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Incongruously-Dressed Zombie

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Disco is undead.
Most zombie encounters in fiction get their shock value from gore, ambush, or the pathos of seeing a named character arise from death to attack the surviving cast. But not every horror scene takes itself that seriously; sometimes, when pacing or tone demands a tension-breaker, filmmakers will toss in the visual gag of a zombie that's dressed in an ironic or amusing outfit: a Halloween costume, an unusual profession, nothing at all, wedding attire, etc.

While undead in goofy outfits seldom stay on screen for long, they provide a bit of a breather for the audience, while giving the production's costumers and make-up crew a chance to exercise some creativity. Their presence can also remind viewers that zombies, however mindless or indistinguishable in undeath, used to be unique, living individuals: that they're creatures to be pitied as well as dreaded. Not to mention that the horror of being attacked and zombified (or whatever) can happen right in the middle of you living your life.

Not necessarily exclusive to zombies: vampires, ghosts, biped werewolves, and other human-derived monsters may also be examples of this trope, provided their outfit is unexpected and/or goofy enough to surprise and amuse the audience. Distinguished from Our Zombies Are Different in that the Incongruously Dressed Zombie only looks unique; functionally, it's usually (though not necessarily) your standard-issue Night of the Living Mooks drone. Compare and contrast Attractive Zombie who retains both his/her personality and good looks.

If an undead creature's clothes look odd because they date from a past era, that's Outdated Outfit. If the outfit was goofy back then, these tropes overlap. Compare to Jacob Marley Apparel. Related to Wight in a Wedding Dress.


Examples:

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    Anime & Manga 
  • In High School Of The Dead, a sniper looks at a zombie that she's about to shoot to clear an airport runway. The zombie is dressed in a nice swanky white suit. Her sniping spotter points out that he used to be an actor, and still maintains his egotistical mannerisms even in undeath. Then she blows his head off.
    • This became an issue during the airing of the anime since said zombie had a remarkable resemblance to famous former South Korean actor Bae Yong-joon, which combined with the nationalistic undertones of the story and the general antagonism between South Korea and Japan, caused a kerfuffle.

    Comic Books 
  • Chances are, if a superhero or villain is brought back as a zombie or something, they will be wearing their costume (or what's left of it). See Marvel Zombies or Blackest Night.
    • Which makes a kind of sense - superheroes would be quick to don suits and respond to something like a zombie apocalypse. They would also be less likely to be taken in surprise in the early stages of said eldritch epidemic (due to superior fighting skills, senses, having fortresses, that kind of thing), and so go down fighting later on, in their fighting gear.
  • Naked infectees are incredibly common in Crossed. Other examples include crossed Hare Krishna monks wreaking havoc on an airport, freshly infected circus performers attacking a nearby town, a group of crossed dressed like different clerical figures (A rabbi, a catholic bishop and a nun, to name a few) hunting down "heretics" in a desolated city. Without a doubt, though, the best example of this takes place on "The Five Bloody Fingers" arc where a Japanese young man tries to get in contact with his friends during the onset of the crossed plague in Japan. This lead him to a Comiket-esque convention... and to fight a seemingly endless horde of crossed cosplayers.
  • One Hack/Slash arc had a slasher who resurrected a bunch of dead animals as zombies, including a circus bear in a tutu. There were also zombie football players in Hack/Slash meets Zombies vs. Cheerleaders.
  • Naked zombies can be spotted all throughout The Walking Dead, as well as zombies dressed in unique clothes like suits, bulletproof riot gear, military and even a punk attire, complete with mohawk. Rick's first trip to Atlanta features several zombies with unique designs.
  • In the chilean comic Zombies en la Moneda, one of the stories is a parody of Scooby-Doo and involves a rock band that gets lost in some underground tunnels and comes across a cavern where there are a large number of zombies in disguise, including some dressed as Michael Jackson or Elvis Presley (nd some are live human beings pretending to be zombies).

    Film — Animated 
  • The titular zombies in Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island are pirates, Civil War soldiers, and 19th-to-20th century tourists. However, the film provides a rare justification for this trope, as the zombies were the specific past victims of the movie's Big Bad.

    Film — Live-Action 
  • The first Technically-Living Zombie found by Jim in 28 Days Later is a priest in a church.
  • All the discarded damaged robots in the "Flesh Fair" scenes of A.I.: Artificial Intelligence are essentially this, due to robots being created as worker replacements: there is a nanny (missing most of her head), a welder, a doctor, a chef, a prostitute, a factory worker, a hairdresser, a chaffeur, a headless and completely blackened robot after being burnt to a crisp, a legless Terminator-like metal skeleton with a police cap... and Chris Rock.
  • Among the zombies seen in Anna and the Apocalypse are schoolgirls in uniform, construction workers, and a zombified person dressed as Santa Claus. This also ends up being a Brick Joke; during the school talent show, two students in full-body penguin costumes end up performing a Stylistic Suck song, and after the school is invaded by zombies, we see that they were zombified while wearing the outfits.
  • Some of the skeletal troops called up by the Necronomicon in Army of Darkness stand out by how they're dressed, such as the bagpipe-players— they even still have full beards.
  • Army of the Dead boasts a host of zombified Viva Las Vegas! stereotypes, including a bachelorette party (complete with male strippers), showgirls (one of whom becomes The Dragon to Zeus), and an Elvis Impersonator. Zeus, the intelligent Elite Zombie who becomes their leader, initially wears a fairly standard military "test subject" outfit but starts dressing in ancient Greco-Roman clothes to mark his leadership, including putting on a metal Spartan helm (a Shout-Out to one of Zack Snyder's other films) that deflects the protagonists' headshots.
  • In a non-horror example, the animated suits of battle-garb in Bedknobs and Broomsticks include some Scottish bagpipers' costumes, and a 17th-century duelist's outfit complete with long flowing wig.
  • Non-zombie example: Some of the recently-dead from the afterlife waiting room in Beetlejuice are dressed in amusingly-odd outfits (a headhunter, a Vegas showgirl).
  • In Big Tits Zombie, zombies starts showing up in all kinds of incongruous outfits, such as stripper costumes and school uniforms.
  • The dead spirits from the film adaptation of Clive Barker's Book of Blood include a firefighter, a geisha, and an emaciated man in a concentration-camp prisoner's striped clothing.
  • In Cockneys vs. Zombies, two herds of zombies in the colors of rival soccer teams stagger towards one another and start clumsily shoving and punching each other in the street. A matronly zombie pushes a stroller with a zombie baby in it.
  • The first zombie seen up close in Dead Heat is dressed as a biker.
  • Detention Of The Dead has a zombie in a fast-food server's uniform, complete with dorky cap and hairnet.
  • Many of the initial wave of living zombies from Devil's Playground are dressed as first responders, illustrating the rapid breakdown of law and order, as well as how their heroic attempts to assist the drug-test volunteers got them bitten for their trouble.
  • A zombie clown attacks a children's birthday party in a video clip from Diary of the Dead.
  • Combined with Anachronism Stew in the short film Fist of Jesus, with cowboy zombies. Eighteen centuries before the Wild West.
  • Some ghosts in The Frighteners wear outfits that rated as weird even in their decade of origin.
  • Ghostbusters II has a ghost jogger and a ghost nanny, following up on the original Ghostbusters' ghost librarian.
    • The fact that one combative ghost is dressed as a Pilgrim is Lampshaded in Ghostbusters (2016).
  • In Goosebumps (2015), the Werewolf of Fever Swamp wears blue lycra jogging shorts and running shoes with white laces, the toes and ankles ripped out by his transformed feet.
  • LA Zombie had a group of undead leathermen.
  • The only-technically-not-zombies from Legion had a few funnily dressed "zombies".
  • Romero's Living Dead Series:
    • The Ur-Example is the nude female model, adorned only with a morgue ID tag, who was included in Night of the Living Dead (1968).
    • In the 1990 remake, Ben and Barbra acquire a handgun from a zombie cop's belt holster. Barbra later uses it to shoot a female zombie that clutches a baby doll under one arm.
    • In Dawn of the Dead (1978), the Hare Krishna Monk zombie in his bright orange robes, as well as the infamously hammy Nurse Zombie.
      • One of the zombies wears plain clothes but he grabs the assault rifle of one of the SWAT as they try to get behind a door, forcing the officer to let it go. Through the rest of the film, the zombie keeps holding onto the rifle as he lumbers towards the characters, never dropping it, nor pointing it at anyone.
    • The first zombie in the 2004 remake is the little neighbor girl in her pink sleeping gown, which causes Anna's boyfriend to get his guard down, and makes her come across as a Killer Rabbit.
      • Many zombies in the early collapse scenes are in their pajamas and underwear. They get replaced by normally dressed people after the main evacuation camp falls. Still, the second batch of survivors from the camp includes a terminal Zombie Infectee who is an obese, middle-aged woman in her underwear.
      • When C.J. throws a gas canister on the zombie crowd to use it as a bomb, it is picked up by a large, bald, bare-chested (or naked?) zombie. An even fatter, bare-chested zombie shows up in a deleted crowd scene, soon after they arrive in the mall.
      • This is even exploited when the survivors are bored and decide to kill time by telling Andy to shoot zombies that resemble celebrities, such as "Jay Leno" (a well-groomed zombie with white hair and a blue business suit) and "Burt Reynolds" (a mustached zombie in a brown uniform).
      • A humororus fake news broadcast in the DVD extras shows a group of high school hustlers taunting an Attractive Zombie that wears nothing but a football helmet, Black Bra and Panties.
    • In Day of the Dead (1985), one of the zombies that invade the military base is dressed in a clown costume. Some of the zombies in the bunker paddock include an older woman in a shower cap, a ballerina, a zombie in a fisherman's outfit (complete with a bucket hat), a woman in a wedding dress, and a zombie drum majorette in a huge puffy hat gets a close-up in the city scene. At other points in the film, there is a zombie in an American football uniform, and a fireman in bunker gear (complete with a fireman's helmet).
    • In Land of the Dead, the zombie "leader" Big Daddy wears a gas station attendant's denim jumpsuit, with a patch that bears his name. Other examples include another zombie clown, a boy in an upper-class school uniform, a marching band complete with instruments, and a zombie cheerleader still clutching her pom-poms.
  • All the lesser undead in The Mummy (2017) qualify by the standards of typical mummy movies, as Ahmanet creates them by life-draining modern people or re-animating the corpses of Crusaders at the Crossrail tomb site. They are therefore dressed in ordinary street clothes or chain mail and tabards, with not a bandage or hieroglyph to be seen.
  • In Night of the Creeps, many of the slug-infested living dead were young men killed on their way to a formal dance, so arrive at the sorority house to menace their dates in tuxes.
  • Otto from Otto; or Up with Dead People wears his Goth/Punk/Emo outfit which consists of skinny jeans, combat boots, a gray and black stripped sweater, a white shirt, a black necktie and a black hoodie.
  • In Porn of the Dead, one of the zombies was a waitress, while another was a mental patient still stuck struggling with a straitjacket.
  • There is a pair of zombified topless strippers very briefly seen in Resident Evil: Apocalypse. They manage to distract a guy long enough to make him crash the car he was in.
  • In The Return of the Living Dead, a zombie priest is seen gnawing on a dead paramedic, then calling Dispatch to ask that more be sent. Trash becomes an example when she re-animates in the nude, having been killed after stripping in the cemetery.
  • Return of the Living Dead Part II has the visual gag of a zombie dressed in Michael Jackson's "Thriller" outfit.
  • The first zombie crowd in Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse includes a roller skater.
  • Shaun of the Dead:
    • The first zombie that Shaun and Ed know is a zombie (they meet a few before but confuse them for drunk people) is a wedding groom with a large, yellow flower over his left breast... and an arm ripped off just under the shoulder.
    • Pete dies in the shower and his zombie walks around completely naked.
    • A zombie outside Liz's place wears a business suit and carries an open suitcase.
    • When the group passes through a crowd of zombies (by pretending to be zombies themselves), the zombies include a biker in a bright red suit and helmet, a wheelchair-bound woman, and two biker twins.
    • Among the zombie crowd that crashes the Winchester in the end is a split-second zombified version of Tyres from Spaced wearing his full, brightly coloured bicycle-courier gear and cap. And he's (probably) still raving.
  • One of the worm-possessed walking corpses from Slither is a local clergyman, dressed in a long black pastor's coat and carrying a handbell.
  • A number of the Zombies in Warm Bodies. The amnesic and zombified main character uses his hoodie to determine he was unemployed in life, for one. M is careful about maintaining his suit, and another member of the hunting party appears to be wearing a Sikh turban. Worst is the character named in the credits simply as TSA Zombie, who carefully waves his metal detector over every zombie inhabitant of the abandoned airport, when not busy eating brains.
  • In Waxwork II: Lost in Time, the alternate-reality that featured zombies had several dressed in over-the-top disco outfits.
  • The short film Zombie in a Penguin Suit puts this in the forefront.
  • Zombie Strippers!, though there the emphasis is more on what the zombies aren't wearing.
  • Zombies! Zombies! Zombies!: Most of the zombies are dressed in street clothes. However, as most of the action takes place in a strip club, this ends up including several women in stripper costumes.
  • In Zombieland, several examples (a stripper, a bunch of little girls in ballerina outfits, father-and-son contestants in a three-legged race, one that's on fire) chase people around in the opening credits. One of the last ones we see is a clown.

    Jokes 
  • A popular joke about the zombie apocalypse is that, when it hits, the biggest jerkasses will choose to die wearing motorcycle helmets and body armor just to spite those who are still alive and now have to fight them.
  • Another observation is that if we ever get a Romero-style "dead rising from their graves" zombie horde, then since people are usually buried in their finest clothes it'll be the best-dressed apocalypse ever.

    Literature 
  • Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I.: In Death Warmed Over, Dan and McGoo interrupt a pair of shambling zombie brawlers, who've continued their fight over a girl even after death. Dan lampshades this trope by marveling at the two teenage zombies' outfits: one, a powder-blue prom tux, the other a Disneyland hoodie. ("Who in the world would want to be buried in a Disneyland hoodie?")
  • Day By Day Armageddon has its moments. In the first book Kilgore spots a grocery store employee with the phrase "If you can read this kill me!" written on his shirt in blood (who he obliges, noting he'd have probably liked the guy had he met him alive), and the third book has him fighting the urge to laugh at zombies dressed in Hawaiian shirts in Oahu.
  • The Dresden Files: The lesser Black Court vampires that attack the shopping mall in the short story "It's My Birthday, Too" are newly-transformed security guards, and therefore dressed in their mall-cop uniforms.
  • In the short story "I Am A Zombie Filled With Love", the nameless protagonist becomes attracted to the female zombie because she's wearing a food-service name tag, so he can actually call her by name (Emily).
  • Among the many weird characters glimpsed on the streets or subways of the Nightside was a zombie surfer in a torn wetsuit, who carried a coffin lid as his surfboard.
  • World War Z plays this trope for drama.
    • One character recalls seeing a horde of zombies, many of which were naked or in pajamas. He determines that most of them were infected at night, and briefly reflects on the chilling thought of being woken by a ravenous bunch of zombies breaking into one's home.
    • The book also averts this by pointing out that, while many people expect to encounter zombies in suits and fancy dresses, most of the time zombies either got their clothes badly damaged when they were first attacked, or were wearing hospital gowns (hospitals having been epicenters of early outbreaks where many bite victims were taken to be treated). Between that, further clothing damage during a zombie's attempts to navigate terrain, and clothing eventually rotting (as the story takes place over the course of nearly a decade), after a certain point in the timeline most zombies encountered are more likely to be naked than to have any clothing.
    • The Battle of Hope provides a straight example when a female zombie in a "G is for Gangsta" shirt is pointed out.
  • In James Patterson's Zoo 2, Jackson is nonplussed when his group in Las Vegas is attacked by feral humans, whose clothes clearly peg them as casino employees, tourists, and (inevitably) an Elvis Impersonator.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Castle, "Undead Again": Among the gathering of undead-cosplayers questioned about a reported "zombie attack" are a woman in a puffy pink ball gown and another with a beauty-contestant's gold sash.
  • The mob of extras made up as zombies as a foundation challenge on season 4 of Face/Off were mostly dressed in everyday street clothes, but a couple of the men wore surgical scrubs, one of the women had on a ragged wedding dress, and a chef's hat is visible in one of the group shots. Contestants regularly dress their own undead creations in odd outfits for spotlight challenges, to make the finished products distinctive and capture the judges' interest.
  • The first army of 'wights' in the Season 2 finale of Game of Thrones includes several bare-chested wildlings, who contrast dramatically with the snowy landscape, and also completely bald ones (we learn later that this is a custom of the Thenn tribe). There are also a few black-clad Nightwatchmen sprinkled among them. In the book, there was also a zombie bear, and a zombie bear shows up five seasons later in the series.
    • The Season 4 finale has Bran's group being attacked by skeletonized wights with very archaic-looking armor and weapons. It's the first undeniable proof that the White Walkers don't need to kill people and animals to turn them into wights; They can also turn bodies that have been dead for centuries. Most wight armies in later seasons also include skeletons among their numbers.
    • At the Battle of Hardhome (Season 5), Karsi fights a wight wearing a Stark helmet before being attacked by five wight children. One of them is almost a skeleton.
    • The Season 7 premiere confirms the existence of wight giants.
  • Rizzoli & Isles, "Cops Vs Zombies": A few of the attendees at ZombieCon are dressed up as this trope, although most convention-goers (including the one who was murdered) are fairly generic undead.
  • The Walking Dead (2010) has a lot of these. Sometimes, it's Played for Drama, as the clothing occasionally protects zombies from attack, causes the characters to react differently to them, or raises disturbing implications about how they died.
    • The show starts out with a little girl zombie dressed in a robe, pajamas, and bunny slippers, carrying a bear.
    • One "walker" is dressed in a Santa Claus suit.
    • One of the walkers encountered while searching for Sophia at a rural church was an old woman in a mourning veil. It's slower to attack than the others because its vision is impaired, and gropes blindly for any source of noise until Daryl hacks it up.
    • Odd clothing on zombies actually has plot implications when the survivors take over the prison, as some of the walkers there are wearing prison riot-gear and therefore have helmets which logically serve to protect their brains.
    • Later in that same episode, Daryl points out that one of the zombies in the prison is dressed like a civilian, thereby raising fears that the prison might not be as secure as they had hoped.
    • Lizzie becomes emotionally attached to a particular walker on the fence because it's wearing a name tag, which gives her something to call it.
    • When his quarantined patients start turning, Hershel warns Maggie not to shoot Henry's walker because it's still wearing the resuscitator bag Hershel needs to save Glenn.
    • Michonne, traveling with leashed walkers in the midst of a herd in "After", gets creeped out by a black female walker with the same hairstyle as hers.
    • One of the walkers in "Here's Not Here" has its hands tied behind its back, suggesting a fatal run-in with other humans. Another becomes this trope when it walks straight through Morgan's campfire, emerging as a Man on Fire.
    • One crispy-blackened walker in the burned-out forest from "Always Accountable" still has its head intact enough to moan, because it had a motorcycle helmet on when it got roasted.
  • A very common trope on Z Nation, as with the zombie cheese-heads in Wisconsin or the busload of zombies who'd died on their way to an Abraham Lincoln look-alike contest.
    • Invoked by Murphy's zombie-controlling daughter Lucy, who dresses her undead "playmates" up as a princess, cowboy, pirate, Raggedy Ann, farmer, and knight.

    Music 

    Tabletop Games 
  • Blood Bowl zombies typically sport the tattered remnants of American-style football gear.
  • Vampire: The Requiem has Larvae: a transitional stage between human and vampire that are functionally zombie-vampires, usually still dressed in the rags of whatever they were wearing when abducted and turned. Their sourcebook suggests that Game Masters employ this trope as a way to ramp up the creepiness. (Yes, that guy in a mailman uniform or the woman in the torn, fuzzy pink bathrobe is about to eat you!)
  • The Deadwalker Zombies kit in Warhammer: Age of Sigmar includes a few who are still wearing battered armour in between the array of shredded pants and decaying dresses.
  • The horribly mutated Poxwalker Plague Zombies in Warhammer 40,000 have a model kit that included one in a long coat. The long lore presence of the Curse of Unbelief, a more traditional (if still Chaos-spawned) zombie plague, has also led to many, many conversions of zombified Imperial Guardsmen, including an entire campaign in White Dwarf focused on it.

    Theme Parks 
  • The Haunted Mansion features some Incongruously-Dressed Ghosts, such as an opera singer in full Valkyrie getup.

    Video Games 
  • Beast Busters has zombie American footballers, workers with hard hats and bald naked zombies. Among the bosses there are a mohawked zombie punk (1st boss), muscular twins wearing nothing but speedos and Jason-esque hockey masks (2nd boss) and a trio of zombie bikers (3rd boss).
    • Its sequel Beast Busters: Second Raid is set in a hospital and as such features zombie doctors and nurses. There are also zombie delinquents.
  • In Darksiders, you have the very smartly dressed Wicked K, a zombie with a British dialect in a tuxedo.
  • One of the zombies in Dead Rising 2 wears a wedding dress, as a result of being almost forced into marriage before being turned.
  • In Fallout: New Vegas, the Courier's Ghoul companion, Raul will change into his old Vaquero outfit if convinced to become a gunslinger once more.
  • Fallout 4 has the ghoul, Hancock. He models himself off the historical John Hancock and wears a revolutionary war era coat and a tricornered hat.
  • Ghostbusters: The Video Game has ghost bellhops and a Fisherman Ghost.
  • House of the Dead Scarlet Dawn has Mac, a katana-wielding athletic zombie wearing a hooded ninja outfit and Bruce, a muscular zombie dressed like Slash from Guns N' Roses fame and armed with a mean electric guitar.
  • All the cadaver-level undead in the Facebook flash game The Last One are incongruously-dressed, including a short-order cook, a fireman, a lady mechanic, a legless granny with a walker, and a construction worker who'd died lying in wet cement and now has much of his body encased in chunks of concrete.
  • In Armor Games' Web Game The Last Stand, a few of the zombies attacking your character wear clown costumes.
  • Left 4 Dead 2 has your usual hordes of zombie masses, but there are also "Uncommon Infected", a step below the Special Infected. They all look different from usual, but also have unique properties about them thanks to their attire. Depending on how you encounter them, they can be either hilarious, creepy, or utterly depressing.
    • Hazmat zombies are former CEDA personnel that run around in their still fully-sealed yellow and green hazmat suits, which make them highly resistant to fire. You can hear the air leaking out of the suits like a deflating balloon when you kill them. Sometimes they carry jars of Boomer bile that they drop on death.
    • The Clown zombie is found in "Dark Carnival", running around with large clown shoes and a big red nose. (Which you can honk by hitting!) The shoes squeak as the Clown walks, which aggravates other common infected into forming mini-hordes.
    • Mudmen are so covered in mud that there's no other color to them. They crawl on all fours and when they hit a player, the mud gets on their vision.
    • Riot infected are zombified security personnel clad in very heavy armour. The only ways to deal with them is to attack their backs, blow them up or set them on fire.
    • Worker zombiesnote  wear bright yellow reflective vests and personal protection equipment that increases their overall health and ear protectors that mean they neither hear nor chase thrown pipebombs. Due to a bug, they also ignore Boomer bile jars, which use the same coding as pipebombs when there isn't an infected coated in it.note 
    • Fallen Survivors still wear their survival gear, so they can drop a medkit, pills, adrenaline shots, pipe bombs, or molotovs. That same survival gear makes them very tough against bullets.
    • Zombie Jimmy Gibbs Jr. used to be a famous stock car racer, and still wears his racer's uniform and helmet.
    • Other examples include hospital patients and staff, Midnight Rider fans, wedding guests (including a bride), and airport personnel.
    • The custom Campaign "Suicide Blitz 2" gives us Tanks decked in football gear in the finale, which happens in a stadium.
    • In "The Passing", a special Witch is in a wedding dress, sobbing at the altar (apparently the zombie apocalypse happened right on her special day). You have to get past her, but if she's startled it triggers a panic event, causing the zombified party guests to charge you and your party.
  • One of the zombies in Medievil 2 sports a beard and wears a suit, which Dan must steal from it to use as a disguise.
  • Plants vs. Zombies has several examples.
    • Browncoat zombies all wear the remnants of a shirt, suit coat and tie, but the "special" zombies all are dressed in a way that identifies their particular attack method. The "dancing" zombie used to look like a Thriller-era Michael Jackson, up until Jackson died and his family requested that they change his appearance. He's now a "disco" zombie with bell-bottom pants and big hair. The crazy Jack-In-The-Box zombie wears a straitjacket and carries an exploding Jack-in-the-box with him. The Zomboni is a guy driving around a Zamboni, and the ice he lays down is used by Bobsled Zombies, who carry their bobsled with them and wear identical team uniforms. Zombies who attack over water wear snorkels, digging zombies have carbide lamp helmets, and so on.
    • In the sequel, with every zombie changing outfit depending on which time period you're in. Even the rank-and-file zombies get different attires, such as mummy wraps in Ancient Egypt.
  • Project Zomboid: Zombies are dressed appropriately for the buildings near where they are found. This includes medical zombies in scrubs and labcoats in hospitals, firefighter zombies in fire stations, and zombie congregations in their Sunday best near a church. Some of the zombies tell amusing stories, such as police zombies surrounding a house with two zombies wearing prison jumpsuits inside.
  • QUESTER: TWD and their Palette Swaps don't have a stitch of clothing on, aside from Brown Bag Masks.
  • Resident Evil 4 has 'Oven Man': A ganado that bursts from an oven in flames for a solid Jump Scare and a cheap laugh. Ada's scenario also has the ganado who swiped Leon's bomber's jacket.
  • Gaichû from Shadowrun Returns: Hong Kong is a ghoul dressed as a red samurai — mostly because he used to be one, and silly as it may look it's still very good armour. It does, however, make Gaichû even more noticeable than usual and therefore a really bad (or really hilarious) candidate to include on social missions, where you are usually called upon to make up some outrageous bluffs to get him past the guards without violence.
  • Shin Megami Tensei has featured some really bizarre undead demons such as the Bodyconian (undead Go-Go dancer), the Drag Queen (undead crossdresser), the Rasta Man (grinning Rastafarian zombie carrying a serrated blade and a bag full of heads) and the Batarion/Obattarion (undead naked woman allegedly based on Trash from The Return of the Living Dead, known as Batallion in Japan).
  • StreetPass Mii Plaza: Battleground Z (also known as StreetPass Zombies) is one of the least serious zombie games in existence and is practically made of this trope. The bosses, for instance, consist of Star Quartersmack, who's dressed in full American football gear; Belinda Munch, an opera singer who fights you in her big pink frilly dress; and Bubba and Cletus, a pair of brothers who run a corn farm and wear overalls and straw hats. The Rare Zombies, who only come out under certain conditions, are dressed even more atypically, with characters like the Movie-Loving Zombie, who always wears a shirt depicting his favorite science fiction movie; the Helpful Zombie, who's dressed like a superhero; and the Fashionable Zombie, who, depending on the designated gender, either dresses in a bright striped dress or a sharp tuxedo. All of the female Rare Zombies also have their hair tied as Girlish Pigtails.
  • The titular trio from Teenage Zombies: Invasion of the Alien Brain Thingys apparently weren't dressed in the usual funeral garb. Lori "Lefty" Lopez wears a basketball outfit, Zack "Half-Pipe" Boyd wears a red hood, and Finnegan "Fins" Magee wears a swimsuit.
  • The Flash game Trucking Zombies includes zombie nuns, zombie clowns, zombies in teddy bear costumes, zombie Playboy bunnies, or zombies wearing Exploding Barrels.
  • Zombies, Run!: Naturally turns up often enough, as it's set in a Zombie Apocalypse world where anyone who isn't very skilled and lucky can become a zombie. Zombie scouts, zombie gym rats, and even an entire zombie wedding party make an appearance.
  • ZombiU has zombies dressed as Buckingham palace guards and Beefeaters.

    Web Original 
  • Nearly every zombie that appears in Brains is a variation on this. A hippie, hipster, and Seattle Mariners fan zombie are all seen in the first season.
  • In webisode clips spun off The Walking Dead (2010), two child zombies wear paper birthday-party hats. Another (adult) zombie wore the day-glow yellow vest of a parking-lot attendant.

    Western Animation 

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