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Everything's Deader With Zombies
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alt title(s): Everythings Deader With Zombies 
Steve: All right. What's with the Zombies? Eric: Oh them. [...] They only come up here when they're bored. — Radioactive Panda
There's a Romero-style zombie shambling around, but it's not a Zombie Apocalypse. So what's it doing here? Because zombies are cool. Whether it's to set up a Low Fantasy setting with necromantic Horrors, add an element of comedy, or simply to add variety, some works of fiction feature Zombies in a less then central position. It doesn't even have to have a reason. The zombie is there just because.
This is something of a popular advertising gimmick for games, MMORPG's, and Comic Books these days. Just like slapping Wolverine on the cover adds to sales, a "zombie invasion", "Halloween Episode", or other stunt can drive up sales and give a fun Breather Episode from more plot heavy story arcs.
This could also work if there actually is a Zombie Apocalypse, but it's not part of the main story. It's just thrown in there as a parody or homage with little lasting effect on the plot.
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Examples
General
- Halloween specials and events used to mean a variety of monsters. Now it just means a zombie episode or zombies spawning in MMORPGs everywhere.
Anime & Manga
Card Games
Comics
- Hellboy had a small eastern European town beset by a horde of zombies. The townsfolk took care of it.
- Marvel Zombies
- A recent Green Lantern story shows that the only thing worse than a horde of intelligent zombies is a horde of intelligent zombies with Green Lantern Rings.
Film
Literature
- Zombie appear in Xanth, but they are simply undead instead of dangerous.
- Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Exactly What It Says On The Tin.
- There IS a short story titled "Everything's Better with Zombies".
- Discworld's zombies, seeing as they're basically the same person's mind and body, just... dead, aren't usually plot-central. One member of the City Watch, Reg Shoe, is a zombie, for example, and a reasonably okay guy. The only "bad" zombie is Mr. Slant, but that has more to do with him being an Amoral Attorney than a zombie.
- The Discworld novel Reaper Man details an actual zombie apocalypse (or more precisely, an undead apocalypse... with zombies!) caused by Death being fired for taking too much of an interest in his work. Hilarity ensues.
- The Cauldron-Born in the Prydain Chronicles are reanimated corpses that exist only to slay for Big Bad Arawn.
- The Inferi from Harry Potter are zombies in everything but name (with the Frankenstein monster's Pop Cultural Osmosis fear of fire).
- In several stories from the back of Max Brooks' Zombie Survival Guide (called "Recorded Attacks"), the zombie threat never reaches epidemic proportions. The most fitting incident was in 2002 in St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, where a zombie washed ashore and drew a crowd. The crowd kept it at bay and when it was finally shot, it hadn't infected anyone. In fact, in the following years, a small tourist trade grew around the sighting, and "St. Thomas Zombie" memorabilia can be bought at souvenir stores on the island.
Live Action TV
- "Degrassi of the Dead"
- The "Green Men" from the Dark Tower series by Stephen King, though they're actually mutants.
- One episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer had a mask that was making a bunch of people come back as homicidal zombies, which had no real relevance to the ongoing plot about Buffy returning after having run away from home. Also, in an episode of Angel, an evil law firm was being destroyed by a terrible monster, and for no apparent reason most of the lawyers turned into zombies.
- It was a supernatural safeguard against unwelcome intruders. After all, Wolfram & Hart is led by very old demons who do not want to share their secrets. And fortunately for Gunn, they left out the "Bite makes a convert".
- Xander also ran into a guy who somehow had the ability to reanimate dead people with a special charm. They still kept their intelligence, but they also kept their wounds.
- In Angel, there was also one guy who was a zombie, and all he wanted to do was hook up with his ex-girlfriend. It's unknown what exactly brought him to undeath.
- The girlfriend poisoned him. He died. He came back as a zombie. She forgave him for cheating. He forgave her for killing him. They kissed and made up.
- Supernatural has yet to include any Romero-style zombies (though there was at least one case of classic necromancy), but at one point Sam tricked Dean into going on a personal mission by claiming they had to go zombie-hunting. Dean really seemed to be looking forward to it.
- In the Second Doctor story The Web of Fear, the evil Great Intelligence operated chiefly through the body of Staff Sergeant Arnold, KIA early on in the emergency.
- The Charmed Ones in Charmed have to fight against zombies created by a necromancer and Zankou.
Video Games
- Quarantine Mode in Combat Arms.
- World of Warcraft had a zombie invasion.
- You can be a zombie in World of Warcraft. Warcraft likes zombies a lot.
- As did City of Heroes. In addition to the Zombie invasions in Cityof Heroes, there are zombies in pretty much every flavour wandering about as antagonists, or, if you're a villain, as minions.
- Nothing prevents you from stopping crime and protecting the innocent as a zombie hero either.
- Nox had zombies as standard monsters mid-game (and they get upgraded later), but it was justified by the fact that the hero's primary enemies were necromancers.
- Grand Theft Auto IV has a "viral" achievement called "Let Sleeping Rockstars Lie" which you get be killing someone who has it already (the developers started with it, so it spread from them). It unlocks the ability to play as a zombie in a speedo. No joke.
- Threed in EarthBound.
- Mother 3 also had some zombies in the beginning of Duster's chapter, who were (coincidentally) Hinawa and Claus like.
- Call of Duty: World at War now has four bonus levels featuring, what else, Nazi Zombies. *
Okay, one level has you fighting Japanese zombies, but "Nazi Zombies" is more fun to say . Some of them even goosestep instead of shambling.
- "We don't go to Ravenholm..."
- Apart from that rather infamous level, both Half-Life games had zombies as fairly weak, slow opponents that were only really threatening in large numbers or small spaces. Apart from (in the second game) the fast ones. And the poison ones. Brr.
- Notably, the creatures which cause the zombies are, in the sequel, loaded into artillery and used as offensive weapons.
- The Dustmen in Planescape Torment use zombies as laborers and offer people large amounts of money in exchange for use of their body after they die.
- Diablo. In the second game, some of them even had the ability to rez themselves.
- No they didn't. Those giant 3-meter-tall bird-headed people with the praying mantis arms could resurrect them, though.
- Those were skeletons. Some zombies could resurrect themselves once, like the ones outside Nihlithaks lair.
- Some of the Army Men games have zombies thrown in just for the hell of it.
- Most of the baddies in the Doom games are demons, but there's no shortage of undead.
- Soul Calibur's Cervantes is one, while Astaroth is a "Golem" (read: Frankenstein's Monster).
- The original Breath of Fire has a whole town (aptly named Romero) full of the walking dead. Though they don't try to harm you, it still becomes your duty to put them back into the ground.
- Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines had a cemetery level full of zombies at one point, in direct homage to Romero films. The exact reason for their appearance has never been explained, considering that no Gehenna actually happened. There are two other major zombie sequences in the game - one caused by a virus and the other caused by vampire necromancy. Despite the stark difference between the origins of the three zombie groups in the game, they all move, act, and are essentially the exact same things.
- Plants Vs Zombies, a Tower Defense game where you fight off invading zombies with an army of plants.
- Borderlands The first DLC will have Zombies.
- Guild Wars has at least 2 different kinds of zombies (without including necromancer minions).
- One of the recurring monsters in Final Fantasy was Zombies. Even in Final Fantasy Tactics A 2, a character named Frimelda Lotice used to be a zombie.
Webcomics
Web Original
- Mur Lafferty's audio drama The Takeover. It's like the American venison of The Office but with zombies. And also funny.
- Oh, and there's a cameo by Johnathan Coulton in the last episode of season 1.
- SCP-008. The world accessible through SCP-093 suffered what's essentially a Zombie Apocalypse under the application of a truly epic instance of Our Zombies Are Different. They fit the archetype of the endlessly hungry, seemingly-mindless hordes of the restless dead, but... well, when the smallest difference is that they're up to six stories tall, you know you're dealing with something weird here.
Western Animation
Real Life
- In Austin, TX, pranksters broke the locks on highway construction signs and altered them to read: THE END IS NEAR! ZOMBIES AHEAD! RUN! RUN TO COLD CLIMATES! NAZI ZOMBIES!
- Unfortunately, this happened once during a hurricane evactuation. Nobody panicked, thankfully, but it could have been a lot worse with the evacuees who were already under stress from the possibility of having lost most of their Earthly posessions.
- Of course, Zombie Walks.
Waldorf: Why do you suppose Tropers like zombies so much?
Statler: Because they don't have lives either.
Both: Do-ho-ho-ho-ho-hoh!
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