Zombie Evolution

 

The term “zombie” has traditionally referred to a corpse that has been reanimated through supernatural means and rendered into an automaton that does its master’s will. Look it up in a dictionary and you will find the traditional definition firmly in place. But pop culture, of course, has its own definition.

The cannibalistic, free-agent zombies that come pouring out of comics, video games, novels, movies and television have little in common with their languid, sleepwalking predecessors. They come into being not through magic, but through a pernicious, fast-acting pathogen. Ceaselessly devouring the living, surging over the landscape like a plague, these hopped-up creatures have become pop culture’s designated agents of the apocalypse.

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