Episode of the Dead

They're not just robots. They're zombots.

The Zombie Apocalypse is a scenario no one wants to be in. Zombie Stories are an entire genre completely dedicated to such an event. But in some works, zombies are focused on for a brief period — a special episode, chapter, stage or level (depending on the media). It may be named Title of the Dead or other similar titles that evoke zombies.

There are many ways this can come about. Perhaps the Villain of the Week or the Monster of the Week have powers related to zombies. Maybe the protagonists or a One-Shot Character accidentally release The Plague or The Virus. Or maybe they just stumble upon a post-zombie apocalypse location. Despite the title, not every instance of this trope features literal zombies, as sometimes it can be people who behave like zombies, or some other form of infection like mutants or vampires.

While examples of this trope can feature smaller scale zombie outbreaks of one or few individuals, it's far more common for there to be a large scale infection with a sizable portion of zombies that the protagonists have to deal with.

In more comedic works, the zombies can be played more lightheartedly and there will more likely than not be a Reset Button Ending for the next episode, or else the episode is effectively non-canonical. In more serious works, the protagonists will finally find a cure for The Virus and all returns to normal at the end of the episode... or they just left the haunted/infected place without coming back.

A sub-trope of Tropes of the Living Dead, Everything's Deader with Zombies and Episodes. May overlap with a Halloween Episode and/or Bizarro Episode, especially if the work is usually quite grounded. Not to Be Confused with Zombie Stories, stories entirely about zombies — this trope is about zombies temporarily being the focus of a work.

---

Examples:

Anime and Manga

• The Royal Capital Arc of Black Clover deals with the Magic Knights fighting against the zombie army created by Rades's wraith magic.
• A few chapters of Bungo Stray Dogs have the villain inflict a "curse" on the citizens of Yokohama. Since the curse causes everyone to mindlessly attack anyone they see, the city quickly degenerates into chaos. The main characters are left having to defend themselves and the few civilians who were unaffected, while the protagonist rushes to get the cure to the only character capable of breaking the curse.
• In Cells at Work!, the Influenza chapter/episode depicts the Influenza virus infecting bodily cells as a Zombie Apocalypse, where cells have the virus latching onto their heads and giving them a zombie complexion. The cells of the Immune system from the White Blood Cells and Cytotoxic T-Cells all fight against the infection, before Naive T-Cell who possesses the antigen specifically against this strain of Influenza, gets activated into an Effector T-Cell and lays waste to the Influenza army.
• Episode 37 of Digimon Ghost Game had Monster of the Week RareRaremon possess corpses with its slime which it then sicced on animals and people to create Technically Living Zombies that would willingly feed themselves to it.
• Dragon Ball Z: Fusion Reborn features the denizens of hell escaping into the world of the living, with many of them with the appearance of zombies and skeletons, including Apocalypse Hitler and his undead army.
• Parodied in the Fairy Tail bonus chapter and anime episode "Fairy Tail of the Dead MEEEEEEEEEN", where Ichiya develops a new parfum that spreads into the city and gives anyone who smells it his "handsome" face, on top of zombie-like behavior like a shambling walk, moaning "meeeen" instead of "braiiins", and spreading the virus by sniffing the uninfected—all of which, mind you, is treated as hellishly dire as an actual Zombie Apocalypse. The virus is cured with deodorant in the end, but then Happy gets infected...
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • The "Justice" arc from Stardust Crusaders has the Crusaders exploring a town overrun by living corpses being controlled by Enya Geil's Stand, Justice. When Enya is defeated, the town is revealed to be a graveyard cloaked within an illusion created by the Stand's ability.
  • The "Kiss of Love & Revenge" arc from Stone Ocean has the heroes fighting against Sports Maxx, whose Stand, Limp Bizkit, resurrects the dead as invisible zombies, including Sports Maxx himself.
• My Hero Academia: The anime's second OVA, "Training of the Dead", features Class 1-A having a joint training session with Romero Fujimi^note named for zombie maestro George A. Romero, who has a Quirk that can temporarily turn people into zombies.
• Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt: The episode "... of the Dead" is about Panty and Stocking as Fair Cops going for a new Monster of the Week, which in this case converts all the population of Daten City into zombies, and with the only weapons they can find are... sex toys.
• Space☆Dandy has an episode in the first season about Dandy and his crew trapped a rare alien, who's a Zombie Infectee, first biting and infecting Meow and later the whole hospital where Dandy and QT left him thinking he was just "sick". The first half ends with the entire cast turned into zombies. The second half reveals turning zombie hasn't affected their minds much, and they've also stopped aging or needing food. Thus when the rest of the universe is converted into zombies, it becomes a utopia.
• Parodied in the Super Sonico episode "Cruise of the Dead". Sonico and her friends are invited to the launch party of a new skincare product, being held aboard a cruise ship, but disaster strikes when it turns out that using the product turns you into a shambling zombie. Unlike most examples, the effects are only temporary, and by morning, the "zombies" are all back to normal.
• Episode 20b of GO-GO Tamagotchi! plays down the more mature and creepy elements of the typical Zombie Apocalypse setting, this being a children's show and all. The episode is about Mametchi, Chamametchi, and Hapihapitchi being the only survivors of a zombie epidemic going around Tamagotchi Town. And then Chamametchi and Hapihapitchi are zombified as well, leaving Mametchi entirely at the mercy of them and all of the other zombies as he tries to survive. Mametchi eventually gets zombified as well.
• YuYu Hakusho: A subplot of the "Saint Beasts arc" had the Big Bad, Suzaku, use the fabled Makai whistle to send Makai insects to the human world and turn anyone infected into violence obsessed zombies. After the heroes beat three of his men, Suzaku decides to take revenge by sending the infected after Yusuke's girlfriend, Keiko. While Botan does come to her aid to protect her, the numbers are much too numerous to handle and the two have to run, hide and ultimately hold out until Yusuke can finally defeat Suzaku and destroy the whistle. Suzaku even says as much when taunting Yusuke in their fight.
  Suzaku: (To Yusuke) You should be honored, it's not everyday your girlfriend gets to be the star of their own horror movie.

Comic Books

• DC Comics
  • The 2009 Crisis Crossover event Blackest Night is this for The DCU, having the universe-scale menace of the "Black Lanterns", reanimated corpses of dead people, not limited to heroes or villains, metahumans or common folks, from every part of the universe. If it's dead, it can be a Black Lantern (resurrected included, that count as Manchurian Agents).
  • The first arc of the DC Rebirth relaunch of Harley Quinn features Coney Island citizens turned into Technically Living Zombies after accidentally eating alien meat.
  • The Elseworld mini-series DCeased is about a corrupted, technological version of the Anti-Life Equation that, instead of brainwashing the masses, turns them into ravenous, rage-filled zombue-like beings called the ‘anti-living’ that seek only to spread the infection to any living persons, including superhumans.
• The Marvel Zombies series takes place on in an Alternate Universe where the heroes of the Marvel Universe have been infected with a zombie virus and devoured all humans on the planet. Afterwards the (still sentient) zombie heroes ponder on what to do next before they get overtaken by the hunger and lose their rationality.
• The Mask has Night of the Return of the Living Ipkiss... Kinda, a mini chapter in which the mask buried in Stanley Ipkiss' graveyard takes his corpse to come Back from the Dead as Zombie!Big Head and kills all the main characters. It’s a Take That! at fans of the movie who kept questioning why he isn’t in the comic anymore, and the story ends with him disintegrating after somebody points out he’s already long dead.
• The Metal Virus Story Arc of Sonic the Hedgehog (IDW), pictured above, is instigated by a Grey Goo virus that turns living beings into ravening robot zombies. The Metal Virus quickly goes out of control, infects Sonic himself, and brings the world to the brink of apocalypse.

Gamebooks

• While zombies are a common, minor enemy in Fighting Fantasy, there is an entirely zombie-themed adventure, Blood of the Zombies, where you're tasked with stopping a Transylvanian Mad Scientist from unleashing a Zombie Apocalypse. By killing all (by that we mean all 333) the zombies inside his castle.

Literature

• In Captain Underpants, the third book involves aliens infiltrating the school as cafeteria ladies, and feeding all the students and teachers a concoction that turns them into 'zombie nerds'. While the zombie nerds don't exhibit The Virus, the fact that the entire school has been turned effectively spells the same result. Unlike typical zombies, they don't hunger for flesh or brains, but they do exhibit all the other stereotypical zombie traits. They also very much pose a danger for the heroes, as they are completely obedient to the aliens and are commanded to destroy the heroes.
• Played with in Episodes 18 and 19 of Fate/Zero: Kiritsugu's backstory involves his father's research inadvertently causing a vampire apocalypse on an island, and then losing his mentor to the same vampire creatures later. However, the situations play out very much like a zombie apocalypse, since the creatures act much more like mindless zombies,^note the information on them technically being vampires is from other works in The 'Verse and a few zombie tropes appear in both episodes, like The Plague, Zombie Infectee, Heroic Sacrifice, and Trapped-with-Monster Plot. These creatures only appear in those two episodes; the rest of the series is about the Holy Grail War. Unlike most examples, the zombification effects stick and the whole thing is Played for Drama, since such an event helped shape Kiritsugu into the battle-hardened magus he is in the present.
• Star Wars Legends gets in on the fun with Death Troopers and its prequel Star Wars: Red Harvest, revolving around Plague Zombies created by the ancient Sith that have a resurgence in the Imperial era.

Live-Action TV

• Community: Despite being a reasonably grounded (if a bit absurdist) sitcom set on a community college campus, the second season Halloween Episode "Epidemiology" was a Bizarro Episode where tainted meat from a government project turns the Halloween party into a Technically-Living Zombie apocalypse (set to ABBA, hilariously). The protagonist manages to cure everyone right as they're being infected, with the side effect of everyone forgetting that it ever happened.
• Degrassi had the season 7 Halloween Special "Degrassi of the Dead", in which Manny, Paige, Peter, Ashley, Jay, and Derek are besieged in a school surrounded by zombies created by genetically modified foods.
• Doctor Who: There have been several zombie related episodes.
  • In "The Unquiet Dead", the Ninth Doctor encounters recently deceased corpses becoming active again and doing things they enjoyed during their life. It turns out that these bodies were possessed by gaseous aliens who live in methane environments and can animate the corpses.
  • Another Ninth Doctor story, this time the two-parter "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances", features 'gas mask zombies', which are a very odd version of The Plague due to futuristic technology Gone Horribly Wrong. Alien medical nanobots find a fatally injured child wearing a gas mask and looking for his mummy. However, as these nanobots have never encountered a human before, they assume that the gas mask, a scar, and the behavior are a part of the human genetic code, so anyone touched by the boy is infected with this new genetic rewrite in an attempt to 'heal' them. It takes the Doctor finding the boy's real mother and allowing the nanobots to recognize the heritage and what a proper healthy human is like to repair the damage done.
  • The Twelfth Doctor episode "Oxygen" is an episode with zombies Recycled In Space. Well, technically A.I.-controlled spacesuits with dead corpses inside, but they still count as zombies.
• Doom Patrol (2019) has a third-season episode where the five are turned into zombies after being drenched in acid by the Night Nurse.
• Farscape: "Eat Me" is an Out-of-Genre Experience into outright horror that has Crichton and friends trapped on a diseased, dying Leviathan full of cannibalistic zombie-like beings. It finally mutates into a Slasher Movie when the real villain behind the situation turns up.
• The Flash (2014):
  • "The Runaway Dinosaur" has a Speed Force-empowered lightning bolt resurrecting the corpse of Tony Woodward as a zombie.
  • In Season 6, anyone infected by Bloodwork is degenerated into a zombie-like form, with all of them being his loyal minions, including The Flash. Bloodwork kills enough of them to form an army.
• Legends of Tomorrow:
  • In "Abomination", a Time Pirate who had been carrying a strain of virus crash-lands during the American Civil War and infects the Confederates with it, which turns them into zombies. The Legends detect the aberration and arrive to investigate, ending up encountering and fighting off several Confederate zombies. However, history is at stake when Henry Scott, a black man and spy for the Union Army, is killed by a zombie. On another note, zombie Confederates are about to swarm the Union Army camp, while Mick Rory gets bitten. So the Legends are split into three teams: helping to complete Henry Scott's mission to steal Confederate plans, aiding General Ulysses S. Grant with fighting off mobs of Confederate zombies, and trying to devise a cure for the zombie Mick Rory before administering it to him.
  • In Season 6, Atropos, one of the Fates and the Big Bad Ensemble of the season, is a God of the Dead and boasts necromancer powers, which she uses to create zombies to attack the Legends. In “Zari, Not Zari” she murders the crew of Supernatural that exists as an in-universe show then revives them as zombies. She later does this on a larger scale in "I Am Legends" where she starts a Zombie Apocalypse in London to take out the Legends, with the Legends having to fight through the zombie hordes to reach a safe house, with Sara Lance ending up pulling a Heroic Sacrifice to hold the zombies off.
• One episode of Misfits has Seth empowering Curtis with a "resurrect dead" power so that Curtis can resurrect Seth's dead girlfriend. Unfortunately, it turns out to actually be a "raise infectious Flesh-Eating Zombies" power, with catastrophic Zombie Apocalypse results. Notable as rather than a throwaway, this is a major episode for Seth's character development and will also eventually, but indirectly lead to Curtis's death in the following season.
• Naturally, Sadie has the Halloween Episode "Ghouls Just Want to Have Fun" where Hal's new girlfriend distributes bracelets that turns the kids at school into zombies.
• Spaced Series 1 Episode 3 "Art" has Tim hallucinate that a party is full of zombies as a result of taking some cheap speed the night before (he didn't want to offend the overly-friendly Scottish drug dealers) and then spending all night playing Resident Evil 2.
• As shocking as it is, Sesame Street has had two examples:
  • "Mine-Itis on Sesame Street" featured the titular disease whose victims were of the Technically Living variant. As the name suggests, the infected mostly just take things that are not theirs, shambling and droning "MINE" all the while.
  • The Walking Gingerbread parody segment involves Cookie Monster dealing with "Crumbies", which were zombie gingerbread men.

Video Games

• Artix Entertainment:
  • DragonFable has featured two Zombie Apocalypse Halloween events back-to-back.
    • The first one titled "Resident Sneevil" parodies Resident Evil where an infectious mutant virus strain known as the Zardbie Virus breaks out of a secret laboratory. Though the Player and other heroes manage to contain this one by killing or curing the infected.
    • The second event titled "28 Weeks Later" parodying 28 Days Later deals with the fall-out of the first epidemic. The player gets to first play as a Sole Survivor in one town that got overtaken by zardbies and must flee after their safehouse is compromised. After a Time Skip the regular Player discovers one boy still carrying the zardbie virus but is immune to its effects. Though as a carrier he accidentally infects several humans and monsters, so the Player must sneak him out of the camp and through the forest while fighting off this second zardbie epidemic.
  • In AdventureQuest Worlds, the "AQW Zombies" Saga explores a what-if Alternate Timeline where Drakath didn't interfere in the Cold Open fight between Alteon and Sepulchure. The result is Sepulchure kills Alteon, followed by the Grim Reaper himself when he comes to escort Alteon's soul to the afterlife. With Death gone, the souls have nowhere to go and the dead all rise as zombies. This was Sepulchure's plan all along, to zombify the Earth and weed out The Champion of Light who would be immune. The player tries to fight against the Zombie Apocalypse only to find all of their allies getting zombified one-by-one. Eventually the player, Artix, and Gravelyn (Sepulchure's daughter and the Champion of Light) end up in a Last Stand defending the last survivor stronghold against the entire world's zombie population. The Zombie Apocalypse gets resolved with the revelation that it was Drakath who created the Alternate Timeline for his own amusement. However Drakath ends up awakening Gravelyn's Champion of Light powers when he kills her father Sepulchure and in this new form she manages to hurt him. Drakath flees by giving her the Sadistic Choice of killing him and letting her friends die or saving her friends and letting him escape, and once he leaves the timeline gets restored to the proper events and the Zombie Apocalypse undone.
• Capcom:
  • Between their stages, Cannon Spike has one in which characters have to fight zombified humans and dogs, as well giant mutated monsters. Being a Mythology Gag game, this stage is a clear Shout-Out to Resident Evil series.
  • Mega Man 7 has Shade Man's stage, which also doubles as Halloween Episode. Being in a base based on a cemetery, most of the Mooks Mega Man has to fight are robot zombies.
  • In Final Fight: Streetwise, the GLOW drug makes people more violent and in high doses they can act like overpowered zombies. This doesn't affect the plot until the end in which a Resident Evil-like mutated monster and a zombified Cody Travers appear as part of the final bosses Kyle has to defeat.
• Azure Striker Gunvolt: The Stratacombs mission has reports of zombies and other strange phenomena occurring in a certain building. Our team, QUILL, has detected that the source of that phenomenon is several meters underground beneath said building, and Gunvolt enters it through the hole that his friend has made, and yes, the level is filled with zombie-like mooks. In the end, it's shown that the mission's boss, Elise, was responsible for the zombies - they used to be lab scientists and soldiers inside the underground facility where Elise was experimented upon; when she awakened her "Resurrection" powers, she flew into a rage and started a massacre, then used her powers to revive them as zombies.
• In EarthBound (1994), Ness and Paula arrive in the town of Threed only to find it under siege by undead led by Giygas' Blob Monster minion Master Belch.
• Goat Simulator has GoatZ, a dedicated episode about the Zombie Apocalypse which also parodies titles like Left 4 Dead and Dead Island.
• Metal Slug: In the third game, the second level has you fight zombified people, and later, zombified soldiers of the Rebel Army. The reason for the zombie phenomenon is tied to the level's boss: an alien artifact (and the aliens that guard it) mutating civilians.
• Pokémon Scarlet and Violet has the Mochi Madness epilogue where the Ghost-type Mythical Pokémon Pecharunt starts possessing everyone in the Kitakami region, turning them into dancing zombies that either attack the unaffected with their mons or try to convert them with poisoned mochi.
• Saints Row: The Third has a short story-arc where Burt Reynolds recruits the Saints to deal with a localized zombie outbreak, which occurred when they shot down a STAG cargo plane carrying a classified chemical agent over a particular district of Newport.
• The Simpsons Hit & Run featured the Halloween themed Level 7, with the main plot being the aliens have laced the town's water supply with tainted cola which causes the zombies to rise from the graveyard. The NPC pedestrians of Springfield have now been replaced with zombies, Krusty Burgers has been retitled "Zombie Burgers", and the radio describes them as attacking Springfield Station. Though the majority of the zombie NPCs never serve as enemy mobs and won't attack Homer. The zombies presumably return to their graves or are no longer active once Homer blows up the aliens' UFO.
• Starcraft II
  • The "Outbreak" level takes place on a planet whose star has a higher-than-usual UV output which prevents the infested terrans (humans infested by a Zerg virus who lose their minds to the Swarm) on the surface from coming out during the day, but they attack en masse at night. In theory, the mission consists of attacking the unguarded infested-producing structures during the day and bunkering down at night so your flamethrowers and siege tanks can do horrible things to the incoming infested, but it's a lot more fun (and cathartic) to build vast mobs of Reapers (which do huge damage against buildings and lightly-armored targets such as, say, infested terrans) and attack the bases by night (which several achievements require you to do anyway). Tychus even claims he saw this plot in a movie once.
  • The co-op mission "Dead of Night" is inspired by "Outbreak" and features a similar mechanic, but now with two players and a variety of units from all 3 races instead of just Terrans.
  • The "Left 2 Die" map mod takes the Outbreak mission and makes it a multiplayer mode, increasing the difficulty and adding Left 4 Dead-inspired Elite Mook lifeforms.
• The game Yakuza: Dead Souls, a.k.a. Ryu Ga Gotoku of the End, is essentially the Zombie Apocalypse installment of the Like a Dragon series, pitting Kiryu Kazuma and company against a swarm of zombies and tasking them with finding and eliminating the source of the invasion. This game would get referenced in games that released afterwards, such as a Majima Everywhere mission in Yakuza Kiwami.

Visual Novels

• Havenfall Is for Lovers had a Zombie Apocalypse during season 4 of Vanessa's route.

Webcomics

• The Whiteboard had a localized zombie apocalypse for the 2010 Halloween special. Which Doc and Roger took as an excuse to test their arsenals.

Web Video

• The improv channel Sorry has "We Survived A Zombie Apocalypse", which has the gang trying to avoid massive hordes of zombies after a virus breaks out. Not that any of them take it seriously, being a comedy channel and all.

Western Animation

• In 6teen episode "Dude of the Living Dead", the gang discover that the mall has been overrun with zombies. The gang first tries to rescue all members of their group, pick up as many survivors as they can, before coming up with a plan to escape. One by one their allies fall to the zombies, some of them going out in a badass Heroic Sacrifice like Ron and Darth Mall, while others are just Too Dumb to Live like the Clones. The gang discover that Jude's hot sauce serves as zombie kryptonite and decide to form a Last Stand where they load water guns with the sauce and blast as many zombies as they can. However the gang falls one by one until it's just Jude and Starr, who decide to share one last kiss before its all over. Then, Jude awakens and discovers it was All Just a Dream.
• Adventure Time:
  • "Slumber Party Panic": Princess Bubblegum's experiments go awry and cause a zombie plague; Finn has to keep it a secret.
  • "From Bad to Worse" sees the zombie apocalypse happen on a much larger scale; the zombification spreads across the Candy Kingdom and Princess Bubblegum is unable to synthesize the antidote and is zombified herself. Thankfully, her hyper-intelligent lab rat manages to do it in her place.
• The Amazing World of Gumball: The episode "The Joy" is a homage to zombie horror. It is about the Joy Virus (a virus transmittable through hugs that turns the huggee into a deliriously happy zombie) infecting Gumball and Darwin. Towards the episode's latter half, it spreads to the entire school. Ms Simian finds out playing sad music cures it, but she fails to use this before getting infected herself. Everyone is back to normal next episode anyway.
• The Batman: "Strange New World" has Gotham seemingly succumb to a Zombie Apocalypse due to the populace being infected by a toxin created and spread by Hugo Strange. Batman and Robin are left as the only two survivors as all of their allies have been transformed into zombies subservient to Strange, with all of them seemingly trying to capture Batman and infect him with toxin too, with Robin ending up falling victim. Managing to get Strange to divulge where the rest of the antidote was located, Batman works endlessly to create vapor bombs, which he plants over Gotham and when detonated will aerosolize the antidote. However just when Batman is about to detonate, he pieces together various clues that leads him to conclude that the 'antidote' was actually a hallucinogenic toxin that Strange had drugged him with at the start, and led him to hallucinate everyone as zombies. Finally realizing the truth, he stops fighting against the zombies and allows them to spray him with the real cure, breaking the zombie illusion.
• Ben 10: Omniverse: "Something Zombozo This Way Comes" has Zombozo the zombie-Monster Clown releasing a Zombie Clown virus and infecting the majority of Bellwood's population, including Ben's partner Rook. These Zombie Clowns have all the abilities of their pre-zombification states and infect via spiting out false teeth that chatter and bite those who have yet to be infected. The purpose of the Zombie Clown outbreak is to cause the civilians to feel fear so that Zombozo can feed on it. Ben ends up defeating Zombozo by scaring him with one of his alien transformations, causing the machin to overload.
• Bob's Burgers: Tina's story in "The Frond Files" is a parody of The Walking Dead where Wagstaff School's basketball team gets turned into a pack of zombies thanks to a faulty "jock itch vaccine". Tina manages to pacify the zombies by flirting with them.
• In Detentionaire this is spoofed in the episode "28 Sneezes Later" where an extremely contagious flu virus sweeps over the school and the students who are 'infected' get treated like zombies. Principal General Barrage declares the school is on quarantine lockdown and refuses to let anyone out until school hours are over. A small group of students who are the only 'survivors' try to escape the school, armed with squirt guns filled with disinfectant to fight against the 'infected' and avoid getting infected themselves.
• Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends: In "Nightmare on Wilson Way", Bloo appears to have scared Mr. Herriman into having a heart attack, leading him to becoming a zombie and start a Zombie Apocalypse. At the end, it turns out to be an elaborate prank to get back at him for his Halloween tricks, but things got out of hand when Bloo fed Mac tons of sugar to fend off the "zombies". It's only after Mac zooms out of the house to harass trick-or-treaters that they break character, and Bloo gets in trouble for what he did to Mac when it's really the others' fault for pushing him to take drastic measures to, in his own mind, keep himself and his creator from getting killed.
• Gravity Falls: In the premiere of the second season, "Scary-Oke", Dipper summons a horde of zombies thanks to a spell in Journal 3, essentially creating a mini-Zombie Apocalypse in the Mystery Shack. And it turns out their weakness is a three-part musical harmony.
• In Grojband episode "Dance of the Dead", Corey acquires a cursed magic amp. When Grojband rehearses with it in a graveyard, the bad music ends up awakening the dead. The gang get chased by zombies for the majority of the episode with some of their friends getting zombified along the way. The zombies all get attracted to the Halloween party at the school. To resolve this mess, Corey uses his typical Insane Troll Logic and reasons that if the cursed amp and bad music brought the zombies to life, then the amp playing good music with lyrics would send them back to their eternal slumber, and turn those who became zombies back into regular humans. He's right of course and Grojband play their new song which is a parody of "Thriller" and gets the job done.
• Kaeloo: In "Let's Play Scaredy Cat", Stumpy accidentally brings everyone in a graveyard back to life by reciting a magic spell, causing a Zombie Apocalypse. Mr. Cat manages to bring everything back to normal by the end.
• The Loud House: In "One Flu Over the Loud House", several of the Loud siblings get sick with the flu. It leaves them with pale skin, dark circles under their eyes, poor posture, and the inability to do anything but wander around and moan. Meanwhile, the entire episode centers around the healthy siblings as they build barricades, defend themselves with squirt guns, and try to escape the house without getting sick themselves. The Louds are however cured of the flu by the next episode anyway.
• Miraculous Ladybug: "Zombizou" plays like a G-rated Affectionate Parody of the Zombie Apocalypse. The Monster of the Week puts characters into a lifeless zombie-like state that is transmittable through kissing^note hence the name, a portmanteau of "zombie" and "bizou", French for "kiss". Many tropes of the zombie genre are played lightheartedly as Ladybug works to stop the plague.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In "28 Pranks Later", Rainbow Dash takes pranking too far when she swaps the scout cookies being sold with joke cookies that stained people's mouths with rainbow colors. But for some reason anyone who ate them became sick and developed a zombie-like demeanor and an addiction to the cookies. Rainbow Dash panics and tries to keep the remaining cookies away from the 'zombie' ponies until the effects wear off. Eventually she's cornered in a barn surrounded by all the ponies and states she's sorry for ever pranking everyone, only for the 'zombies' to reveal they were all pretending and pranking Rainbow Dash back.
• Phineas and Ferb: In the Halloween special "Night of the Living Pharmacists", a malfunctioning -Inator starts turning everyone in Danville into clones of Dr. Doofenshmirtz that act like zombies and lose intelligence outside of infecting other people. The plot revolves around the main cast hiding from the zombies and searching for a cure, all while slowly getting picked off and turned into zombies one by one. Interestingly, Stacy doesn't even notice the apocalypse the whole time, as she is watching a horror film. It comes to the point where she accidentally punches one but still doesn't even notice.
• Rick and Morty, "Rick Potion #9" plays out as one but with a Mutant Apocalypse rather than zombies, but otherwise fits all other cliches. Rick makes a serum for Morty to use to attract Jessica, but it goes horribly wrong when it combines with the influenza virus she had contracted, causing it to mass multiply and quickly spread as The Plague. This virus causes everyone to turn into love-sick zombies that all want to make love to Morty. Rick attempts to fix up an antidote by mixing in mantis DNA, which only seeks to make things worse as it instead mutates them into Mantis-human hybrids that still lust for Morty but now also want to eat him. Rick's second attempt to fix the epidemic is to mix a whole bunch of different DNA material together in the belief it would restore humanity. It doesn't. In fact it makes things far far worse as now all the Mantis people mutate into hideous deformed fleshy blobs with various limbs protruding all over, extra eyes and mouths, with these creatures dubbed "Cronenbergs". Morty's family are the only ones unaffected by The Plague due to being closely related to Morty's DNA and end up fighting through hordes to survive. In the end rather than fix the apocalypse, Rick's solution is to find a Close-Enough Timeline where the apocalypse was fixed but the Rick and Morty also perish, so that Rick and Morty can pull a Kill and Replace, while abandoning their old dimension. While Rick and Morty do return to their lives, the psychological ramifications are deeply traumatizing for Morty as he now knows, Nothing Is the Same Anymore.
• The Simpsons has had several of these in Treehouse of Horror specials:
  • "Dial Z for Zombie" is the first ever zombie special, and possibly the first ever portrayal of zombies for a kids show making it one of the Trope Codifiers. Bart stumbles across a Spell Book in the library, and upon seeing Lisa mourning her late cat Snowball I, he offers to bring her back to life. However the spell Goes Horribly Wrong and instead of resurrecting the cat, corpses all over the world burst out of the ground as zombies hungering for brains. Eventually the world gets overrun with a full blown Zombie Apocalypse and the Simpson family are some of the few survivors left. Running out of options they reason the only way to fix this was to reach the library and find a spell to reverse the effects of the zombie one. Driving through town, Homer guns down many zombies including those of historical figures, before Bart manages to reverse the spell to send the zombies back into their graves.
  • In "The Homega Man", Homer is out buying a bombshell, during which Springfield gets nuked by an atomic bomb. He walks out and finds all of the people of Springfield has been skeletonized, but he's too dumb to realize they are dead until reading of the nuke on a newspaper. While he's devastated at first, Homer realizes as the only survivor he was free to do whatever he felt like and no one to stop him, but he soon realizes he's not the only one around. Not every person was killed, with the rest having been mutated into a zombie-like state and now want to eat Homer. They give chase to the Simpson house where Homer is overjoyed to discover his family had survived due to the lead paint coating their house. Just when the mutants look as though they wish to make peace after seeing this act of love, the rest of the Simpsons family pull out shotguns and blast the mutants dead.
  • In "The Fright to Creep and Scare Harms", Lisa sees the gravestone of Billy the Kid who "dreams of a world without guns" and manages to petition Springfield to outlaw all guns. But then Billy the Kid and his crew rise from the dead after hearing what she's achieved. Unlike most examples, these zombies are intelligent and take over Springfield with their guns rather than devouring flesh. To resolve this problem, Homer gets given a time machine by Professor Frink, and manages to warn past Springfield not to give up their guns and to instead shoot the graves of the undead cowboys which rekills the zombies.
  • In "Don't Have a Cow Humanity", which is a parody of 28 Days Later, Springfield succumbs to another zombie apocalypse, this one being of the Technically-Living Zombie variant, due to a brand of tainted Krusty Burgers that infected people and causes them to turn cannibalistic, whereby they are dubbed Munchers. Bart is revealed to be The Immune and a genetic The Chosen One that may be the only hope for humanity, so the Simpson family need to protect Bart and deliver him to the safe zone.
• Villains in Samurai Jack are almost always robots or demonic entities, but Jack and the Zombies instead sees the samurai get lost in an enormous cemetery, where Aku's magic causes a virtually endless number of the dead to rise. Aside from being one of the more serious and thrilling episodes, the zombies being fragile and numerous give Jack a chance to show off his more lethal martial arts skills.
• The Secret Show: "Zombie Attack" has Doctor Doctor unleashing a Zombie Apocalypse upon the world. As a more G-rated version of this trope, the zombies are not the flesh eating variant, and merely transmit the infection via touch. In a more unorthodox means of spreading the infection, Doctor Doctor encoded two words, “yes” and “no”, that when spoken would turn a person into a zombie. Eventually the entire world ends up zombified with only Victor and Anita being the Sole Survivors left to stop Doctor Doctor and save humanity, with Anita stealing Doctor Doctor's controller after both the Mad Doctor and Victor get zombified, with Anita resetting the key words so that the zombie groan “uhh uhh” restores a zombie back to human.
• South Park: "Pinkeye" sees Kenny become infected by a zombie virus and spreading this to the town.
• In Spliced episode "Bite, Shuffle And Moan", Peri gets a really bad cold that gives him zombie-like symptoms, so the inhabitants of "Keep Away Island" catapult him to the neighboring "Zombie Island" inhabited by literal zombies. However Peri ends up building a raft from the literal zombies who then return to Keep Away Island and infect the populace. Entree tries to fight off the zombies by using the sick Peri as a blaster and firing his snot at the zombies, but he runs out of ammo. Peri then discovers it was All Just a Dream, only to wake up to find out his friends really are zombies, before the episode ends and returns to status quo.
• Spongebob Squarepants:
  • In "Once Bitten", the residents of Bikini Bottom believes that Gary has "mad snail disease", which turns people into a zombie after being bitten. The town is sent into a state of chaos, with most residents being zombified, and the survivors hiding out in The Krusty Krab. In the end, however, a doctor explains to everyone that Gary's attitude is due to a splinter and that "mad snail disease" is just a myth, causing everyone to return to normal.
  • "Krabby Patty Creature Feature" is a better example. Mr. Krabs and Sandy concoct a lab-made Krabby Patty to modify the menu. It's initially a hit, but it comes with a grievous side effect; turning whoever that eats it into a mindless Krabby Patty like monster who can turn others via force feeding. From there, Bikini Bottom becomes overrun by Krabby Patty zombies, leaving it up to Spongebob to save the day. Everyone gets cured when they consume pre-cooked chum, which makes them throw up the Secret Patty.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars: The last 2 episodes of the Geonosis arc, "Legacy of Terror" and "Brain Invaders", are about the Jedi being forced to fight against a horde of geonosian zombies controlled by Queen Karina to rescue Luminara and arrest Poggle the Lesser in the former, and Ahsoka and Barriss being forced into a fight for their lives against infected clones in the latter episode.
• In Total Drama episode "Hurl and Go Seek", the contestants must consume a batch of heavily expired drink called Juggy Chugs before partaking in a game of hide-and-seek. However the awful drinks cause all the contestants to become nauseous to the point of giving them a zombie complexion and a Zombie Gait. Conveniently, Sugar who is 'it' is also one of the first 'zombies' and each person she tags ends up succumbing to the nausea and becoming a 'zombie' too. This spells trouble for Shawn, who is the resident zombie conspiracy doomsayer and believes the world has finally succumbed. He ends up fleeing the 'zombies' with Jasmine, the only other 'survivor' by climbing a tree, but when the 'zombies' climb up too, Shawn decides to perform a Heroic Sacrifice to save his girl by knocking the zombies off and give Jasmine a chance.
• Totally Spies! has a Halloween Episode, appropriately titled "Halloween", where the spies' rival Mandy unintentionally awakens a demon who turns the occupants of an entire town into zombies, and wants to make Mandy his Queen. Even the show's regular characters, Clover and Mandy, gets subjected to zombification, though eventually everything went back to normal when Sam figured a way to re-seal the demon.
• What If…? (2021) has an Alternate Universe episode that is Marvel Zombies (see the Comic Book folder above) in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, except here there are regular zombified humans instead of the infection only afflicting the superpowered.

---