Night Of The Living Mooks - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Zombie Mooks

"The undead require very little maintenance and rarely demand a salary or benefits. What they lack in speed and agility they more than make up for in persistence and can-do attitude. You won't hear any sass or whining from the undead! Since the victims themselves are transformed into walking undead, these henchmen are a smart investment that will grow your organization even when you are busy with other tasks."

— How to Be a Villain, Neil Zawacki

The undead don't kill. They recruit.

Undead mooks are a staple of video games, Tabletop Games and live-action alike, and the entire point of the Zombie Apocalypse. May be zombies, skeletons or even mummies. An extreme form of Faceless Goons, in that while it's pretty hard to identify with someone with no face, it's basically impossible to sympathise with a corpse. ^*

May be spawned from Clown Car Graveyards, which act as Mook Makers. They may need to be killed in a certain way, or may even be completely unkillable, getting back up every time.

If you really want to find these guys, look in the designated Big Boos Haunt. Raising The Steaks can be considered a Sub Trope of this.

Compare Everythings Deader With Zombies.

Examples

Anime and Manga

Sound Stage X of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS, which is set 3 years after the anime, features the Mariages, mass-production humanoid weapons from Ancient Belka that are also known as Corpse Weapons, being artificial soldiers reanimated from corpses that continue to reproduce itself from the corpses in the area as an instant weapon.
The standard mooks in Hellsing. If a vampire sucks the blood of a virgin, they become another vampire; if they suck the blood of a non-virgin, they become a mindless ghoul who serves their creator.
The revived dolls in Fullmetal Alchemist, fuelded by Philosopher stones. Though when they activated, they didn't behave like they expected....
The "cultivated humans" used by early villain Suzaku against Yusuke and his friends in Yu Yu Hakusho are basically this. They groan, stumble and don't ask questions about their motivation with the best of them.

Film

Army of Darkness features, well, an army of these that Ash accidentally released unto the world when he takes the Necronomicon without doing the chant properly.

Tabletop Games

Warhammer's Tomb Kings and Vampire Counts are entire armies of these.
Similarly, the Necrons of Warhammer 40000 are Undead Robot Skeleton Mooks.
- And then there's what happens if you make Nurgle angry...
  - Oh, no. Grandfather Nurgle smiles on his children , bestowing his many gifts with beneficience and joy.
The undead often show up in games built on the D&D rules, where they have a host of special rules. They're immune to mind-affecting spells (preventing many of the better spells from working), immune to death magic, (preventing the best spells from working), immune to sneak attacks (making the Rogue more or less useless), and to top it off, skeletons resist piercing damage since there's nothing to pierce.
- The latest edition (4th) removes all of these restrictions. Undead now simply have resistance to one specific type of damage. Sneak attacks work just fine on them, and there's no longer any such thing as "mind-affecting spells", "death magic", or "piercing damage".
- On the other hand, the two "holy" classes (Clerics and Paladins) can mow through them with ease - both get spells and abilities whose sole purpose is to kick undead hiney.
  - An old DM observation goes: "The number of undead encounters in a campaign is exponentially disproportional to the number of clerics in the party."
- The Undead are immune to normal mind-control, but there is a Necromancy spell called "Control Undead". However, since it only works on the Undead few Wizards/Sorcerors bother to take it unless they know ahead of time that they will be encountering a lot of Undead. Same goes for the spell "Undeath to Death", which is the only way to bypass their immunity to Death magic.
  - Untrue! All the good undead creation spells are high-level/create standard zombies/skeletons. If necromancers want decent undead horrors at their beck and call, they have to go out and "catch" them. Being a necromancer is alot like being a pokemon trainer...
  - Actually, the art of zombies was trading up. Weaker zombies plus your magic and good planning let you take out and then zombify successively more powerful targets. And there were midrange spells that let you create the weaker infectious undead.
- Subverted by Van Richten's Guide to the Walking Dead, a Ravenloft supplement which helps D Ms equip ordinary zombies, skeletons, and other corporeal undead with an un-Mookish diversity of powers.
Drudge Skeletons and Scathe Zombies are just a few of many undead mook armies a Black using player can summon in Magic The Gathering.

Video Games

Damn near everything in Castlevania.
The Dry Bones (undead Koopas) and Boos from Super Mario Bros 3. Super Mario World added undead versions of Buzzy Beetles and Cheep-Cheeps, as well as several new types of ghosts (Eeries, Fishin' Boos, Big Boos, etc.).
The skeletons (stalfos), ghosts (poe), mummies (gibdo) and zombies (redead) of The Legend Of Zelda.
- And the Undead Rats! Don't forget about Twilight Princess Undead Rats!
Undead bunnies in the Meat Circus of Psychonauts.
Resident Evil.
Ghosts appear in several Sonic The Hedgehog games, first in Sandopolis Zone of Sonic & Knuckles, then the desert stages of Sonic Adventure 2, and finally some hooded pumpkin-head phantoms in Sonic Heroes and Shadow the Hedgehog. They're usually an annoyance, not an actual enemy, but there was a memorable boss battle with the gigantic King Boom Boo in Adventure 2.
The House of the Dead - It's an on-rails shooter. Guess who gets blasted into paste a million times over.
The headcrab zombies in Half Life.
The flood in Halo. They originated as “Fungal Zombies” in Marathon 2, the result of Pfhor infected with an ancient S'pht bioweapon, but were cut from the shipping game because “While it sounded really cool, in retrospect, a weapon that turns your enemies into ravenous zombies doesn't make much sense.”
- Most of the armies of The Fallen Lords in Myth.
The underlings of a necromancer PC in Diablo, hey, the bad guys can't have all the fun!
Metal Slug 3 has quite a bit of these: You have to deal with zombified civilians and soldiers in mission 3, and later on you fight off legions of zombified clones of your previous player character while trying to escape from an exploding spaceship. You can even become a zombie and vomit acidic blood that can take out damn near anything in one shot.
The zombies in Nox who don't die unless you deliver the final blow with a fire-enchanted weapon or a fire spell and regenerate to full health otherwise.
In Warcraft III the Scourge are a faction of undead ruled over by a group of elite Death Knights and Liches who serve the Lich King. Whatever their magical plague can't convert into an undead zombie, they kill and reanimate with necromancy.
- In the expansion a faction of the Scourge splintered off. While they aren't above creating mindless minions to serve them, they generally don't go around converting everyone they kill.
- In World Of Warcraft the Scourge's method of converting the fallen become increasingly evident. An entire army of undead elves was created from those Arthas killed at the end of Warcraft III's expansion.
The skeleton in level 3 of the original Prince Of Persia is unkillable. The only way to get rid of it (and finish the level) is to keep pushing it back into a very deep pit. The skeletons in the sequel Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame are also unkillable, but after beating them they fall to the ground, then rise again shortly afterwards.
The zombies in Quake cannot be killed by conventional means, as they rise again after a few seconds. The only way to get rid of them permanently is to destroy their body completely using grenades or rockets (cue Ludicrous Gibs).
- "Thou canst not kill that which doth not live, but you can blow it into chunky kibbles" :)
Dead Rising
In City Of Villains, a Mastermind player character with the Necromancy powerset gets their own set of undead mooks.
- There are also two enemy factions in Cityof Heroes - the Vazhilok and the Banished Pantheon - that are almost entirely made up of undead mooks.
  - And come Halloween, the special event ensures where the city is overrun with zombies, ghosts, witches and werewolves...
The Hell chapters of The Darkness game are filled with zombified souls of soldiers consumed by the titular quasi-demonic entity during World War I. Particularly horrible as the Brits cannot die no matter how badly their bodies are mutilated. Fortunately, the Narm of an arm-less, leg-less face-less moper in the village hospital cheers things up a bit. ...what?
- The German zombie soldiers are the mooks, obviously.
Every so often, Left 4 Dead will send a massive horde of zombies at you. Unfortunately, the timing and the location of the Mook Maker are more-or-less randomized, so one never knows precisely when a pack of them will come running around the corner.
Call Of Duty: World at War features Zombie mode. You and some friends vs. hordes of zombie Nazis.
The zombies in Eternal Darkness. Range from Mantorok zombies (who catch fire) to Xel'lotath zombies (who take "phantom limb" to whole-new levels) to Chattur'gha zombies (who regenerate) to Ulyaoth zombies (who explode).
The game Overlord features an area infested with zombies, as a mysterious and agonizing plague turns its victims into the living dead. In a twist keeping with its tone and sense of humor, it's caused by the proximity of a slutty, disease-ridden Succubus Queen; apparently, what's a harmless STD to a demoness is a virulent Zombie Apocalypse-inducing epidemic for humans.
- In the sequel, people "infected" by magic are exiled to the Wastelands, an area devastated by a Class 0 magical detonation following the protagonist's disappearance in the first game. The exiles are transformed into mutated zombies by their close proximity to the overwhelming amounts of concentrated magic.
The normal enemies in the Siren series are all Undead Mooks called Shibito (literally "dead person" or "corpse"). They get more monstrous as time passes from their conversion... and simply can't be killed — they can be put out of action for a while, but the red water in their bodies will revive them. Generally, it's best to save resources and energy by sneaking past them instead of fighting them.
Inverted in Stubbs The Zombie, where the infected are instead a Redshirt Army.
Return to Castle Wolfenstein had a whole set of missions pitting you against the undead, and quite a few could be found in the last couple of levels as well.
- Second Episode of the original Castle Wolfenstein had combined this trope by the hands of an evil professor upgrading corpses into a virtual army of gun-toting zombies.
- The newest installment, Wolfenstein, has the Despoiled, dead Nazis brought back to life as superpowered zombie monsters by the Elite Guards' dark magic.
Various kinds of undead are a staple of the Wizardry games, though they tend to only be common in certain areas.
In the fifth stage of the Touhou game Subterranean Animism, the player is introduced to Orin's army of zombie fairies. Shooting them down will only result in them coming back to life and then trailing after you, spewing bullets in their wake. It's one of the many reasons why that stage isn't very liked.
Whenever Neclord appears in a Suikoden game, expect these to appear.
In CommandAndConquer 3: Kane's Wrath, the Nod vanilla faction is given the support power, redemption. For a limited time, every militant squad (Basic Nod Mooks, weakest infantry in the game) killed in a certain area will be resurrected as a squad of Awakened (Zombie cyborgs). It's really more of a Useless Useful Spell, because militants are useless, and Awakened aren't all that much better.
Every Heroes of Might and Magic game features an undead faction.
In Plants Vs Zombies, your army of plants fight nothing but an army of zombies. Zombies that do pole vaulting, play football, ride dolphins, go bobsledding and bungee jump amongst other things. Even the final boss is a zombie in a huge zombie robot. The only exception here is the Zomboni, which is actually a space ogre mistaken for a zombie in a Zamboni.
Earthbound: Zombie Mooks are used by Master Belch to overrun the city of Threed. And they come in two flavors: Urban Zombies and Rural Zombies.
- Mother 3 has zombies in the early part of Chapter 2, too.
Madworld had an entire zombie stage. The zombies were basically your everyday Mooks, but out of ALL the ways you could kill them, giving them horizontal cuts kept them alive.
- Though, when grabbed by a zombie in the first arena, Death would come in and give you five seconds to escape the zombie's grip, less you get an automatic death.
In Guild Wars the Necromancer class has the ability to raise and uncontrol a small undead army.
- The backstory of the original game reveals that the entire nation of Orr was destroyed in a magical Class 0 event. The bodies that weren't instantly incinerated have transformed into an undead army that plagues the swamps of nearby Kryta. They are ruled by a Lich who caused said catastrophe and who you were helping all along.

Web Comics

The Character Blog of Girl Genius' Othar Tryggvassen, Gentleman Adventurer! includes an entry on his battle against a Spark named Huffnagle and how his second line of defense was a horde of undead stoats. Tedious, yet unnerving. It did not help that they sang.
"Crawler" zombies in The Zombie Hunters - slow, shambling, and practically harmless. But they attack in massed groups of several hundred, and their bulk provides an opportunity for faster, more dangerous zombies to get close without being seen.
K'Z'K's army of "Deadels" from Sluggy Freelance.
Undead mooks crop up a lot in the armies of Xykon in Order Of The Stick. In the early strips, he kills his own followers and raises them as zombies to stop them complaining; during the battle for Azure City, Redcloak orders the clerics to zombify the fallen rather than healing anyone (at least prior to his epiphany that Hobgoblins Are Goblins Too); and more recently they have Tsukiko the Mystic Theurge and her army of wights.

Web Original

Phase got a faceful of this trope in the Whateley Universe in "Boston Brawl", when Team Kimba faced The Necromancer and Phase had to take down a couple hundred zombies. In the dark.

Literature

The Abhorsens are constantly fighting undead Mooks.
Harry Dresden once had to deal with six necromancers coming to town at once. While only one (Grevane) made really copious use of zombies against Harry, since Dresdenverse zombies are more like The Terminator than anything, they were more than sufficient.