A recent post on the zombie in popular imagination gives an excellent general sense of what we talk about when we talk about the living dead. But there’s a conflict inherent in the system. We basically think of zombiism as a virus, transmitted by zombie bite. We do think that zombies eat brains. But we also think that zombies are pretty much mindless. And we do think that they are dead.

As Matt pointed out, this last point doesn’t sit terribly well with the “virus” argument. It also doesn’t sit all that well with the original zombie folklore! But no one ever accused the popular imagination of being consistant. The definitive zombie movie will always be Night of the Living DEAD, and that idea isn’t going anywhere.

The conflict between the zombies-as-corpses and zombiism-as-virus isn’t actually all that hard to resolve. A virus, after all, is a living thing that takes over the body of another living thing. All you have to do for zombies is imagine a virus that can take over a dead body. That way you get zombies that are dead, but a zombie virus that is alive (at least in so far as viruses are alive). But there’s another conflict, and one that’s not so easy to resolve.