo series, certain monsters can resurrect the undead.
  • In Act V of Diablo II, Reanimated Horde-type monsters have a random probability of resurrecting themselves, and can do so up to three times.
• The Zombie in the Disgaea series is one of the few monster classes that's present in every single game.
• Most of the baddies in the Doom games are demons, but there's no shortage of undead. Most of these are soldiers that can fire their guns at you, but 3 introduces the classic, flesh eating, slow shambling variety.
• Dragon Age: Origins has corpses possessed by demons; what kind of monster they will be depends on the variety of demon. One corpse might want to simply bash your face in, another might want to chew it off, and still others might melt it off with fireballs. Party member Alistair collectively refers to them, however, as "brain-eaters."
• Draugrs from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
  • Not to mention every other game still has Zombies. The first few games they were generic. but brutally hard to kill and could give you the "Rotting" disease which if you don't get it cured you turn into a zombie and game over. While Oblivion had variations, such as Headless Zombies. Even in Skyrim aside from Draugr you could become a Necromancer and revive corpses into regular zombies to fight for you, even random wild animals.
• Fallout has ghouls, unfortunate folks who got a lethal dose of radiation and didn't die. Many of them are quite sane, if a little worse for wear, but are the new victims of bigotry in a world where human slavery is colorblind, and are often forced to eke out an existence separate from the rest of society. Why? Because at least some degenerate into the feral zombies that give the civil ones such a bad name. The sad irony is, the isolation and forced habitation in radioactive areas are the very things that seem to accelerate the process. There is also a strain of plain old bigotry against different folks (the different, in this case, being sterile, seemingly unaging people with rotting skin).
• One of the recurring monsters in Final Fantasy was Zombies. Even in Final Fantasy Tactics A2, a character named Frimelda Lotice used to be a zombie.
• As if being hounded by Jason Voorhees himself in Friday the 13th wasn't enough, there are also zombies of his past victims shuffling around the campsite.
• Zombies are the most common enemy in Gamer 2. They are completely irrelevant to the storyline.
• Grand Theft Auto IV has a "viral" achievement called "Let Sleeping Rockstars Lie" which you get be killing someone who has it already (the developers started with it, so it spread from them). It unlocks the ability to play as a zombie in a speedo. No joke.
• Guild Wars has at least 2 different kinds of zombies (without including necromancer minions). There are about 3 major zombie armies, (the Orr zombies, the plague zombies and Joko's zombies) as well as numerous smaller groups. (Unless you count Joko's zombies as mummies.)
• GunFu Fighter sees you fighting mostly human mooks or robots, until after the first boss where you're unexpectedly attacked by zombies. It makes sense since the game's set in a simulated environment.
• Half-Life:
  • Half-Life 2: "We don't go to Ravenholm..."
  • Apart from that rather infamous level, both games have zombies as fairly weak, slow opponents that are only really threatening in large numbers or small spaces. Apart from (in the second game) the fast ones. And the poison ones.
  • Notably, the creatures which cause the zombies are, in the sequel, loaded into artillery and used as offensive weapons.
• The inside of the whale's body in Hell Pie is infested with "ghoulies." Don't ask how the human corpses got their or how they came back to life. The game doesn't tell you.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The series has Redeads that leave Link paralyzed with fear in order to come closer and suck the life out of him (by apparently leaping onto and humping him to death).
  • The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening has actual zombies in the graveyard area.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword has Cursed Bokoblins, half-undead shuffling abominations who also attempt to cling onto Link and hurt him, albeit without the humping.
• LittleBigPlanet has numerous zombie-themed costumes.
• When the makers of The Lord of the Rings Online had to bring the barrow-wights to life, they went the traditional "rotting animate corpses" route. Wights aren't much described in Tolkien's works, but they do have a physical form (Frodo cuts off one of their hands) so going with a medieval zombie look isn't such a stretch.
• Mass Effect has husks — basically, cybernetic zombies created by devices known as "dragon's teeth" which are enormous spikes that bodies are impaled on. While impaled, cybernetic implants are put into the body to make it obey orders and give it one of several abilities, most commonly a large electrical explosion. In Mass Effect 2, new variants of the husks appear, including a version that consists of several bodies mashed together and equipped with a huge cannon, a massive amalgam of about thirty corpses turned into an enormous living, flying tank, and a form of husk that is on fire.
• Metal Slug 3 has a zombie level, featuring a contagious outbreak at a civilian crash site. Those who get infected die, get hit by lightning and come back to life as a zombie. If this happens to the player, they become less mobile and lose everything but their pistol, but it averts One Hitpoint Wonder unless they get hit with the substance again. Trying to use a grenade results in them vomiting large amounts of blood across the screen at everything in front of them, and it's VERY powerful, able to take down bosses in one hit. It can be cured with medicine that enemies drop, but why would you do that? And then the clones of your captured ally get infected during the final mission.
• Metroid:
  • Metroid Prime 2: Echoes starts out with Samus entering a Galactic Federation base, only to find that all of the soldiers she had been tasked with rescuing have been brutally murdered. As she investigates further, all of the corpses suddenly come back to life as undead "Dark Troopers" and start attacking her. They continue to shamble about the base even after she leaves, but they never have a significant appearance later on in the game's plot.
  • Metroid Fusion also has "zombie researchers" (slimy X imitations of human beings) that have little to no plot significance.
• Minecraft. One of the earliest added, and least dangerous hostile mobs in the game; although as per usual with this trope, they can be a bit of a problem in groups. If they attack a village, they can turn villagers into more of them, though it is possible to cure infected villagers without killing them.
  • Zombified Piglins are even worse. They show up in groups, most often in the Nether, and attacking one will bring the entire group down on your head. And they are much tougher, faster and stronger than regular zombies.
• Mother:
  • EarthBound (1994): The town of Threed has been overtaken by zombies and ghosts by the time the heroes get there, and the town's story arc involves stopping the invasion.
  • Mother 3 has some zombies in the beginning of Duster's chapter, who were (coincidentally) Hinawa and Claus like. One of the zombies Exaggerates the creepy by commenting on how much Duster has grown since she knew him, then attacking anyways.
• Zombies are very common enemies in Necesse, even though there's no Zombie Apocalypse officially going on. Zombies just pop up out of nowhere at night or in caves for the sake of having enemies to fight.
• Neverwinter Nights featured several areas infested with zombies.
• Nox has zombies as standard monsters mid-game (and they get upgraded later), but it is justified by the fact that the hero's primary enemies are necromancers.
• Organ Trail is a zombie infested version of The Oregon Trail.
• The Dustmen in Planescape: Torment use zombies as laborers and offer people large amounts of money in exchange for use of their body after they die.
• Plants vs. Zombies, a Tower Defense game where you fight off invading zombies with an army of plants.
• Postal 2 features its own mad-cow-tourettes zombies when an inevitable apocalypse hits Paradise, causing havoc alongside terrorist attacks, insane protesters, drunken rednecks, fanatic church workers, and cats raining from the sky. Just one of those days.
  • Eternal Damnation, a standalone mod developed for Postal 2 and later released officially by the Postal devs, puts the player in the shoes of a wrongfully-accused murderer escaping from an insane asylum in the midst of a deadly zombie outbreak, though the zombies take a backseat to his own antics.
• The first level of 1998 racing game Radikal Bikers has you drive through a graveyard where there are zombies wandering around, although they can't actually hurt you; the worst they can do is slow you down if you run over too many of them.
• The DLC for Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare uses the original setting of game, but throws in a zombie plague to create instant awesome.
• Every game in the Saints Row series has at least one homie who ends up dying in a cutscene, who you then have the option of bringing back as a zombie. The Third finally makes them part of the actual storyline when the Boss accidentally unleashes a virus over one of the islands of Steelport, resulting in the bridges to it being raised and everybody within becoming zombies for the rest of the game.
• The Simpsons arcade game has a level in a cemetery. While the ghosts are mooks in bedsheets, the zombies are real.
• Nightmare in Northpoint, a Halloween themed DLC for Sleeping Dogs (2012), has Chinese vampires.
• The Soul Series' Cervantes is one, while Astaroth is a "Golem" (read: Frankenstein's Monster).
• StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty has a mission where you have to fight off colonists who are infested by the Zerg. They're zombies in all but name.
• Uncharted: Drake's Fortune is an Indiana Jones-style action/adventure that ticks along at an even pace, pitting you against your rival's hired thugs, ancient death traps, and a journal full of cryptic instructions. Suddenly, Zombies!
• Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines has a cemetery level full of zombies at one point, in direct homage to Romero films. The exact reason for their appearance has never been explained, considering that no Gehenna actually happened. There are two other major zombie sequences in the game — one caused by a virus and the other caused by vampire necromancy. Despite the stark difference between the origins of the three zombie groups in the game, they all move, act, and are essentially the exact same things.
• Warcraft games have plenty.
  • The first campaign in Warcraft III was about trying to stop a Zombie Apocalypse, the second had you playing the other side and continuing where the first one left off. Following campaigns also had you fighting against the undead. In the Frozen Throne Expansion the Night Elves campaign had a visit into a zombie-infested lands, Blood Elves campaign begun with trying to stop a massive wave of undead. And of course there was an Undead campaign in which you continued to crush the remaining bastions of humanity before first pausing for a civil war and later leaving for Northrend.
  • In World of Warcraft, the free-willed zombies are one of the playable races for the Horde. There also were two zombie invasions. First one heralded the introduction of Naxxramas. The second unleashed the plague of undeath on the lands — you could become infected and, if not cured in time, transform into an evil^note not the normally playable one zombie and spread The Virus further. The second invasion heralded the Wrath Of The Lich King expansion, in which the players task is to venture into the Northrend, infested with undead from top^note Big Bads Evil Tower of Ominousness is the highest point of the continent to bottom^note the ruins of arachnid's civilization, conquered and converted by the undead.
• The graveyard scenario in Waxworks (1992) has a never-ending supply of respawning zombies roaming around the area.

Webcomics

• Dead Metaphor is a comedy set in a world plagued by zombie outbreaks. It seems people have gotten used to zombies, treating them as annoyances and lower-class citizens.
• Subverted in Gone with the Blastwave, where the zombies are actually disguised civillians who do this to frighten away the soldiers. And not because of any political motives, either, it's just because they literally have nothing better to do in the wasteland. They even place bets on it for crying out loud!
• {...} from Hanna Is Not a Boy's Name
• In Holiday Wars, a zombie Tyrannosaurus Rex shows up in this Episode 47.
• MegaTokyo has zombies occasionally pop in to destroy parts of Tokyo. They have to get proper approval just like everyone else, though.
• The main characters of Loserz all like videogames with zombies, and then there's this strip.
• Sarilho: the Lusitanians big approach to battle is to raise dead soldiers to do the dirty work for them.
• Sluggy Freelance. Three words: Zombie Fun Lab.

Web Original

• Discussed in Ep. 3 of Monster Management from Cracked. Chet and Aisha realize that taking the Sex Sells approach to zombies didn't work, but didn't stop people from loving zombies either because zombies are a money-making machine.
• Empire did "20 Movies Improved By Zombies".
• Gaia Online had its first Zombie Apocalypse on Halloween 2004. The zombie avatar skin was supposed to be temporary and was eventually wiped out altogether due to server problems, but the skin was so popular that in Halloween 2005 another race of zombies, the Grombies, were introduced. After a while, newer users who joined after the event complained that they couldn't get a zombie skin, so a Grombie knock-off skin was introduced via the Death Whisper evolving item, and later another zombie skin was introduced via the 2008 Halloween event. Gaia Online members really like zombies, it would seem. The zombies are not usually part of the plot during the rest of the year but the skins are still fairly common. The original zombie skin has been re-released as an equippable item.
• If you can't beat' em... employ them! The League of S.T.E.A.M. have developed "domestication collars" in order to employ zombies as servants.
• In the official Lost podcast, a Running Gag was that after the show's finale in the sixth season, there would be a Season 7, "Lost: Zombies" with "everybody who we've killed off over the years coming back and trying to eat brains." The producers also released a fake script where Walt becomes a zombie.
• Jonni Rotten in the Metro City Chronicles.
• SCP Foundation: SCP-008. The world accessible through SCP-093 suffered what's essentially a Zombie Apocalypse under the application of a truly epic instance of Our Zombies Are Different. They fit the archetype of the endlessly hungry, seemingly-mindless hordes of the restless dead, but... well, when the smallest difference is that they're up to six stories tall, you know you're dealing with something weird here.
• Mur Lafferty's audio drama The Takeover. It's like the American venison of The Office (US) but with zombies. And also funny. Oh, and there's a cameo by Jonathan Coulton in the last episode of season 1.

Western Animation

• One Buttons and Mindy segment of Animaniacs was a Homage to Michael Jackson's "Thriller".
• The Batman: The episode "Strange New World" deals with this, where Doctor Strange releases a serum that effectively turns the citizens of Gotham into zombies. It being a kid's show, Batman has 42 hours to administer an antidote before the effects become permanent. Subverted at the end of the episode, when it's revealed that no one was really zombified, it was just a hallucination caused by Strange.
• In the Catscratch episode Zombie Party a Go-Go, Blik coldly disallows Waffle to part take in the party preparation, until Gordon gives him a helpful job in making dip. However, despite Waffle's incompetent nature, he picked the Scottish Book of the Dead rather than the regular blue cook book that Gordon had requested him to acquire. Consequently, he created dip that is lime greenish in colour which caused the corpses of deceased people to reanimate. Blik had recklessly let the Zombies inside, mistakenly thinking that they are the guests that he was looking for. But eventually he finds out that the undead monsters aren't the important people. Eventually, after the Zombies are done with the food, they turn on Gordon and the rest of the gang, forcing them to fight against them in order to survive.
• The "Attack of the Zombies" episode of Code Lyoko. When X.A.N.A. possesses Kiwi, it turns him into the carrier for a virulent virus that turns those it infects into zombies.
• One episode of The Fairly OddParents! has Timmy accidentally reviving a zombie version of his dead pet gerbil.
  • Overlaps with Revenant Zombie. Eddie the gerbil doesn't just come back; he comes back sentient, and clearly pissed about having died of starvation to begin with.
• The first episode of Gravity Falls season 2, "Scary-oke", has a brief zombie invasion that threatens to take down the Mystery Shack. It's averted through the wonders of terrible karaoke.
• Invader Zim breaks into the mall to return a video tape, leading the security guard to release his zombie army. Played for Laughs in that the zombies just sort of stumble around aimlessly, mostly bumping into each other and ignoring Zim completely.
• Johnny Test: "Johnny Zombie Tea Party" had Porkbelly's founding fathers as zombies who don't eat brains but love iPods and TV. Although, they do threaten to lower the property value.
• In Odd Job Jack, Leo creates an army of zombies to out-evil Jack, but the city accepts them, finding the swarm preferable to meter maids. Heck, many even find their presence an improvement!
• The "Abracadaver" episode of The Powerpuff Girls (1998). A local magician named Al Lusion pulls a deathly trick where he comes back from the dead as a zombie to haunt Townsville.
• Enzo in ReBoot once became a zombie in a game.
• Robot Chicken: After being killed in the second season finale, Seth Green and friends return as zombies. They stop their rampage once they read their new contract with health benefits.
• The "Jack and the Zombies" episode of Samurai Jack features Jack being led into a cemetery by Aku, where an army of undead lay in wait.
• In the first Halloween episode of South Park, Kenny becomes a zombie after morticians accidentally embalm him with Worcestershire sauce.
• The "Legacy of Terror" episode of Star Wars: The Clone Wars. When Luminara goes missing, Obi-Wan and Anakin lead a platoon of clones in search of her. When the search leads to a mysterious lair, the Jedi are faced with a horde of undead warriors."
• Zombies are one of the many bizarre creatures in Ugly Americans, with the protagonist's roommate Randall being the main example. They do like to eat brains, and there was a war against them in the '60s that may have been some kind of failed Zombie Apocalypse, but these days they're mostly just normal people. Randall finds the ones that still lurch around moaning annoyingly cliché.

Real Life

• In Austin, TX, pranksters broke the locks on highway construction signs and altered them to read: THE END IS NEAR! ZOMBIES AHEAD! RUN! RUN TO COLD CLIMATES! NAZI ZOMBIES! Unfortunately, this happened once during a hurricane evacuation. Nobody panicked, thankfully, but it could have been a lot worse with the evacuees who were already under stress from the possibility of having lost most of their Earthly possessions.
• Of course, Zombie Walks.
• In Portland, Oregon, a group of people dressed as zombies for a costume party got into a car accident. In a literal example of everything being deader with zombies, their costumes were so good that bystanders thought their injuries were much worse than they actually were.
• There's even a book titled Theories of International Politics and Zombies by political scientist Dan Drezner, which studies real-life international politics through the lens of a Zombie Apocalypse—because why the hell not?

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Waldorf: I have never seen such a rotten, disgusting, slow-moving sight in my life!
Statler: And the zombies don't look that good, either!
Both: Do-ho-ho-ho-ho-hoh!

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