Main Tropes Index

Troperville

Editing Help

Tools

Toys

Narrative

Genre

Media

Topical Tropes

Other Categories

Custom Search

Not Using The Z Word
alt title(s): Not Using The Zed Word
Ed: Are there any zombies out there?
Shaun: Don't say that!
Ed: What?
Shaun: That.
Ed: What?
Shaun: That. The 'Z' word. Don't say it.
Ed: Why not?
Shaun: Because it's ridiculous!
Ed: Alright...Are there any out there, though?
Shaun: Don't see any... Maybe it's not as bad as all that. Oh! Nope, there they are.
— Shaun Of The Dead

A story has creatures that are obviously based on some sort of mythological monster, but goes out of its way not to call them that.

The title comes from Shaun Of The Dead, which gave this a Lampshade Hanging, as seen in the page quote: Shaun doesn't like it because it makes him nervous, but the real reason they're not supposed to say it is because they're in a zombie movie.

A subtrope of the Sci Fi Ghetto. Can be used to highlight how their monsters are different, though when it's used to force a sense of "realism" (We don't call them "Zombies" because Zombies aren't real), it smacks painfully of Genre Blindness. If you were confronted by what appears to be a member of the walking dead, how much effort would you spend coming up with an alternative name?

Occasionally sort of justified when the writers or the characters themselves admit that the normal word is something that is hard to admit exists. After all, Zombies don't exist right? These things coming to eat our brains must be something else.

Compare to Differently Powered Individuals, the superhero version, and A Mech By Any Other Name, the Humongous Mecha version. See also Call A Rabbit A Smeerp, Fantastic Slur, and T-Word Euphemism. When used for non-fantastic things and attributes, it may be an attempt to show and not tell.

Examples

Anime and Manga
  • High School Of The Dead doesn't even bother making up some name for the zombies, everyone just calls them "Them". One character called them zombies, only to be corrected by another character who made it sound as though zombies are entirely different creatures from the ones the cast faces (they're not, really).
    • It's later mentioned by one of the main characters that the word "Them" was a piece of brilliance: It becomes easier to put "Them" down if you don't think of them as anything and thus affirm their existence as former humans.
  • Despite its prominence in the title, Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha has only used the words "Magical Girl" once, during a no fourth wall moment where Nanoha described her situation to the audience as being akin to a magical girl in the third episode of the first season. Every other time, the term "Mage" or "Knight" is used.
  • Chiropterans from Blood Plus are a way to lampshade that they are sorta different from... Vampires. To be fair, the only things they have in common are the blood-sucking habit and the bat-like characteristics.
  • In the Yugioh GX dub, Jaden and the others keep annoyingly referring to the zombies as "Duel Ghouls".
  • Hellsing calls the non-virgin spawn of vampire bites 'ghouls', though they are essentially zombies.
    • Though this may be less a case of This Trope and more of Our Ghouls Are Different who's to say they arn't "Zombie/Vampire Ghouls" as described in the article?
    • Concerning vampires, however, Hellsing seems to work as it hard as it can to completely and utterly avert this trope. Sometimes it seems like you can't get anyone - especially Alucard - to shut up about vampires. "Vampire" this and "vampire" that. The closest they come to actually playing it straight is with "freaks", but that's at least somewhat justified in that freaks are artificially induced.
  • A related and slightly confusing example: in Samurai Champloo, in the episode "Lullaby of the Lost", there's a character named Okuru. To Western viewers, he seems to embody a lot of tropes that apply to American Indians. This is because he's supposed to be one of the Ainu, the native peoples of Japan. However, Japanese broadcast code is extremely strict on how the Ainu may be portrayed. Therefore, Okuru is never explicitly identified as Ainu.

Comic Books
  • The Comics Code once prevented the portrayal of zombies in comics. Marvel Comics decided to get around this by just calling them "zuvembies" instead (a term popularized by a Robert Howard story).
  • Preacher has a vampire, Cassidy, who is never called a vampire (though they do in a way invoke this trope by him saying he's "the 'v' word"). This is partially due to the fact that, for quite a while, Cassidy didn't know he was a vampire (he was born before Dracula hit the big screen, and he never got to talk with the vampire who turned him). In fact, he didn't realize it until a friend of his lent him a copy of the original Dracula.
    • However, outside of the regular series, in an all-Cassidy special where he meets another vampire, they throw the "V" word around all over the place, also referencing (and pointing out the lack of) many different vampire tropes.
  • Robots in Top Ten are usually called "Ferro-Americans" or "Post-organics." Some are okay with "robot", some aren't, but it's never cool to bust out "clicker" on them.
    • Although that doesn't stop "scrap" musicians from using it in their songs...
    • Vampires are much the same. One vampire character insists that he's "a Hungarian-American with an inherited medical condition."
  • The survivors in The Walking Dead call the zombies by a variety of names, includes "lurkers" and "roamers" (depending on the zombies' behavior) or simply "biters."
    • They use the word "zombies" as well, but less frequently, because it's hard to take seriously.
  • In Zombies That Ate the World by Guy Davis and Jerry Frissen they are called "living impaired".

Film
  • No one in Cloverfield mentions the words "Godzilla", "King Kong" or even "Monster", which would be the logical words anyone would utter upon seeing the titular creature.
  • Shaun Of The Dead uses it again; later, when David says Barbara's "turning into one of those zombies", Ed angrily shouts "We're not using the Z-word!"
  • Night Of The Living Dead never calls them zombies. It does call them "ghouls" in a newscast. According to The Other Wiki, George Romero never thought of them as zombies, despite the movie becoming the Trope Maker for the modern Zombie Apocalypse. It was made at a time when 'zombie' still referred to someone under the spell of a voodoo priest. Although there may have been some passing references to reanimated corpses as zombies in earlier films, it wasn't a general term for them yet.
    • The second movie, Dawn Of The Dead, uses the word "zombie" only once. A black policeman who mentions his grandfather was a Trinidadian voodoo priest offhandedly calls them as such, but only in one scene.
    • In the fourth movie, where Dennis Hopper in particular uses it on a couple of occasions. Presumably, at this point in the series, everyone is sufficiently jaded about their situation to finally slap on a label.
  • Death Becomes Her. No one in the film mentions zombies, but director Robert Zemeckis openly admits in interviews it's a zombie film, albeit glamorous literally Hollywood zombies.
  • Averted in the book I Am Legend by baldly calling a vampire a vampire throughout the narrative, as it was written over a decade before Night. Film adaptations of the novel never use the word, preferring vague euphemisms. This may be because they're more often treated as zombies due to the more modern concept of a Zombie Apocalypse instead of a Vampire Apocalypse, and the fact that the movie version are less like vampires. The one with Will Smith goes so far as to totally omit the existence of any monsters in the movie from most of its trailers. Additionally, the writers felt "vampire" was too corny, so they called them "darkseekers".
    • It's not hard to see why, at least in the old black-and-white movie; they're undead, they shamble, they lack proper diction, and they have the intelligence of a rotting cabbage. They have all the weaknesses of vampires, and all the weaknesses of zombies. Blessed With Suck, indeed.
  • The Resident Evil movies never use the word zombie.
    • The games do use the term, quite a bit. There's even a moment in the fourth one where Leon observes the villagers trying to kill him aren't zombies, appearing perfectly human (if rather pale) and interacting intelligently with one another, and the first Majini Chris Redfield or Sheva shoots in the fifth, Chris notes that they don't move like any zombie he's ever seen.
  • 28 Days Later calls them the Infected. This has resulted in rather nerdy arguments on the Internet on whether they are actually zombies or not.
    • The exact same is also true of the zombies (or not) in the movies The Crazies and REC.
    • The people in 28 days later aren't zombies, though. They are just infected with the rage virus. They are not undead, and can be killed by anything from toxic gas to a single gun shot to the chest.
      • Who says zombies have to be undead? If you want to be real technical and take it back to Haitian folklore, they're meant to be under the control of a sorceror and not particularly violent.
      • Most died of starvation, which makes them very similar to the many types of undead who constantly whine over how hungry they are.
      • And to humans, who tend to die of starvation when they don't have enough food.
      • They should really have died much earlier of dehydration, after a few days, especially as they're constantly throwing up.
  • The movie Ultraviolet directed by Kurt Wimmer, which is unrelated to the series but also features vampires, refers to them as "hemophages".
  • They always call the Aliens "serpents" and the Predators "hunters" in the Alien Vs Predator movie... Or So I Heard. In-universe, the Aliens are officially known to humans as Xenomorphs, although the nickname "Bugs" is more common. (A minor character in Alien3 calls them "dragons".) Likewise, when the Predators are used as viewpoint characters in the Expanded Universe books, they refer to themselves as "yautja", though it's unlikely any humans know this (the Predators also refer to the Xenomorph as "kainde amedha" — "hard meat" — and humans as "pyode amedha" — "soft meat". Don't use the H word!)
    • For the record: the term "Xenomorph" — basically meaning "strange shape", although for taxonomic purposes you might put it as "strange/foreign/alien body" — is official to fans, but it was made very clear that humans had never encountered them before the Nostromo incident, therefore they had no classification at the time; Lt. Gorman was using "Xenomorph" as a placeholder term for the then-unidentified species.
      • and "Bug hunt" simply meant a search for something that may or may not even be there in the first place. Gorman was saying that well, there just might really be some sort of alien there maybe.
    • The Aliens have also been referred in the role playing game materials by a Latin species name, Linguafoeda acheronsis - literally "vile tongue of Acheron".
      • The "Alien Quadrilogy" DVD menus, on the other hand, refer to them as Internecivus raptus - literally "murderous thief".
  • Planet Terror had "sickos", brain-eating bubbly-skinned not-quite-zombies.
  • The Underworld films call their vampires vampires, but their werewolves are called lycans, which, while it makes sense as a shortening of 'lycanthrope', does make them sound like lichens, that thin layer of green moss and fungus that grows on rocks. That being said, most of the movies are from the perspective of a vampire and someone who was part of neither society. The first word a werewolf says is a shouted warning to his fellows that vampires in the area. The word? "BLOODS!" (an occasional slang term for "friends")
    • However, the term werewolf is not completely omitted. When Selene explains to Michael what lycans are, she explicitly calls them werewolves to clarify the matter.
    • This Troper thought it was strange that they never actually explained that "lycan" was short for "lycanthrope" which is Greek for wolf-man just as "werewolf" is old English for man-wolf. Instead, if one doesn't know anything about Greek and has never played Dungeons and Dragons, one is likely to believe that "Lycan" is their family/clan name or something.
  • Not a mythological monster example, but it is worth noting that The Godfather (part 1) does not once use the word "Mafia," and in the novel it's based on, only people outside the syndicate refer to it as such, while Vito uses the phrase Cosa Nostra during his speech to the bosses of the Five Families. This ties in with the fact that real-world mobsters never use the term, as far as anyone can tell who is likely to say anything about it.
    • The first member to even publicly acknowledge its existence was Joe Valachi, in October 1963.
    • American mobsters didn't really use "Mafia" or "La Cosa Nostra" to refer to themselves until they adapted those terms from law enforcement and film and television. In Italy Mafia refers to geographically specific (Sicilian) crime groups but in North America some regional differences were ignored among Italian immigrants. Also, during and after Prohibition the vast organized crime network united by Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky was half Jewish, and thus preferred the ethnically neutral term "Syndicate".
  • The Hamiltons never uses the word vampire; through most of the movie, it isn't even clear that that's what the story is about.
  • In From Dusk Till Dawn, an argument begins over whether the creatures they were fighting are technically vampires.
    • Played with at the end of the movie:
    "Psychos don't explode when sunlight hits them, I don't give a fuck how crazy they are!"
  • Subverted in 30 Days of Night, where one character asks "if they aren't vampires, then what the hell are they?" after being told it's ridiculous to assume that the monsters are exactly that.
  • The vampires of Near Dark are never referred to as vampires, despite the blood-drinking, extra strength, lack of ageing and general vampire-ness.
  • The Steven Spielberg-directed War Of The Worlds movie goes out of its way to not call the clearly alien invaders "aliens".
  • Super Hero movies sometimes do this also. The most recent example is Iron Man in which the term "Iron Man" wasn't used until after nearly everything was over (and the hero was named by the media, not Tony Stark). Also, in X2, Lady Deathstrike was never named (except in the credits).
    • Same goes for Venom in Spider-Man 3.
    • The straight-to-DVD animated Iron Man movie was an even worse offender. His name is never used, and when mentioned in some Chinese prophecy, he's referred to as "The Iron Knight."
    • In a similar vein, note that The Dark Knight seemed to pointedly avoid the "Two-Face" moniker, even to the point that they were calling him "Harvey Dent" in the promotional materials and even the credits (which list him as "Harvey Dent" and not "Harvey Dent/Two-Face"). He is referred to as "Harvey Two-Face," once (referring to an old nickname), before everyone goes back to calling him Harvey Dent.
    • The "Two-Face" thing is arguably to keep some of the people who saw the movies and weren't fans of the comic books (and thus unaware that Harvey Dent is Two-Face) from knowing it was going to happen.
    • Also in the Chris Nolan Batman films, Batman's Vehicle is never called The Batmobile because it would sound too silly.
      • "Batpod", of course, does not sound silly in the least.
      • This is mostly because it's only called as such by Alfred, who by now has been established as a magnificent Deadpan Snarker.
  • The word "vampire" is never uttered in Rise. That's why most people who saw the trailer thought it was about some sort of Pushing Daisies-esque zombie or something.
  • The granddaddy of the 'Don't use the "R" word' subtrope: Back in 1977, the world knew mechanical/electronic automata as pretty much just one thing: Robots. To look different, we suppose, Star Wars referred to theirs as something (at the time) different, an abbreviation of 'android' — droid. Of course, nowadays the word is so common that non-Star Wars-based shows and movies have used it, even, and it's entirely possible that there are people out there who would recognise the word 'droid' more quickly. Moreover, 'droid' is more immediately recognisable as a term for sci-fi movie robots—few people would think to refer to an automated arm that screws bolts onto cars, a thick frisbee that sucks your carpet clean, or a plastic velociraptor with stupid legs as 'droids'.
    • This also contains irony. Abbreviated from 'androids,' the word 'droid' should thus refer only to things that match the definition of 'android.' 'Android,' of course, means 'humanoid robot' (and more precisely, male humanoid robots) —only of the two most famous Star Wars droids, 50% aren't humanoid at all.
    • It should be remembered that the term "robot" was coined back in the 1920s by Czech author Karl Chapek, and comes from the Czech verb "robotovat" or "to work hard". Its actually interesting that Star Wars doesn't use the term. Its one of the few affectations that indicate just how alien the setting is (why would a galaxy far far away use an originally Czech-derived word?).
  • The Hunger never uses V-word, despite the fact that it centers around a nigh-immortal woman who drinks blood.
  • The Sixth Sense avoids using the word "ghost" for almost the entire film. It is used only once, and in one of the last scenes. Also, the words "medium" and "psychic" are never used, although clearly the young Cole could be described as either.
  • John Landis's Innocent Blood never uses the word vampire, but isn't merely an example of Genre Blindness as dialog and clips from classic horror movies hint that many of the characters are thinking it.
  • In REC the 'zombies' are never acknowledged as such, even though it's acknowledged the fact that it's a virus. there's even the suggestion that the virus is from Hell.
  • The Evil Dead films refer to their monsters as "deadites", a term first used by the medieval knights that Ash finds locked in combat against them. Justified in that 13th century Europeans would hardly know the word "zombie", but perhaps it's also in an effort to emphasize that their monsters are different. The deadites, the result of Demonic Possession, can levitate, perform acrobatic feats such as cartwheels and spinning jump kicks, and seem no less intelligent than their human enemies.
  • Bishop prefers to be called an "artificial person."
  • Legend of the Werewolf, a Hammer 1975 movie starring Peter Cushing about, you guessed it, a werewolf (not Cushing). Although Cushing and other characters talk about the probable cause of several murders, they never utter the word "werewolf" or "wolfman": "It could have been... (the other guy waits to hear the anticipated hypothesis) No, that's a preposterous idea". Besides, the wolfman's romantic interests works as a prostitute (which is an important part of the plot) and that word is not uttered either: "She told me she's a servant." "(Laughs) Yes, she does indeed serve".
  • In Leprechaun 4: In Space the Leprechaun is never referred to as such; the main characters just assume he's some kind of alien.
  • Covered and named straight out between 5:20 and 7:00 in The Spoony One's review of the movie Quarantine, which apparently just thinks all of its zombies are "sick" and "need help".
  • Nobody in Requiem For A Dream ever says the word "heroin". Viewers are expected to realise what it is three of the four main characters are addicted to.
Literature
  • Harry Potter's "Inferi". They're closely based on the zombies of Haitian folklore (bodies animated by magic, to do the magician's bidding). The name comes from Roman gods of the underworld, the Inferi Dei.
    • Ironically, zombies are mentioned by name in the first book; Quirrell supposedly got rid of one and received his turban as a reward.
  • Subverted in World War Z: they had all sorts of codewords starting with Z ("Zack" was common in the U.S., a callback to "Charlie" from the Vietnam War), and when they actually did use the word "zombie" it was self-conscious, because until the Zombie Apocalypse, zombies had just been scary things from horror movies. Incidentally, the British called them "Zeds", and the Japanese named them after a type of ant.
  • Kit Whitfield's Bareback (Benighted in the US) is about a world where nearly everyone is a werewolf; they are referred to only as "lycanthropes" or "lycos."
  • The vampiric narrator of Steven Brust's Agyar never once uses the word "vampire," nor does he ever explicitely describe himself feeding on blood, though he does so many times. Agyar tells the story simply to put his thoughts on paper, and therefore does not explain anything that would be second nature to himself.
  • Used for humor in Terry Pratchett's Reaper Man. Windle Poons comes back as an undead, but almost any mention of the word "zombie" in describing his condition dissolves into a debate as to whether or not he actually is one. Because to really be a zombie, you need to eat a certain root and this specific kind of fish...
  • Green Rider and its sequel by Kristen Britain have the Eletians or Elt. They look, act, and speak like traditional Tolkienesque elves, but the author never calls them that. (Though considering her alternate name was "Elt", she might as well just have owned up to it.)
  • In Cell, Stephen King has his protagonists calling the victims of the mystery brainwipe "phone-crazies", later "phoners".
  • Stephen Erikson's Malazan Book Of The Fallen series has this in the Tiste races and the Jaghut. The K'Chain Chemalle are the world's lizardmen.
  • Half lampshaded, half played straight in Daniel Waters' Generation Dead, where the term "zombie" is only used in the same way as words like "nigger" and "dyke" are in the real world: that is, it is occasionally used as a joke or jocular term of affection amongst those actually belonging to the subculture (undead kids obviously, in this case), but considered offensive for anybody else to use. In fact, one of the book's more amusing running gag concepts involves society's attempts to come up with a politically correct alternative, with them at first settling on "Living Impaired" and eventually leaning more towards "Differently Biotic". Of course, not that this really stops any of the people who are unsettled by them from calling them the Z word...
  • In Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, Silas is fairly obviously a vampire, but the word is never used.
  • The vampires in Peeps by Scott Westerfield are pointedly not referred to as vampires, instead they're called "Peeps" which is short for Parasite-Positive. They're explicitly acknowledged to be the source of vampire legends, but the modern and scientifically literate vampires just feel self-conscious using it, probably because it sounds pretentious.
  • Explicitly parodied in the third book of The Dresden Files. Harry is attacked by a fairy plant monster that he insists on calling a "Chlorofiend", a term he just made up because he'd feel silly saying he was attacked by a plant monster. He does call Zombies a such though.
  • Lian Hearn's Tales Of The Otori series centers around a secret society of Japanese assassins. The author never once drops the word ninja. Similarly, the feudal warriors are never referred to as samurai.
  • Saturn's Children by Charles Stross justifies this in regard to its robots—the actual term robot is considered a Fantastic Slur.
  • In Pride And Prejudice And Zombies, while no effort is made by the author/narrator to not refer to the zombies as such, the characters occasionally refer to them as "unmentionables" or "the afflicted", apparently because calling them zombies isn't proper. They sometimes do so anyway.
  • In Barbara Hambly's The Ladies of Mandrigyn, the Big Bad (or, more accurately, The Dragon and the Eldritch Abomination that's powering him) has a nasty habit of turning people into ghouls, or type-F zombies, or some sort of blind, slavering, mindlessly vicious freaks. However, the canon term for the process's victims is "nuuwa," and that's all that they're ever called.
  • In John Ajvide Lindqvist's Handling the Undead, a large number of recently dead people suddenly and for unclear reasons comes back to life, sort of. After some debate, the authorities decide that the official term for these people should be "the Reliving". Not everyone obey this politically correct rule and many people keeps referring to the undead as Zombies.
  • In the Torchwood novel Bay of the Dead, Gwen and Ianto initially refuse to refer to the attackers as zombies. Jack, however, is practically gleeful about it.
    Jack: You know what I'm thinking, don't you?
    Ianto: No, Jack. It's ridiculous. You know it's ridiculous.
    Jack: On our way here we field a call from Gwen, who says that she and Rhys have been attacked by a walking corpse. And now here we are surrounded by evidence of an attack in which the perpetrators used their bare hands as murder weapons and then cannibalised their victims. What does that suggest to you, Ianto?
    Ianto: It's crazy, Jack. It's horror-movie hokum. You know it is.
    Jack: And you know what we're up against here, don't you?
    Ianto: No, I don't. Don't say it, Jack. Don't use the-
    Jack: Zombies!
    Ianto: -zed word.
  • Subverted with Twilight in that Stephanie Meyer removed everything that defines a vampire, but still insists on using the V word.

Live Action TV
  • Ultraviolet never used the word vampire. Instead, the government called them "Code 5" (that is, V).
    • Also 'leeches' as a slang term.
  • The Doctor Who stories "The Curse of Fenric" have undead which drank blood and are repelled by strong faith, but are never called vampires. (Another Doctor Who story, "Smith and Jones" and the Torchwood episode "Something Borrowed" have similarly vampiric creatures not named as such. Admittedly, the ones from Torchwood differ from vampires in some signifiant ways.) This was possibly because an earlier story Doctor Who, "State of Decay", did have vampires called by name, and the ones in "The Curse of Fenric", at least, were clearly different.
    • In the Big Finish audio production Loups-Garoux, in which the Doctor meets a group of Werewolves, they're usually called "Loups-Garoux" (the French word for "werewolves"), but one character calls them "Lobos", sometimes they're referred to as "wolves", and "Werewolf" is used sparingly. The television story "Tooth and Claw" has the Doctor refer to a "lupine wavelength haemovariform".
    • The new series has done this for witches (Carrionites). (The Gelth from "The Unquiet Dead" aren't actually ghosts, though, they just pass themselves off as spirits of the departed. They can also possess human bodies for a little zombie action.)
  • The 2007 Flash Gordon series avoids referring to any of the Mongo peoples as the human-animal mashups or mythological constructs that they're based on, and by which they are known in most other adaptations. Thus, Hawkmen are "Dactyls", Lionmen are "Tuuren", Amazons are "Omadrians", and so forth. Being that it's an installment of Flash Gordon, it doesn't work. At all.
  • The Initiative in Buffy The Vampire Slayer insists on calling the various monsters they hunt "Hostile Sub-Terrestrials" (which sounds suspiciously like "Aggressive Non-Terrestrials" from the Doctor Who story "Dragonfire", which does not involve dragons) in a laughable effort to sound scientific about it. But then they're military. If they don't have a multiple-word phrase they can abbreviate, they wither and die.
    • The show itself was pretty bad about this in its early monster-of-the-week episodes. A dead football player is resurrected by his brother's experiment with electricity, and they cobble together a bride for the monster by graverobbing and stitching together body parts... somehow nobody, not even well-read characters like Giles and Willow, mentions Frankenstein, and they all seem rather shocked by the idea. Later, a monster of the week turns out to be a student using a potion that transforms him into his disfigured, evil half, all without anyone making a reference to the names Jekyll or Hyde. You almost have to assume that in the Buffyverse, those books simply don't exist. Thankfully, that sort of literary amnesia went away as the show went on. But then, if you suddenly realized you were living in a bad horror movie, would YOU want to admit it, out loud, to your friends?
  • Kyle XY features a main character and another character who are clones, but follow almost no cloning cliches; possibly because of this, nobody ever uses the word "clone" in the show.
    • Until the last episode comes and they are apparently not only not clones, but show no qualms about killing actual clones, even though the description of their origins (and their identical appearances to their parents in younger days) meant "clone".
  • In an episode of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, Herc visits his old friend Vlad, who lives in Transylvania, and learns that he's changed a bit since the old days... Apart from a couple of slips, however, the script resolutely uses the term "strigoi" to describe the bloodsucking monsters ("strigoi" being yet another East European term for a vampire, but is similar to the Classic Greek term "striga".)
    • "Striga" is more likely to be interchangeable with "witch" than "vampire"...not, of course, that old folktales are super-careful about such distinctions....
    • Fortunately, they're using the folklore version of Vlad and not drawing from the historical version. A 'couple of slips' for Vlad Dracul would be pretty bad for anyone within a hundred miles that so much as looked at him funny. And certainly not be Family Friendly Violence in the least.
  • Cylons in Battlestar Galactica are called any number of names, from "Toaster" to "Skin Job", but never robots, except in "Pegasus", in which some of Pegasus's crew members call a Cylon just that.
    • In the miniseries, Baltar says disparagingly to Number Six "You're a Cylon. A robot."
  • Dead Set never uses the word zombie to describe its undead - writer Charlie Brooker wanted to distinguish it from more light-hearted zombie comedies like Shaun of the Dead where characters use the Z-word frequently. One character does however quote "They're coming to get you Barbara!" from Night Of The Living Dead, so at least they aren't completely Genre Blind.
  • Midway through season 2 of Torchwood, Owen is killed off and then revived through Applied Phlebotinum. The show makes it quite clear that he's still technically dead: he has no metabolism, can't eat or drink, can't heal injuries, etc. And yet, despite all the references to him being a walking dead man, no one once uses the word "Zombie".
  • Heroes is to be commended for being well into its third season with no sign of planning to use the word "mutant".
    • Or for that matter, "superhero" or "supervillain". The Fan Nickname for people with powers in Heroes is "evolved humans", because those are nothing like "mutants" (of course, granted, "metahuman" is already taken...). And no one in Heroes has "powers", going by Heroes Wiki; they have "abilities". And no one has "super strength", they have "enhanced strength", because "super strength"... well that would be just silly. Suffice to say that Heroes fandom has a bit of a thing for this trope, at least as much as the show's own writers do.
    • Of course, Ascended Fanboy Hiro does refer to himself as a "superhero", and the characters have swapped "abilities" with "special powers" and "powers" occasionally.
    • Especially Sylar. He doesn't have abilities, he has powers. And considering how he can slice the top of your head off like it's a hard-boiled egg, it's best not to argue.
  • Sheena, Queen of the Jungle contains an episode in which the title character faces off against some mindless people who walk like the dead. When her love-interest/straight man refers to them as "zombies", Sheena and her African matron are alternately shocked and amused; apparently "zombie" is some sort of sexual term in the tribe's language.
  • The Terminator TV series made a point of never ever saying the T word out loud, despite it being the very title of the show. Then, at the climax of (possibly) the last episode, Sarah screamed it into her adversary's face. Good times.

Music

Newspaper Comics
  • Candorville justifies this in a humorous fashion regarding its "fangs": "Copyright issues. Lawyers would get involved."

Tabletop Games
  • The tabletop game Unhallowed Metropolis, set in a nightmarish future London (while, in a twist, keeping the victorian setting from before the outbreak of the plague alive) where the dead do not always rest quietly, uses various terms for them, and Zombies is only one of them. The standart term is "animates", mortus animatus is the scientific name, and the term ambulatory dead is also sometimes used.
  • The World Of Darkness games are a somewhat odd case: each of them uses the particular creature's common name as the title of the game ("Vampire", "Werewolf" etc.) but those names are largely avoided in the actual text and even more in the parlance of the creatures themselves. Vampires are "Kindred" or (in the old version) "Cainites", werewolves are "Garou" (or "Uratha" in the new version), and so forth.
    • They acknowledge the stereotypical terms, but use them about as frequently as we refer to ourselves as "hominids" and for similar reasons.
    • In the case of vampires, this is explained as them wanting to sound more refined than they actually are, a sort of denial. One sourcebook describes using the word vampire in a meeting of the more "civilized" Kindred as being akin to shouting "motherfucker" in church.
      • The trope is incompletely sustained, but justified where it is. Vampires know they're vampires, werewolves know they're werewolves, everyone else in on the Masquerade knows they're vampires and werewolves. But they call themselves by something more flattering and the others more insulting. Vampires, for instance, tend to call werewolves and mages "lupines" and "warlocks," whereas those groups might call vampires "bloodsuckers" or "leeches". The same thing extends to humans; few people refer to themselves and others as 'humans', and the vampire label them the more condescending 'kine'.
    • Promethean: The Created establishes that the name used for the Walking Wasteland supernaturals that are the game's subject is mostly just for-the-players's-convenience shorthand, and that most of the titular species wouldn't even recognize the term. There are simply too few of them for the Created to have an accepted species name.
  • Due to a religious flap about the presence of demons and devils in the game, Dungeons and Dragons was forced to refer to the inhabitants of the Abyss and the Inferno as "Baatezu" and "Tanar'ri" for many long years. And then they tried to return and ended up with a mix of both.
    • Or, as one of narrators in "Hellbound:The Blood War" (AD&D 2nd ed) put it —
    Most berks think that the Blood War's nothing more than the battle between dem - no, wait. That ain't the right word. For one thing, it's a sure road to woe. Calling the fiends by the d-words is no better than insulting any other group of folks because of the way they look or act. Not only does it infuriate them, it marks the speaker as a crass boor, someone to be shunned (or killed). Might as well call a bariaur a randy goat, or a slaad a slimy toad. It's a mark of ignorance, plain and simple, and it'll paint a body to be as Clueless as they come.
    When speaking of the evil creatures that fight the Blood War, just call them "baatezu" and "tanar'ri", or "the fiends." Or call them nothing at all; that way, a body's not as likely to draw their attention.
  • Magic: the Gathering encountered a similar problem several years into its rise to power; for many years, cards which depicted a horrible monster from the Underworld were "Beasts" or "Horrors" without fail, and never too closely resembled the demon stereotype. At about the same time, images such as "Unholy Strength"'s flaming pentagram disappeared, and this was later Handwaved as a choice to "avoid using real-world iconography in our fantasy universe". A few of the creature-type changes have since been Retconned.
    • Lampshaded in Unglued, where Infernal Spawn of Evil has the type Demon crossed out with Beast scribbled in.

Video Games
  • The Fallout series hosts a form of radioactive human mutants called "Ghouls" in the post-WWIII nuclear wasteland, coming in intelligent, civilized and mindless, flesh-eating (but god, not slow) and arm-chewing forms. Because of the latter form, people keep calling the intelligent ones zombies, leading to situations where uttering the Z-word around normal Ghouls is about as smart as removing the safety pin on a hand grenade and not throwing. In fact, calling a Ghoul a zombie is on par with using the "N-word" around black people.
  • In Parasite Eve 2, Eve is never referred to as a clone.
  • In Breath Of Fire: Dragon Quarter, characters rarely use the D word as slang for D-Constructs, despite its presence in the game's title.
  • The Boktai series is a rather strange example, where while ninety percent of the time its antagonists are referred to as "Immortals", the game still manages to slip in the occasional "Vampire".
  • The open-source strategy game Battle For Wesnoth calls its zombies "walking corpses", which makes sense, given the term "zombie" would not have existed in the medieval setting used. One scenario in an included campaign even parodies the Shaun of the Dead "zed word" exchange mentioned above.
    • It makes a little less sense when a Walking Corpse kills and reanimates a mounted unit. You then get a new mounted "walking corpse" that never walks.
      • Although the horse it is mounted on is also a corpse, and presumably walks.
  • In Metal Gear Solid 4, when the French mercenaries in South America have their nanomachines repressed, causing emotion, guilt, and reason to flood back into their brain, they are heavily brain damaged, to the point where they feel no pain and shamble about and attack like Romero zombies. Despite being a nerd, Otacon says "things" instead of "zombies".
  • The roguelike Castle Of The Winds uses "Walking Dead" instead of the Z word.
  • Robots are "Synthetics" in Mass Effect.
    • And in the instance of reanimated corpses, you have either the Geth-transformed Husks or the plant spore mind-controlled Thorian Creepers, both of which shamble around fairly similarly to other undead specimens.
    • To be fair, the Codex does point out that various "synthetic rights" groups have successfully lobbied to have "artificial" lifeforms be dubbed "synthetic" instead of "robot" or similar.
  • In The Elder Scrolls demons are "Daedra".
    • In Arena they were called Daemons, but there was only one of Fire. They were renamed as Daedra in Daggerfall as the backstory settled, then a type of Daedra inherited the name of the abandoned man-made golems, Atronachs, in Morrowind.
  • Dead Space does not have 'zombies'. It has Necromorphs.
  • Valve's Zombie Apocalypse Co-op shooter Left 4 Dead lampshades this in its first TV spot, viewable here.
    • Some of the random conversations and quips the characters make reference this. Francis in particular can go an almost half a campaign (5 levels) calling the Infected/zombies 'vampires' (even talking about techniques for killing vampires) before Bill gets annoyed and finally corrects him with a very firm "They're ZOMBIES, Francis!"
  • In Final Fantasy XII and the other Final Fantasy games set in Ivalice call Humans "Humes", borrowing from Final Fantasy XI.
    • And Cid never uses the term "human", when he talks about bringing "History back into the hands of Man". Maybe "Man" is used to describes every sentient races of Ivalice, but it is never really explored
  • In a case of 'using the other M word', the term "machine" was only used once near the beginning of Final Fantasy X to clarify for players what "machina" were. The trope is later played with in Final Fantasy X 2, where certain groups start using the term "machine" to avoid the in-universe negative connotations of "machina".
  • Another Square Enix example, Humans in Last Remnant are called Mitras.
  • Link in the Zelda games is a Hylian or Hyrulian. The term "elf" is never used, even though he belongs to a race of pointy-eared forest dwellers who use bows. Like 28 Days Later, this has resulted in some fan debate about whether he is actually an elf.
    • They're not. The Minish Cap calls them "humans" more than once.
      • By and large hylians are more human than elf. The pointy ears are the only elf like feature exibited by all or even most hylians. They aren't long lived, they don't prefer living in forests, Link is the only one who always wears green and I defy anyone to show me a culture that, at that level of technology didn't use bows.
      • Being called "humans" doesn't mean anything; lots of races call themselves the people, their planet the Earth, etc. (Example: in Dragaera the elf-like Dragaerans call themselves humans. Also several examples of aliens calling themselves "humans" in Named After Their Planet.)
    • Also used literally, as there is a race of living dead present through many of the games who have the appearance of corpses, no intelligence, and walk in a slow shuffle, yet they are only ever referred to as "ReDeads". Ocarina of Time even involves a minor Zombie Apocalypse, in which the entire of Hyrule town is infested by zombies, and we only see a small portion of its population evacuating to Kakariko. Nevertheless, all we hear is something along the lines of "Under Ganon, Hyrule became a land of monsters".
  • House Of The Dead: Overkill uses this trope early on in the game, where G corrects his partner on calling the mutant enemies zombies, spelling out the trope's title. Of course, this is done with a wink and a nod, as the game is an intentional So Bad Its Good mixup of every zombie trope in the book.
  • Fable II has zombies (reanimated, shambling dead) called "Hollow Men". Which is fair enough, since it takes place in a different world. One NPC, Sister Hannah, cracks a joke about them not truly being hollow because then they'd make a different noise when struck.
  • The first five or ten minutes or so of Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines only use the term "Kindred" in place of vampire, which might give one the impression that the term is exclusively used in place of the more familiar term. However, in the tutorial, your mentor Jack casually says "Kindred, that's, uh, our word for 'vampire'."
  • The Land Of The Dead: Road to Fiddler's Green video game goes to such extremes to avoid using the "Z" word, it's almost comical. Some of the more strained euphemisms the game uses include "flesh feasters", "awakened dead", and "soulless walkers".
  • The Flood in Halo are never referred to as zombies. Granted they are quite different than the standard idea of zombies to a knowledgeable observer but former allies transformed into hostile walking corpses should certainly be notably familiar to at least some humans.
  • Averted in Half-Life 2. Rebels will yell "Zombie!" whenever they see a you-know-what.
  • Used to interesting effect in War Craft III, the closest thing the Undead faction have to a Zombie is the Ghoul (they have the same backstory as Zombies, though, innocent townspeople infected with the Plague of Undeath who attack the living). Zombies are a completely diferent monster, a feral Undead independant of Ner'Zul's influence. **Technically, Blizzard got it backwards, the Ghouls should be feral, while the Zombies should be under the Lich-King's command.
  • Left 4 Dead calls them Infected though since the game takes more after the fast zombie rather than the shambling zombie and they're not dead, it may or may not make sense. Though "infected" is the official term, the characters do refer to them as Zombies, particularly Zoe, who's very Genre Savvy, and calls "Zombie bullshit!" on them running that fast.
    • Graffiti also has a little fun with this. One line says "They only come out at night," and right below it is another saying, "No, that's vampires jackass!"
  • Guild Wars not only has more traditional zombies (the undead from early-mid Prophecies and in certain Eye of the North dungeons), it has "Awakened" (Joko's underlings and, presumably, Joko himself, all of whom look more like mummies) and "Afflicted" (those inflicted with Body Horror by Shiro's plague. Not actually undead, but they act enough like zombies to qualify).

Web Comics
  • Robots in Girl Genius are called "Clanks," never "robots." The real world owes the word 'robot' solely to Czech author Karel Capek's play R.U.R. (from Czech 'robota' = 'labor'), and Girl Genius is set before it was written. (Also, Capek's 'robots' are apparently biological creations rather than mechanical. Constructs, anybody?)
  • In spite of the ever-present supernatural elements of the setting, Gunnerkrigg Court goes over 400 pages before the first use of the word "magic". The commentary below the comic lampshades this.
  • Sluggy Freelance does this a couple of times with the "ghouls" who were revealed to be aliens who adopted human forms, and the "infected" (namely, infected with intelligence increasing insects that turn people into unusually feral geeks). Of course, it also includes straight-up, spelled-with-a-Z zombies on occasion, too, so the different names are probably to avoid confusion more than anything else.
    • In one case, the Z-words are called "deadels" by the one who raised them. As one character argues, "Hey, when your world is ruled by an evil demon who wants to call its undead minions 'deadels', you call 'em 'deadels!'"
  • Subverted in Narbonic, when Dave dies and gets stitched back together and reanimated, he makes Zombie references and "Brainnsss" jokes whenever possible. Played straight in that he *never* references Frankenstein's monster, despite that being much closer (down to the bolts in the neck) to what he is.
  • The orphaned Lacunae has photosensitive bloodsuckers that are called "haemophages" or just "phages", but never "vampires."
  • Linburger always has a different word for their Demi Human races. So thus the elves are called Cyll, the Cat Girls are called Mirrakae, and the orcs are called Trokks. Granted, Cat Girl would be a pretty silly name for a race.

Western Animation
  • In the Justice League cartoons, the characters with particularly stupid names in the comics (like Amazo, Martian Manhunter, Power Girl and most of the Superfriends) were almost always called by other names.
    • Amazo was actually named by Lex once, in the episode where he fires the JLU's space-cannon. He's talking to himself about his new robot body he's been building and specifically mentions the creation of the robot Amazo as his inspiration.
      • And of course Solomon Grundy ought to be mentioned, and he is explicitly referred to as a zombie, which leads to the exchange:
      Green Lantern: Funny thing is, he's supposed to be dead.
      Vixen: Aren't all zombies, by definition, dead?
      Green Lantern: Uh...
    • Power Girl wasn't exactly in Justice League Unlimited. The villainess Galatea was somewhat based on her, except Galatea was an evil clone created from Kara's DNA.
      • "Somewhat" my aunt banana. She has the Magic Boob Window. And Power Girl already has a million different origins anyway.
    • Justice League also had "Task Force X", which wasn't referred to by it's comics name "the Suicide Squad" because, hey, it's a Kid's cartoon.
  • The Aladdin series had a character that controlled what were obviously some form of Undead, but the words undead and zombie were never mentioned. Instead, they were always called Mamluks, which rather than being some kind of mythological creature, simply means "slave" in Arabic. While they were enslaved zombies, the name is still a source of frustation for this Arabic-speaking troper.
  • The Secret Of Kells never uses the word "bible", despite being about making one. The Book of Iona/Kells is just referred to as "the book" or a sacred text.

Web Original
  • In the universe of The Descendants, there's a sort of culture war going on over using the term 'superhero'. As comic books exist in that world and there are presumably legal issues involved in using it, the media calls the real super humans emerging 'prelates' even though many of them call themselves 'superheroes' and their enemies 'super villains'.
    • It gets better when you note the extent the series goes to to call their mutants anything but.
  • The online furry comic/graphic novel Rework the Dead and its sequel, Rework the Dead II, By David Hopkins, has zombies referred to as "Reworks"—- which makes sense as the dead are reanimated immensely stronger, faster, incredibly violent and with claws and razor-sharp fangs. (Warning: this "funny animal" comic is anything but cute and cuddly.)

Fan Fiction

Real Life
  • From the 2008 April Fools issue of the University at Buffalo school newspaper, Opinion section: "We of the American Society for Necro-Animatory Syndrome Awareness object to the outdated and offensive term 'Zombie.' We prefer the politically correct term Ambulatory Dead." The newspaper proceeds to act in a politically correct manner, though Bush is quoted as having slightly more trouble.
    • The Onion has repeatedly done similar things.
Nothing Is Scarier
« Horror Tropes »
Occult Detective
Note To Self
« Speculative Fiction Tropes »
Not Wearing Tights
Not A Zombie
« Tropes Of The Living Dead »
Our Zombies Are Different
new edits
forum
page history
edit page
view source
discuss
Creative Commons License
This wiki is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.