Zombie Apocalypse



"Zombies don't represent anything in my mind except a global change of some kind. And the stories are about how people respond or fail to respond to this. That's really all they've represented to me."

- George Romero (creator of Night of the Living Dead)

"If thou openest not the gate to let me enter, I will break the door, I will wrench the lock, I will smash the door-posts, I will force the doors. I will bring up the dead to eat the living. And the dead will outnumber the living."

- The Epic of Gilgamesh

Within the past couple days or hours, something very strange has happened. Maybe the Synthetic Plague the government was working on got unleashed. Maybe a voodoo priest's spell went awry. Maybe an alien space probe broadcast a weird signal at the Earth, or fell to Earth and brought radiation with it. Maybe there's just no more room in Hell.

Whatever the cause, the result is the same; the recently dead have risen, en masse, to feed on the living. With each victim they claim, their numbers swell, and no force on Earth can contain them. As society collapses, it's up to the Big Damn Heroes to fight their way to safety or keep shooting until things blow over.

The Zombie Apocalypse has arrived.

While Horror is assumed to be an inherent part of the zombie apocalypse, not all the horror and conflict comes from the zombies themselves. Instead it can come from the reaction of the living humans involved, and how they respond to the state of fear and violent chaos brought about by the zombies. Often, the answer is "not well". The breakdown of society, the fear that your Fire-Forged Friends could be infected and turned against you without warning, are just as or more important to a zombie story as the zombies themselves.

Common to virtually all Zombie Apocalypse tales is that, regardless of the reason zombies attack living/non-infected people, they never attack other zombies. Whether they'll attack animals other than humans varies, but it's rare for The Virus to affect other species, probably because it's cheaper to film humans in make-up than to work with animals, whether trained, animatronic, or CGI.

Due to the threat that zombies pose (they did just become the apocalypse, after all), protagonists of more serious works are required to become very genre savvy very quickly (but will demonstrate genre blindness with regard to the word "zombie" itself). Failure is often the only option in these stories; rarely do they have an ending that could be considered "happy" by typical standards, or indeed one where humanity survives as a species. Another main staple is that things will always, always get worse. Either from the character's actions or circumstance which are out of their hands, no matter how improbable it is.

The collapse will also take place very quickly, over a period of weeks or months, instead of years. This prevents society and/or the main characters from adapting, and also makes Convenient Comas somewhat plausible. In the occasion where collapse occurs in a couple of months, a nuclear submarine or aircraft carrier could realistically be expected to weather the entire outbreak start to finish in perfect isolation and safety. This will never be brought up. Characters will also assume that their portable radios have infinite reception and frequency range, and local dead air means a completely global collapse.

Subtrope of Our Zombies Are Different. A member of The Undead trope family. See Night of the Living Mooks for cases where zombies don't threaten the end of the world. See also Zombie Gait, Everything's Deader with Zombies. Raising the Steaks is what happens when humans are not the only creatures that can be infected by The Virus. The Zombie apocalypse is almost always a case of Guilt-Free Extermination War.

The trope Zombie Apocalypse refers to any kind of undead apocalypse — the common traits of this trope are that the undead spread rapidly, wipe out humans primarily by eating or biting them, and are usually highly infectious.

If you are looking for different types of Zombie, see Our Zombies Are Different. Not to be confused with Vampire Apocalypse the Series by Derek Gunn.

Advertising

 * If Toshiba doesn't make their laptops drop-resistant, the resulting chain of events will cause a zombie outbreak. Their latest marketing campaign has the CEO imagining various worst-case scenarios if some seemingly minor feature isn't added to their latest product.

Anime and Manga

 * An episode of Samurai Champloo was a homage to Russo's work, with an asteroid blowing everyone up ala the nuclear bomb from the movie. This episode had Negative Continuity.
 * The manga series, Highschool of the Dead features a bunch of typical high school anime characters put into a zombie apocalypse in which everybody who dies and was dead before almost immediately turns into a flesh-eating zombie. On a number of occasions, this manga pays homage to previous zombie movies and games.
 * Notable in that the zombies are actually played as realistically as possible - the protagonists test and figure out that since the dead have no circulation, their eyes cannot possibly work, meaning that they find things from vibrations (throwing a wet cloth at a locker on the other side of a hallway will draw them to it); no circulation also means that with the local humidity, the zombies will decay to the point of uselessness in a little under a month (although nobody has a clue how the zombies are still moving).
 * Highschool of the Dead also subverts the traditionally leftist/libertarian politics behind most zombie-themed works, and is one of the few that takes on an explicitly right-wing nationalist stance. An uyoku dantai group provides safe and effective harbour for survivors (whereas the "normal people" undermine it), and the military is shown to be effective at containing zombies. There are also some scenes where the characters lament the stupidity or myopic priorities of groups of anti-government radicals and protestors. Speaking of characters, the main cast includes: the rich, blue-blooded daughter of the uyoku dantai leader, an Heir to the Dojo with traditionalist Yamato Nadeshiko views and styles, a gun nut trained by a Blackwater mercenary, and the daughter of a police officer (and, by extension, The Man), while the head of the group is praised by the uyoku dantai leader for his filial piety (family loyalty). The anime actually had some scenes involving Saya's family altered because it became increasingly apparent to the Media Watchdogs that the creators were trying to make a political statement with an unpopular group.
 * The licensed English translation also tries to downplay the right-wing politics of Highschool of the Dead. For instance, in one scene a character likens the Ukyou Dantai group to a mafia - in the Japanese Saya rejects that and defends her father's group, noting how it's a force for good in the community; in the Yen Press version, however, she only growls "we're so right-wing even the mafia hate us", which quite badly distorts the original point.
 * Spoofed in an episode of Urusei Yatsura. Alien toothaches are contagious, and if the sufferer bites three or four people, the pain will go away. In short order the entire classroom is filled with crazed teenagers with swollen faces and a burning need to bite each other and any non-infected that they can. It's like a very silly Zombie Apocalypse.
 * Parodied in the D.Gray-man manga. The Science Department created Komuvitamin D in order to help people work overtime, however it turned them into zombie-like people instead. The zombie arc was played mostly for comedy but there is one scene where.
 * In Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, the justification for The manga-only chapter Onisarashi-hen shows precisely what happens when
 * Higurashi Kira's second episode features a fog that zombifies the residents of Hinamizawa by brainwashing them and making them act hostile towards those unaffected by the fog. The fog was created by - you guessed it -.
 * Parodied in the Thriller Bark arc of One Piece, where pretty much every single zombie convention is shattered. Here, zombies can move pretty quick, they get tired, they have resorted to fighting each other on a couple occasions, and bite from them has no effect; plus, the giant zombie is actually the fastest one of the bunch. However, this does make sense considering these zombie are made by implanting the personality and move set of a living person into a specially modified corpse.
 * Thriller Bark zombies feel no pain, however. They feel fear just fine, but not pain.
 * In Dorohedoro, Hole gets a Zombie Apocalypse every year, and surviving it is as simple as being inside behind locked doors after midnight. This has been going on long enough that the braver (or stupider) denizens of Hole have turned it into a game, with prizes for killing a certain number of Zombies and everything.
 * In a Naruto Shippuden filler arc, a group of ninja has a special jutsu that makes zombies. It turns out that the zombie apocalypse facing the leaf village is
 * Chapter 515 shows a bunch of dead characters being revived by Kabuto to use as his personal army against the United Shinobi Alliance.
 * Fullmetal Alchemist has a couple of variations:
 * Manga: They also eat people, beg for "mama" and "daddy", and look like MP-EVAs.
 * Anime: In The Movie, the Gate inexplicably turns a group of Thule Society soldiers into zombies. They also have thick suits of armor. Badassity ensues. About their only real weakness is that they possess the zombie gait.
 * Brutally subverted in Kara no Kyoukai, the zombies are around for about a minute before Badass Knife Nut Shiki shows what happens when zombie meets very well aimed knife.
 * Panty & Stocking did this on their eight episode fittingly titled ...of the Dead which parodies most Zombie Apocalypse tropes.  It should also be noted that in this universe zombies can zombify angels, demons and Ghosts.
 * Franken Fran has a zombie outbreak on an island.
 * Black Butler has one on a Titanic-sized ship.

Comic Books

 * The Marvel Universe comic Marvel Zombies, spun off from Ultimate Fantastic Four, fused this with the Super Hero genre, to transform the superpowered characters into intelligent, Russo-style zombies. Zombiism in this series causes decay and an incredibly powerful craving for non-zombified human flesh. Although the virus can infect anyone, the super-powered zombies still kept their powers, and thus quickly overwhelmed and devoured all the defenseless, normal humans. The series starts on a world where they're the only ones left, having already hunted down and eaten every last non-zombie person on the planet.
 * In addition, Marvel Zombies discusses why they do not turn on each other; zombie flesh is singularly unappetizing, and flesh imbued with the Power Cosmic is more nourishing to the zombie-ized superheroes.
 * Also, the zombies are able to stay sane and focused after they have just eaten, though it was later revealed that
 * Later on, they're attacking the main Marvel universe. Good thing Aaron Stack is a robot with chainsaw hands...
 * A later series also hints that the zombie virus is sentient, with various zombified characters referring to it as "the Hunger Gospel."
 * Amusingly, this was actually itself made fun of in Marvel Zombies 5, in which the characters go to the real world and talk about how the trope itself makes little sense.
 * The Goon is all about zombies, all are created by an unnamed Zombie Priest to be his army, most are fully sentient and can do pretty much anything (others are standard Romno) also the bulk of them are all former Mobsters.
 * Amazingly, this even happened to The Smurfs. The Smurfs started out as a Belgian comic book, and in the first issue, "The Black Smurfs", a Smurf is infected by a disease that turns him black, violent, and unable to speak. He then spreads the disease by biting other Smurfs, and Papa Smurf and the few other remaining normal Smurfs have to find a cure. This story, despite having nearly every element of the modern Zombie Apocalypse, predated Night of the Living Dead by nine years.
 * When the story was adapted for the animated series (see below), the color of the "zombie" Smurfs was changed from black to purple, presumably to avoid any accusations of racism.
 * The Papercutz translation of the original comic book story to English also changes the infected Smurfs to purple.
 * The Walking Dead, a typical zombie story about a handful of survivors trying to seek shelter in an increasingly zombie world... if they don't kill each other first.
 * Averted in an issue of BPRD (a spinoff of Hellboy), wherein a zombie outbreak occurs in a small European town and the zombies are brutally slaughtered by angry villagers with farming equipment before anyone else is infected.
 * In Dead West, zombies rise up in a town built on ground where a Native American tribe was slaughtered. Then a Lawyer-Friendly Cameo by the Man With No Name shows up and things get interesting.
 * Zombies vs. Robots (and its sequel Zombies vs. Robots vs. Amazons) starts out in a post zombie apocalypse world where man's former servants fight to protect the last uninfected baby.
 * The Black Lantern Corps in the Green Lantern story "Blackest Night" are a particularly nasty variation. The zombies are reanimated by flying rings that are programmed to automatically seek out corpses. As long as the rings are still worn, they can construct zombies out of almost anything, even empty skeletons, so damage to the brain doesn't kill them. They are neither slow nor stupid, regaining all the skills and abilities they had in life, including any superhuman powers. The number of Black Lanterns in existence is truly Legion, recruited from multiple different planets across the entire universe. Worst of all, while Black Lanterns do possess many elements of their former personalities, they will all kill any living thing they encounter without hesitation or remorse.
 * They actually have to kill people to recharge their rings. One ripped out heart, filled with one of the seven emotions, equals 0.01% power restored to every ring. Not that they need the incentive.
 * Worse yet, even though they're magic zombies revived by power rings, their bites still carry part of The Virus. Hope the rest of the universe is more Genre Savvy than.
 * The series Crossed is a 28-days series done with Garth Ennis's subtle touch. The infected like to rape people to death and do other absolutely horrific things. They do not lose their intelligence and they can talk. Oh, boy do they talk. The crossed will prey on each other if there are no uninfected around, and they get bored. Ennis calls this the most fucked up thing he's ever done.
 * Two Thousand AD:
 * Zombo, had this as a background in the far future, where a zombie apolcalyse is sweeping through the galaxy, and being hushed up by the government. The eponymous Zombo is a human/zombie hybrid (DON'T TRY TO THINK ABOUT IT) created by the govenment to fight back. Zombies personalities are exactly the same as when they were alive, except they now crave human flesh. It's a weird story, even by 2000AD standards...
 * Previous to Crossed Ennis wrote a Judge Dredd/Strontium Dog Crossover zombie apocalypse story called "Judgement Day". The necromagus Sabbat has zombies attack every Mega-City on Earth, overrunning five (which Dredd has nuked) and killing three billion before being stopped. Mega-City One's response to the zombies, by the way, is "Estimate sixty million plus! OPEN FIRE!"
 * Another 2000 AD strip, Defoe, involves a motley crew of adventurers fighting zombies in the 17th century using weapons provided by Isaac Newton and Robert Hook.
 * The comic Dead Eyes Open takes the Zombie Apocalypse and turns it on its head: people are rising again as the undead, yes, but the undead are intelligent, mostly want to be left alone, and are generally in more danger from the living than vice versa.
 * A UK-original story in the Marvel Transformers Generation 1 comic involves a plague of reanimated Transformer corpses overrunning Kalis city-state under the command of rogue Autobot Flame, which forced Autobot and Decepticon to join forces to defeat them.
 * Impaler depicts the start of a Vampire Apocalypse which, by the end of the second volume, reached Class 0 proportions, with no sign of stopping. Possessing the ability to become Made of Air Living Shadows and manifest long shadow Combat Tentacles, it only takes two days for what started as a few dozen vampires to become a few million and infest New York City to the point where it has to be nuked. It takes less time for them to wipe out Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.
 * Damn Nation takes place five years after a Vampire Apocalypse has mostly wiped out the United States. The government has abandoned the lower 48 states, and the rest of the world has put the country under quarantine.
 * The near-future "found journal" Zombies: A Record of the Year of Infection, which is presented as the journal of Seattle doctor Robert Twombly, has the western seaboard of the United States and some of Canada overcome with a zombie uprising in 2012 caused by, of all things, an experimental food preservative gone bad. Although the fact it was found and published suggests (in the context of the journal's universe) the zombies were successfully stopped somehow.
 * The Bash Street Zombies story by Kev F Sutherland which appeared in The Beano. Read it here.

Film

 * Night of the Living Dead and its sequels. Perhaps because the original film predates most of the zombie canon, it actually avoids many of the "rules" it is credited with creating. Some zombies in the Romero canon can move quickly, use tools, and show problem-solving ability. These abilities are increasingly developed through the sequels. Also, the term "zombie" is never actually used. They are called "ghouls" instead.
 * The sequels:
 * Dawn of the Dead
 * Day of the Dead
 * Land of the Dead
 * Diary of the Dead
 * Survival of the Dead
 * The 2004 remake Dawn of the Dead 2004 updates the setting and has a much larger cast. Zombies are also distinguished from the original by being capable of sprinting.
 * The Return of the Living Dead film series resulted from a dispute between John Russo and George Romero, which split the Night of the Living Dead sequels into two branches. Russo only lived to make the first film with his new partner Dan O'Bannon. The Return of the Living Dead series is more campy and humorous as well as more grotesque than Romero's more famous films. The zombies have human-level intelligence, specifically eat brains rather than just human flesh, and are much more difficult to kill. The first film lampshades its departures from the original by acknowledging the existence of Night of the Living Dead as a movie within its world. One character even exclaims, "You mean the movie lied?!"
 * The sequels:
 * Return of the Living Dead Part 2
 * Return of the Living Dead 3
 * Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis
 * Return of the Living Dead: Rave from the Grave
 * 28 Days Later is a zombie film with Technically Living Zombies who are afflicted with the "rage virus," something akin to super-rabies. Zombies are called "the infected", and can spread the condition through any bodily fluid transfer.
 * In the Italian film Nightmare City (a.k.a. City of the Living Dead) the zombies are radioactive,drink blood instead of eating flesh, and can run.
 * REC, and the American remake Quarantine document the first stage of a zombie apocalypse with an In-Universe Camera. In these films, the zombies are afflicted by a disease described as similar to rabies. It's hinted that a mysterious tenant intentionally created the disease.
 * In Lamberto Bava's Demoni, the creatures are more like monsters than zombies, but they work with zombie rules and may have been an inspiration for straight zombie films to follow.
 * Blending Zombie Apocalypse with Our Werewolves Are Different, Mulberry Street gives us a virus that's transmissible by rats as well as humans (totally screwed was the phrase, wasn't it?), and turns infected people into rat-faced, rampaging cannibals. Subverted in that . Similarly, Reliquary, the sequel to Relic, has those affected by a watered-down virus (it turned you into a horrific cocktail of dinosaur/primate DNA in the original) turned into light-shunning, psychotic, rat/lizard faced things. The even more watered down version just turned you into something like a 28 Days Later zombie.
 * Italian director Lucio Fulci's Zombi 2 took the Romero concept and increased the gore factor with such novel touches as a zombie fighting a shark underwater and a woman getting her eye gouged out with a sliver of wood.
 * Burial Ground: The Nights of Terror takes this trope to its beginning phase, with zombies coming back as the presumable result of an ancient curse, and includes tool-using zombies, along with the unusual use of an adult dwarf playing the role of a child.
 * Shaun of the Dead plays the concept for laughs, while at the same time remaining faithful to the style of the Romero films. Like those films, it includes hints that zombies retain some semblance of their former personalities. It also includes a Take That against the Twenty-Eight series.
 * Brilliantly skewered in the 2006 film Fido, which occurs in an alternate 1950s that is in the heyday of a zombie post-apocalypse. The zombies have been tamed into domestic servitude by a control collar. This is possible because zombie bites do not cause a change. Billy Connolly plays the eponymous character, one of the most charismatic shambling corpses ever shown on the big screen.
 * Grindhouse: Planet Terror gleefully plays out all the classical zombie tropes in the style of a '70s B-Movie.
 * The Resident Evil based movie series with Milla Jovovich is more straight forward survival horror, although zombie apocalypse elements are involved from 2 on to the end.
 * Night of the Creeps features the alien entity infection variety, where the victims could either remain sentient or become mindless shamblers looking to continue infecting others.
 * SLiTHER also includes an alien infection, where zombies are infected by parasitic worms and controlled by a hive-mind. The film is partly an Homage to and an Affectionate Parody of zombie tropes.
 * The French movie Les revenants (They Came Back in international release) has 70 million people climbing out of their graves... and peacefully returning to their old lives, trying to relearn speech and basic motor functions, and generally not killing anyone.
 * This would actually cause much more damage and dislocation to human society than the traditional zombie attack.
 * Gangs of the Dead aka Last Rites had homeless people zombies created by radiation from a meteor that fell to earth attacking so the Latino and black gangs had to more-or-less put off their fight to stay alive.
 * Day of the Dead (2008) shows a virus that turns people into zombies starting out as flu symptoms. About half the town is infected and comes down with what is thought to be the flu, but then everyone infected simultaneously stops moving for about five minutes, then visibly rot from the inside out within seconds, killing them, and turning them into flesh-eating zombies.
 * J'Accuse! aka I Accuse (1921) is possibly the earliest zombie apocalypse style movie ever made complete with political commentary. What starts as a typical patriotic war story of lost loves, turns into a Zombie apocalypse when the millions of dead soldiers of World War 1, march home from the battlefield to lay the blame for the war at the feet of those that stayed behind.
 * The same premise makes up Joe Dante's Homecoming (from the Masters of Horror anthology), where soldiers rise from the dead en masse to vote out the administration that sent them to war. It's only when said administration starts treating them like horror movie zombies that the violence begins...
 * Zombieland uses the fast zombie variant. They aren't very clever at all except where required by the Rule of Funny, and are pretty much limited to basic functions such as turning doorknobs and climbing fences and scaffolding, putting their minds at about "pissed off monkey" level. and they were created by The Virus and can spread it through bites. They're also seemingly immune to pain, leading to the first two of the lead's Rules of Zombieland: Cardio (zombies can run fast, making it important to be able to run faster) and the Double Tap (put another bullet into the head after taking one down to make sure).
 * ZA: Zombies Anonymous aka Last Rites of the Dead (2006) gives a new spin on the Zombie Apocalypse: the outbreak has happened, the dead are walking the earth, but they are still functioning -- although mostly closeted -- members of society. The movie is a good study on prejudice, showing the new world through the eyes of the recently-deceased Angela. Most of the living prefer the dead to stay dead, but most of the "mortally challenged" just want to be left alone; there are, of course, extremists on both sides, the living who actively hunt down the dead, and vice-versa. The social commentaries aren't subtle, and can be quite agitating at times, especially during the climax.
 * Colin (2008) plays the Zombie Apocalypse pretty much straight, with the eponymous zombie as the protagonist.
 * Tokyo Zombie is a 2005 Japanese live-action Zom-Com about a pair of bumbling Jujitsu practitioners where zombies of the shambling variety first appear by popping out of a mountainous pile of garbage, toxic waste and discarded bodies called Black Fuji. Within 5 years all of Japan is covered in zombies except for a pyramid-shaped building inside a wall where rich people have gathered for safety and to amuse themselves with zombie-on-zombie as well as zombie-on-human fights to the undeath.
 * Flight Of The Living Dead (2007) is a zombie movie which was clearly inspired by Snakes on a Plane, since it takes place in the confines of a commercial airliner. The film's zombies follow the Russo mould, in that they can move faster than a shamble, but the incubation time for the virus varies wildly - some are infected and do not turn until a good while afterwards, whereas some are zombified almost as soon as they die. The most hilarious thing about the film is that the layout of said plane is completely screwed up (access tunnels and zombies clawing their way through the floor of the cabin are two of the most egregious examples). Also, the heroes are able to shoot guns inside the pressurised cabin, which would be film-endingly disastrous if they hit a window.
 * Unless the movie decided to be realistic in this regard, in which case the characters would just have to deal with an annoying whistling sound for the rest of the flight.
 * The Zombie Blood Bath trilogy (1993, 1995, 2000) proves to be capable of bringing forth Narm Charm unlike anything you've ever seen.
 * Heavily subverted in Dead Heat, a cops vs. zombies movie with a Who Dunnit to Me? plotline. Police detective Treat Williams dies in the line of duty, but is brought back temporarily with a resurrection device concocted by the corrupt scientist he was investigating. No apocalypse is forthcoming and no flesh/brain-eating ensues, as the zombies retain their free will if they're revived immediately after death.
 * Dead Air continues the tradition of virus-infected Technically Living Zombie films, with the infection being caused by a compound spread by terrorist attacks in the United States' major cities.
 * The fan remake for Plan Nine From Outer Space seems to be playing this up, majorly.
 * On that note, the original had also had a (badly) attempted one.
 * Stake Land takes place in a post-Vampire Apocalypse setting.
 * The Dead, filmed on location, depicts a Zombie Apocalypse in an unnamed African country.

Literature

 * Raymond E. Feist's fantasy literature has the Black Slayers: dead warriors called back to life using necromancy, or in one case, using the authority of the Goddess of Death. Once called, they are virtually unstoppable, where even severed body parts will wriggle towards each other to reassemble.
 * Near the end of the Serpentwar, a magic user casts a spell that continuously reanimates all corpses in the battlefield to do their bidding. This has friendly and enemy soldiers both being killed off and rising again to fight for the magic user.
 * Older Than Dirt invocations in Mesopotamian Mythology:
 * In The Epic of Gilgamesh, the goddess Ishtar/Inanna tells her father that if he doesn't help her get revenge on Gilgamesh for turning down her proposition, she will break open the underworld and bring up the dead to consume the living, all of them. He, sensibly, agrees to her alternative. Had she gone through with it, it would probably have been the Ur Example by a couple of millennia.
 * She does it again in Inannas Descent to The Netherworld, sort of a Spin-Off of the Epic of Gilgamesh. She uses the Zombie Apocalypse threat against the gatekeeper of the underworld, and after deliberating with Irkalla's queen (Inanna's sister Ereshkigal), he agrees to let her in, on the condition that she remove her clothing and jewelry at a series of checkpoints.
 * Max Brooks' The Zombie Survival Guide is a handbook on how to survive a zombie apocalypse. Its advice is based around classic zombie behavior that is not quite rooted to any specific source. It breaks down the hazards and strategies in detail, from zombie strengths and weaknesses to effective combat tactics.
 * Max Brooks' next effort, World War Z is a mockumentary of a past zombie invasion, conducted in a series of interviews with survivors from around the world. The interviews are ordered so as to take the reader through the war chronologically, from "Patient Zero" to the Zombie Apocalypse to the eventual human victory. The interviews are supposedly conducted by Max Brooks himself. When The Zombie Survival Guide is mentioned and criticized, the "interviewer" says, "Oh really?"
 * In Teresa Edgerton's Celydonn novel The Moon and the Thorn, Lord Cernach causes the Cauldron of Cerridwen to be recreated, which has the power to create an army of phantoms every twelve hours. Cernach's stated intention during the design phase of the work was to use it to extort concessions from Mochdreff's Governor, who preferred diplomacy to military action.
 * Brian Keene's Dead Sea features a zombie plague that also affects cats, dogs, and rodents in addition to humans. After the characters flee the land for the sea, they discover that the plague is spreading to other mammals and eventually fish. By the end, the plague has reached the birds. Zombies do not result from demonic possession in this book as they do in his other books.
 * It does contain a 'blink and you'll miss it' reference to an incident in The Rising so it may be a case of Unreliable Narrator.
 * The Rising and its sequel City of the Dead by Brian Keene play with several zombie tropes. As a result of a scientist messing with things he oughtn't to mess with, a portal to Dimension Hell is opened. Now, every time any animal above the level of "bug" dies it is possessed with a malignant, sadistic demon with one purpose: kill more creatures and let more of its buddies into the world. So we get zombie animals: zombie cats, zombie birds, zombie rats, zombie hump-backed camels, heck, zombie alligators in New York City's sewer system. As noted in the introduction above, zombie animals equals totally screwed. At the end of the second novel,
 * Garry Kilworth's Welkin Weasels: Castle Storm features a being called a "ghoul", but effectively it's a zombie; the villain resurrects a badger corpse via (surprisingly disturbing for a kids' book) necromantic rituals. The resulting being obeys his every command, but displays a hint of personality in a Shout-Out to Frankenstein when it begs him not to call it a "monster".
 * In the Stephen King short story Home Delivery, an object orbiting the Earth (either an asteroid covered with seriously weird worm-like creatures, or it's worms all the way down...) is somehow causing the dead to reanimate. The story was originally published in a collection of Romero homages called The Book of the Dead.
 * Similarly, Cell, another King zombie novel, has people turned into zombies by cell phones.
 * In H.P. Lovecraft's Reanimator, Dr. Herbert West devises a chemical that will bring dead people back to life. Unfortunately the subjects either die (again) within minutes or turn into flesh-eating creatures that share more that a slight resemblance with your average zombie (they retain normal human strength and speed though). He eventually get better at reanimating, creating an intelligent zombie who can reanimate more bodies. The intelligent zombie then leads an army of other zombies to kill Dr. West.
 * Hell, the spine is their weak spot (as the head is the weak spot in normal zombies), since the chemical is injected into the spine.
 * Jonathan Maberry's book Zombie CSU The Forensics of the Living Dead is a What If scenario in book form. The author has interviewed Real Life Police, SWAT, doctors, hospitals, 911, and even DHS about what they would be doing to react if the Zombies began walking the earth. Delightfully enough, all the agencies and groups interviewed in the book had already given the question some consideration and had strategies formulated. Yes, even the DHS.
 * His novel Patient Zero, has a genetically engineered version of The Virus (that infected unusually fast via parasites and prions along with the viral cocktail) that creates Zombies used as a weapon by jihadist terrorists who come up with a strain that allows for smart zombies.
 * His other novel Dead Of Night has an engineered version of The Virus that was meant to leave a serial killer awake in his own rotting corpse, Buried Alive. Unfortunately, instead, . The resulting Zombie Apocalypse got contained, but.
 * Richard Matheson's 1954 book I Am Legend, while it was about vampires and not zombies, is an important precursor to the genre. Matheson's novel was adapted into the films The Last Man on Earth, the most faithful adaptation, and later into The Omega Man, which apes the then-recent Night of the Living Dead to a degree and turns the vampires into Luddite photophobic albino mutants produced by biological warfare. The most 2007 adaptation, I Am Legend, has the infected more like an odd cross between zombies and vampires.
 * In Graham McNeill's Warhammer 40000 Horus Heresy novel False Gods, the attack on Davin's moon is met by hordes of animated corpses.
 * David Moody's Autumn series is somewhat novel in its setup: the story begins with 99% of the world population dying - in the following weeks, some of the victims get better. The most novel aspect of his approach is that for the majority of the first book, the zombies are benign, just wandering about at random, with the result that we can see that "Holy crap, dead people are getting up and walking around," is really freaking scary entirely independent of the possibility of being eaten by a zombie. Of course, at the end, the zombies do become violent, and the whole thing just slips into the mold of the standard survivalist zombie apocalypse story. It is also somewhat novel in that the protagonists plan, for most of the story, to simply wait the zombies out, on the assumption that they will eventually decay past the point of mobility.
 * Carrie Ryan's The Forest of Hands and Teeth takes place in a fenced-in community several generations after the Zombie Apocalypse.
 * A good half of Clark Ashton Smith's work features Zombies of the non-contagious variety, generally custom animated by necromancers. In at least one case they 'outlive' their creators and carry on with what they were doing before they died.
 * John Wyndham's 1951 novel The Day of the Triffids, while concerned with genetically engineered Man Eating Plants, foreshadows many themes of the contemporary Zombie Apocalypse. Society collapses after an atmospheric event causes mass blindness. The sighted and unsighted alike struggle to scavenge a living while being hunted by this new predator. Eventually the sighted protagonists retreat to the countryside and barricade themselves in a farm house, fending off repeated Triffid attacks. The book is heavy with social commentary and contains memorably hellish imagery of shambling, groping masses of humanity. The Triffids themselves have a rickety, limping gait and are slow moving, awkward creatures of little threat individually (unless they catch you unawares). In large numbers, however, they are a serious menace; able to force their way in anywhere and seemingly capable of rudimentary communication and organization. The most effective way of stopping one is to 'decapitate' it using special blade firing weapons. It has been adapted as a lightweight 1962 monster movie (casts the Triffids as extraterrestrial plants) and a more faithful (albeit stagey) 1981 television series, and then again as a TV series in 2009.
 * Star Trek Destiny reveals that this is how
 * Another Warhammer 40000 example: the second Soul Drinkers novel features the ridiculously powerful mutant-psyker Teturact, who would induce these, then bring it to a halt while forcing any survivors to worship him as a god. His main starship has been set up so that it can self-destruct and provide a drop assault Zombie Apocalypse.
 * David Wellington's Monster Island and its sequels provide Romero-style zombies with an exception: if your brain is provided with oxygen between death and before returning as a zombie, you return as an intelligent zombie which the sequels call a lich. The dead are reanimated as a result of a scientist having pierced the source of Life Energy, causing the world to overflow with life energy, reanimating the dead. The trilogy is available online.
 * Friday the 13th: The Jason Strain has Jason, while a "special guest" on a Deadly Game, being abducted by scientists, who want to replicate his regenerative abilities and immortality; Jason wakes up partway through the vivisection, rampages through the lab and is exposed to an experimental virus which reacts negatively with him, giving him the ability to reanimate his victims as zombies. Thousands of deaths later the virus is cured and Jason's rid of his new powers. Notably headshots don't stop the zombies - the head needs to be completely eradicated in order for them to be fully (re-)killed. Also, Jason fights a shark in reference to Zombi 2.
 * "The Concord Virus" is a rather traditional example of this trope. It's a short story, but it manages to get the job done.
 * This was one theory about what some of the bad guys in The Abhorsen Trilogy had in mind, since hordes of zombies are their favorite mooks and they were taking thousands and thousands of refugees into the country. Unfortunately, they were actually thinking a bit bigger than what Sabriel and Touchstone were expecting.
 * Happened in Fire Sea, third book of The Death Gate Cycle. In this case the effect was not pandemic but might as well have been (almost all the zombies were necromancers in life and simply animated every corpse they came across) and rather than being mindless they were sentient but Ax Crazy with hatred for the living (except for Kleitus, the leader of said undead, who was still Ax Crazy but also smart enough to have vision- he was gunning for ruling an entire zombified universe.) Mercifully, they were contained on just one world of the series multiverse at the end of the novel, and in the climactic volume Kleitus was killed in battle and the rest of the undead were destroyed by what could best be described as "cosmic reshuffling".
 * Christopher Moore's The Stupidest Angel has quite a bit of zombieism. And Brain hunger.
 * The Newsflesh series by Mira Grant (pseudonym of Seanan McGuire), in which bloggers and geeks are the only reason that humanity survived the Rising. Subverts and lampshades lots of related tropes, while playing others straight (notably zombie animals: any mammal over 40 pounds will reanimate upon death).
 * Walter Greatshell's Xombies series deals with an odd combination of Romero and Russo rules; the titular 'xombies' are the result of a contaminant which can only infect dead people (due to the fact that it has to bond to anaerobic hemoglobin, or a blood protein that isn't bound to oxygen). The zombies in this series are especially dangerous because they literally can't be killed. Seperated body parts are sometimes more dangerous than actual zombies. In the second book, it is revealed that.
 * In Aaron Allston's Galatea in 2-D, the last attack Roger unleashes on Kevin.
 * In the episodic ebook series Zombies! by Ivan Turner, a Genre Savvy 17 year old is the first to alert the authorities to the threat, thus subverting the trope because the authorities handle it carefully and sensibly enough that your average citizen doesn't even notice the undead walking among them.
 * Night of the Living Trekkies is about what happens when the intial outbreak is at a Star Trek convention.
 * Derek Gunn's Vampire Apocalypse the Series is pretty obviously an example of this with vampires.
 * Peter Clines' Ex Heroes is a story about the end of the world at the hands of zombies, only to be opposed by superheroes.
 * Deconstructed in Handling the Undead, which explores how society would react if dead people actually came back to life, and without the craving for brains that makes it so easy to just Kill'Em All. (The zombie violence is rare and seems to stem more from their being unaware of their actions and consequences.) The first thing that happens is that the government calls an emergency meeting and decides what terminology to use, deciding on "reliving" because it sounds so much more pleasant than "zombies". A memorable subplot follows the grieving mother of a recently deceased young boy, fighting to hide her mindless zombie child from the authorities.
 * Theories of International Politics and Zombies, a rare non-fiction case of this trope; it's an almost serious look at the subject, through the lenses of various theories of international relations.
 * In the Biblical Gospel of Matthew, when Jesus is crucified, the dead rise from their graves around Judea.
 * Another Biblical example, this one involving a sort of inversion: In the Book of Ezekiel, piles of bones are assembled and fleshed out. They then receive the breath of life from God, and form an army. (They are probably more in the category of Technically Living Zombie or even Back From the Dead, though.)
 * The entire point of Can YOU Survive the Zombie Apocalypse?.
 * In the 1961 novel The Day They H-Bombed Los Angeles by Robert Moore Williams, mutated protein molecules invade Southern California, turning people into flesh-eating zombies.
 * The web-novel Domina is about a number of super-powered zombies called "screamers" attacking an island city. Hasn't hit the actual apocalypse stage yet, but the Reasonable Authority Figure is rightly worried.
 * Rot and Ruin takes place about 15 years after an unexplained Zombie apocalypse, and while the zombies are relatively easy to kill (zombie hunters tend to make a game of it) the society is still kind of in shock, so the idea of any organised take-back-the-earth campaign fails to gain traction when it's brought up. Something of an unusual example in that while the main characters do kill Zombies, one of the main points of the book is that just because they're walking around doesn't mean they're not someone's dead relative who deserves respect
 * Diario de un Zombi has this as the setting for a depopulated Barcelona. Add in unstoppable biomechanical horrors and cultists.
 * Subverted in That Is All; the Zombie Apocalypse is one of the few things that doesn't occur during the Ragnarok of 2012. The only creatures that rise from the dead are taxidermied animals, and they are harmless because they are all mounted on wooden planks.

Live Action TV

 * The Borg of Star Trek fame are almost Zombies In Space! One guest star even referred to them as 'cybernetic zombies.'
 * They are in fact cyborg pirate zombies. In space.
 * The two-part serial "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances" from the 2005 Doctor Who is a neat twist on the Zombie Apocalypse, with . The walking corpses in the earlier episode "The Unquiet Dead" are closer, but.
 * There's also the episode, "New Earth" set in a hospital in the year 5 billion and twenty-three on, naturally enough, a New Earth which is run by cat people. Towards the end, we find out that . Of course, the buggers get out and mischief ensues.
 * The Sarah Jane Adventures did a zombie-themed story for the show's pilot episode, "The Invasion of the Bane". In this case, the zombie effect is caused by consuming a new energy drink that turns out to be a symbiotic life form. The resulting zombies try to force others to drink the stuff.
 * The UK horror series Dead Set involves a zombie apocalypse in Britain, with the plot revolving around the contestants of Big Brother as they are trapped in the house.
 * An episode of Star Trek Enterprise has the crew coming across a drifting Vulcan spacecraft whose crew have been affected by the Trellium-D they were mining from nearby asteroids. The insanely aggressive Vulcans stagger after the crew through darkened corridors growling incoherently and, while their bite is not contagious, T'Pol is affected by the Trellium becoming a danger to the others.
 * A season three episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer had people being turned into zombies due to a mask that contains the powers of a Nigerian zombie demon. Zombies aren't really her thing.
 * Degrassi the Next Generation had a Halloween special called Degrassi of the Dead in which genetically-modified food turns people into zombies, leaving the few surviving students to fight for their lives to escape.
 * Although they are not real, in an episode of Spaced, "Art", Tim takes some bad speed and plays Resident Evil 2, essentially making him hallucinate a zombie attack throughout the whole episode. The Twiglets he ate at the party didn't help either.
 * Discovery's The Colony is a reality TV show that takes place after a simulated "viral catastrophe". It's basically a zombie apocalypse with the zombies cut out.
 * An episode of Smallville dealt with a zombie apocalypse.
 * Though not a classic example, the dark future of the Dollhouse resembles a Zombie Apocalypse. A signal was sent to all telephones on the planet that would wipe the listeners' minds, and program them to kill anybody who didn't hear the signal. In result rabid hordes of lunatics hunt down the few remaining normal people in the ruins of the civilization; a very strong similarity with this trope.
 * That Mitchell and Webb Look features a recurring sketch about a game show taking place in a world where an unspecified, but clearly horrific and traumatising, "Event" has happened. Food is scarce, there are no more children, there are frequent exhortations to "Remain Indoors" and the survivors live in terror of a mysterious Them, who look like us because they used to be us. It's hinted that this is not the worst part of the "Event".
 * The Supernatural episode "The End" has exactly this. It was more or less a Shout-Out to 28 Days Later (rage virus infected, very fast Zombies, I mean Croates).
 * AMC's TV adaptation of The Walking Dead.
 * The Sliders had an alternate dimension Earth, where, get this, a  causes a Zombie Apocalypse. The   and an antidote would be taken to end the effect... However something went horribly wrong and millions of people started to hunger for fat, even if that fat was of another human. For some reason these zombies also became very sensitive to light, possibly having something to do with the zombies becoming excessively pale. Also the zombies aren't of the risen dead variety,.
 * The X-Files episode "Millenium" deals with a zombie apocalypse with the advent of Y 2 K. Obviously, going back and watching this episode over a decade later, it doesn't hold nearly the same punch as it did when it first aired in 1999.
 * The Halloween episode of Community deals with a zombie plague breaking out in the college. The group must try to escape, reach the thermostat to lower the temperature, and not be driven insane by the "Mama Mia!" soundtrack.
 * National Geographic program, How to Survive the End of the World, had an episode called Zombie Earth, where an airborne strain of the rabies virus creates this kind of tropes.

Music

 * This is the basis for the Creature Feature song, "Aim for the Head".
 * "Shoot To Kill" by thrash-metal band Warbringer is about gunning down zombies. Boom Headshot indeed.
 * "Re: Your Brains" by Jonathan Coulton. The narrator, Bob, is a zombie who seems to have been made merely sociopathic by zombification, rather than mindless, since he retains his sapience and incredibly middle-management personality while attempting to persuade his co-worker Tom to let him eat his brains. Other zombies are mentioned, but they seem to be the standard nonsapient kind ("...my colleagues, who were chewing on the doors").
 * The music video for Metallica's "All Nightmare Long".
 * The music video for Michael Jackson's "Thriller".
 * Most of Cannibal Corpse's album covers and quite a number of their songs feature zombies (and the same goes for the bajillion gory death metal bands they inspired). The name itself, according to bassist Alex Webster, refers to a zombie who feeds on other zombies.
 * Ludo's "Save Our City"
 * "The Zombie Apocalypse Blues"
 * The music video for the Gorillaz song "Clint Eastwood" involves zombie gorillas rising from the dead.
 * "Early Sunsets Over Monroeville" by My Chemical Romance.
 * "This is a slow one...grab your girl...and then shoot her in the head!"
 * The Devil Wears Prada's concept EP "Zombie", as the name implies, centers around one of these. The lyrics and sound clips in between songs (such as the quote at the top of the page) rely heavily on the genre's many clichés.
 * Lemon Demon's Bad Idea.
 * Chiodos' "Those Who Slay Together Stay Together" details the events of a Zombie Apocalypse. It eventually culminates with the narrator and his group of friends turning into zombies themselves.
 * Oderus Urungus of GWAR leads the Zombie Army.
 * Kirby Krackle "Zombie Apocalypse"
 * March of the Undead and Reanimator by Machinae Supremacy.
 * Parodied in LMFAO's music video "Party Rock Anthem".
 * "Fight 'Em 'Til You Can't" by Anthrax. The cover for the single even depicts the band themselves fighting off zombies.

New Media
"Grif: There's two kinds of people in the world Doc. Those who have a plan prepared for when the zombies take over the Earth, and those who don't. We call those last people 'dinner'."
 * Blogging example: on 13th June 2007, the blogosphere declared a zombie apocalypse. While this page contains the biggest list of links, it is no means exhaustive.
 * The Red vs. Blue Public Service Announcement "Planning to Fail" detailed the Zombie Apocalypse survival plans of the main characters


 * The Spider Cliff Mysteries: Spider Cliff has the occasional zombie attack, which are all quickly contained offscreen. Except for Annabelle, the intelligent, intact, friendly zombie.
 * Last year Topps released a new card series titled Hollywood Zombies which features parodies of celebrities as flesh eating zombies.
 * Zombies are an Iconic feature of Gaia Online. Gaia has not one, but two Zombie Apocalypse events (one traditional, one involving Killer Rabbits), as well as a Vampire war that was functionally identical to a Zombie Invasion. In addition, Gaia has released two item based Zombie themed skins, and later brought back even more zombies for the Olympics (although they're created through a serum rather than The Virus).
 * The Zombies introduced for the Olympics played a part in the 2K8 Halloween event, where they were referred to as Glompies. They killed members of the other three teams by hugging them to death.
 * The website Last Days Journal is a user-generated series of blogs about what happens after the zombie apocalypse.
 * Xombie is a series of animated web shorts, trade paperbacks, and web comics that deals with the war between xombies, zombies, and humans. The schtick is that zombies are your average, run-of-the-mill reanimated dead, whilst xombies are corpses that retain their former intelligence, gain enhanced physical strength, some kind of crazy weapon, and high Animal Empathy. The original shorts revolved around the xombie Dirge and his dog Cerberus protecting a young girl (Zoe), on her way to the last human settlement.
 * So in other words, zombies are... well, zombies, whereas xombies are more like revenants as defined on the undead page?
 * Fledgling Survival of the Fittest Alternate Universe RP SOTF Zombies sees a group of ten survivors attempting to fend off the reanimated bodies of their dead classmates to make it to the coastline, where a rescue boat awaits.
 * A prominent Image Board's Weapons-oriented component routinely sees threads of what would you do during a Zombie Apocalypse. Anything from where would you go, to what weapons and ammo and supplies you carry is brought up. The board is getting fairly sick of it at this point.
 * Surprisingly enough, someone managed to make a Watchmen zombie apocalypse Alternate Universe fanfic, which you can find here, that really kicked ass.
 * Several SCP objects could potentially trigger this, especially SCP-008, which specifically invokes the trope. Additionally, SCP-093 allows access to a world where something like this has already happened;
 * This is implied to be the case in Tales of Ubernorden.

Newspaper Comics

 * The Far Side once had a strip depicting the "Night of the Living Dead Chipmunks".

Tabletop Games

 * The tabletop role playing game All Flesh Must Be Eaten is all about surviving the Zombie Apocalypse, with a variety of different Apocalypses in different settings (called "Deadworlds").
 * The back story for Unhallowed Metropolis puts a subtle but significant spin on this trope by having the first Plague outbreak occur in 1905. This is also the kind where anyone who dies may come back -- although it's only a sure thing if they died of a bite from a zombie, there's a chance of it for any corpse, with the odds depending on the surrounding environment.
 * It's also hinted that zombies might be the least of the world's problems. Bizarre wastelands expanding throughout the world, reports of unnameable horrors and mind-rending blasphemies in the jungles of Africa and beneath the streets of London, hints that the people of the Crimean peninsula have undergone an unwholesome transformation that makes the degenerate ghouls and feral vampires look tame by comparison, Hong Kong somehow having become a true necropolis where zombies can survive long past when they should have desiccated into immobility... clues abound that the Zombie Apocalypse is just the most visible symptom of something having gone deeply wrong with the world on some fundamental level.
 * In Warhammer Fantasy zombies make up the bulk of the armies of the undead Vampire Counts (alone with other classic horror creatures like wights, ghouls and giant bats). They also use undead dire wolves. These zombies are reanimated corpses animated by the will of the vampire or necromancer who raised them and are slow and weak, relying on numbers to make any impact. Since Vampire Counts magic-users can effectively grow them out of the ground, numbers are NOT something they have trouble with...
 * Warhammer 40000 brought on plague zombies during the 13th Black Crusade, courtesy of the god of pestilence and decay, and other zombie infestations have been known to be caused by Tyranids and a fair number of different plants.
 * Plague zombies have been part of 40k background for almost as long as the Chaos powers, and are a playable gang in the spinoff skirmish game Necromunda.
 * Card Game Magic: The Gathering has had zombies since the first set, but the plane of Grixis, one of the Shards of Alara, is in a successful Zombie Apocalypse, albeit with necromancers and demons at the forefront, caused by the crapping out of two types of magic good at fighting them off. In any case, humanity is boned on the plane. Note that in Magic, zombies are not The Virus; they cannot create more of their own kind through infection, but are instead created from corpses by Evil Sorcerers.
 * Invoked by the Archenemy deck Bring About the Undead Apocalypse, which allows you to create a Zombie Apocalypse of your own.
 * The latest Innistrad block takes this way over eleven, by introducing a good old fashioned zombie apocalypse, vampires and werewolves, mad scientists and their abominations, demons, and central to the block's story, all of these at once.
 * Name-dropped in the Dark Ascension card Zombie Apocalypse, which brings back all of your zombies then destroy all humans in play.
 * The Horde format becomes this when you build the Horde out of zombie cards.
 * The board game Zombies!!!, which seems to owe some influence to Resident Evil (the players have to shoot the zombies, and they win the game by escaping in a helicopter).
 * The GURPS Infinite Worlds setting has the Gotha timelines. Those are about twenty known parallel worlds where civilization was wiped out by the "Gotha Plague": a mutant disease that causes infectees to behave like the 28 Days Later variety. It specifies that the Plague has trouble establishing itself in small communities, so civilization on these worlds is in small enclaves.
 * The Gotha Zombies have a few differences from other zombies, though; they're semi-intelligent, and function more like a highly aggressive chimpanzee tribe in terms of organization than anything else. They're quite willing to eat zombies from other "tribes", and will even eat their own if there isn't any other food available.
 * In 2008, Palladium Books debuted their own Zombie Apocalypse game: Dead Reign. Featuring a mish-mash of tropes and abilities. (The majority of the Zombies are tough, slow-moving ones, but there are also fast zombies, thinking zombies, zombies that don't believe they're zombies, and "half-dead".)
 * The Corpse Factories in the Feng Shui supplement Glimpse of the Abyss are Buro-created superzombies that are markedly more intelligent than the non-infectious zombies that they create. Only five of these things exist in 2056, and if just one of them gets loose, it's Zombie Apocalypse time, particularly since the Necromantic Implanter, an arcanowave device that every corpse factory is equipped with, can be used to turn regular zombies into more corpse factories.
 * In Exalted, this is one of the favored tactics of the more militarily inclined Deathlords. High level Necromancy can raise corpses en masse, and certain spells can even corrupt an area to the point that the dead will rise of their own accord. Eye and Seven Despairs, one of the Deathlords, has even pioneered a zombie plague that works on its own accord, but is too busy tormenting the reincarnations of people who screwed with him in the First Age to actually deploy it.
 * Deadlands has zombies, but these things are intelligent and cunning. Makes them hard to put down. Particularly if they're intact enough to be shooting back.
 * The World of Darkness games actually subvert the zombie apocalypse. While Zombies do exist, they're not exactly common, and aren't normally infectious.
 * There was an adventure done by Thomas "Wanderer" Wilde (best known for his Resident Evil plot guide) that took this trope head-on, called The Last Escape.
 * While there isn't necessarily an infectious means of Zombie Apocalypse, certain ghosts and spirits in the New World of Darkness have a chain of Numina that allow them to jump into a corpse, then jump into any corpse that corpse kills, then possibly invite some friends along...
 * Dungeons and Dragons zombies are simply mindless, reanimated corpses with no risk of infection, and are among the least dangerous of The Undead. However, there are quite a few undead with the "create spawn" ability, and several of them are incorporeal.
 * The "Infectious Zombie" template was provided in the 4th-edition supplement Open Grave. Unfortunately, actual rules for the zombie plague were not, despite being alluded to in the template.
 * In the previous edition, wights are probably the closest thing to more traditional zombies.
 * The World of Greyhawk campaign setting included a zombie variant known as a "Son of Kyuss," which was an aggressive zombie with green worms crawling about in its eye sockets. If the worms landed on someone, they burrowed under that person's skin and attempted to reach the brain, at which point the victim would become another Son of Kyuss. Given the nature of some of the beings in the game, these creatures were probably too weak to cause a full-scale apocalypse, but they could easily wipe out an entire village of zero-level humans.
 * In the 3.5 edition book Elder Evils, there's a world born dead, Atropus, whose coming is marked by the undead rising from their graves in a zombie apocalypse. As in some other Zombie Apocalypses, his coming may cause anyone who dies by any means (not just killed by a zombie) to rise as a zombie (or skeleton if there's not enough flesh for a zombie). When Atropus gets close enough to the planet anyone who's dead will reanimated as a skeleton or zombie by tearing out of their graves even if they were killed years ago.
 * The board game Last Night on Earth has several different scenarios to play through during a Zombie Apocalypse.

Theatre

 * Rhinoceros is a play by French author Eugene Ionesco that revolves around people spontaneously becoming rhinocerotes. They're destructive, but not violent, and one must apparently choose to become one (or at least not actively choose not to). Though mostly comedic, it still has the feel of a Zombie Apocalypse, not least because there's

Video Games

 * In Dwarf Fortress, zombie apocalypses are now completely possible, and are one of the deadliest threats a fortress can face if the ball gets rolling. You see, every creature killed by the undead in Dwarf Fortress will, if not quickly cremated, reanimate and join the undead horde. This can include even the most minute body parts. Once the zombies start racking up a few kills, they quickly becoming a massive ball of flesh that reanimates itself faster than it can be killed.
 * Resident Evil is generally a subversion of this trope. Only 2 and 3 deal with anything close to a zombie apocalypse; the rest only involve local outbreaks of The Virus.
 * However, the games usually take place which has been almost completely devastated at the regional level, providing a sort of local zombie apocalypse.
 * And subverted in the later games where they are not, technically, zombies, though they behave much the same.
 * Now it is a true zombie apocalypse in Resident Evil 6, targeting two fictional cities.
 * The House of the Dead series.
 * Subverted in Overkill:
 * Dead Rising is similar to the above Resident Evil examples in that the USA is kind of tolerating the zombies. Apparently,there are zombies out in the countryside of middle and midwestern America, but being slow and fragile, they are not that big a threat individually. The danger comes in densely populated areas; Willimette in the first game, Las Vegas in between games, and Fortune City in the second game. The rapid speed of the outbreak in Fortune City is explained by the fact that the city was hosting Terror is Reality, an American Gladiator -style reality TV show about killing zombies enmasse, and someone simply destroyed the gate on the zombie pens, releasing the show's extensive stock into the city. Dead Rising 2 also reveals that there is now a standard procedure for an outbreak.
 * Saints Row 2 has a zombie arcade game that strongly resembles Dead Rising.
 * Alliance of Valiant Arms has the "Infection" game mode, where random players will become zombies and must then infect the remaining players who are attempting to kill them.
 * Left 4 Dead is fairly nonchalant with its predicament,(Zoey) can utter the following line; "I can't get over how fast they all are. It's not even fair! I'm calling zombie bullshit on that, you know? They're not allowed to be so fast."
 * The Virus in Left 4 Dead also seems to be a fairly flexible type. Whilst it turns most people into common cannon fodder zombies, what little backstory exists suggests that it can target certain aspects of infectees to create the Special Infected. Infection is transferred via bite, and can take approximately an hour to set in depending on circumstances. Certain people seem to be 'blessed' with utter immunity (or were just lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time; ie, offshore or in the air and nowhere near the spreading infection), making the four heroes not the sole survivors.
 * Thanks to the events of Left 4 Dead 2 and the comic of events taking place after Left 4 Dead 1, it's been discovered anyone who can resist being changed into a zombie are actually carriers; people who carry the virus and can't mutate, but can still spread it to others, effectively making anyone who is an immune survivor spread the virus forever. The military sees these survivors as almost an enemy to humanity and are rounding them up for quarantine so they can try to find a cure, or kill them if they can't find any.
 * A fan theory is that copious intake of certain substances can change your inner chemistry enough to react to the infection. The Boomers are severe alcoholics, the Smokers are multiple packs a day chain smokers, The Hunters are meth fiends, The Witches crack-addicts, and the Tanks juicers.
 * Also note that in the intro movie, Bill notes that the zombies are mutating, so it could be different strains of the virus.
 * There is also a subversion to the rule that the zombies don't fight each other, but it happens so rarely that you may not see it at all at first.
 * Two things throw into doubt whether this is a true apocalypse - the military's still in reasonable shape, having the capacity to launch rescue missions and bombing runs, and it's not stated what's going on in the rest of the world.
 * The Military Base portrayed in the Comic seems to show the severity quite heavily. The base appears severely understaffed, with only a handful of soldiers where there should be hundreds. The base is also extremely insecure, with one soldier getting Infected and nearly killing some guards, and a Witch somehow wandering right on in. To make matters worse, it's dangerously low on supplies, and one of the Officer's is leading a mutiny against the base's Commander. The base also appears completely isolated from the rest of the Military (if it's still even around). The Military Base is ultimately destroyed by a massive zombie mob attack, and all known personnel are KIA. However, due to the Infection's inability to spread over water, the Navy in Left 4 Dead 2 seems to be operating at full capacity.
 * Multiple maps show that almost all the evac centers in the US have been overrun or aren't evacuating anymore. In Crash Course, the New Orleans, Midwest, and Allegheny Forest outposts are still up and running. In Dead Center, only New Orleans and the Midwest are left. The entire United States has been overrun in 2-3 weeks.
 * Of course, by the time you reach New Orleans in The Parish campaign, it seems to be largely overrun and abandoned, too. Bill says "As far as we know, zombies can't swim", so it's possible that islands are still safe, as long as air travel didn't bring The Infection to them.
 * Space Pirates and Zombies, of course. You are Space Pirates! There are Zombies! What more is there to say? Well, actually, there is quite a lot to say, as the Space Pirates have got to wonder why there are no sentient alien species to speak of... then they  What a way to go.
 * Project Zomboid has Knox County being overrun by zombies with you in the middle of it. Developers state in later versions of the game, later (provided you survived that long) the zombies spread worldwide, with repercussions ingame such as no electricity for ovens or refrigerators.
 * Both Doom and Quake, in both cases supernatural (and in neither case the main threat to humanity). In the former game, the zombies were undead foot soldiers (a few pistol shots would do one in permanently), still using the firearms they had been carrying in life (though Doom 3 introduced more regular walking corpses, which were originally intended to keep getting up as long as their corpse was intact, as revealed in a leaked beta; this was dropped from the final version because the Ragdoll Physics added to their deaths made it impractical). In the latter the zombies were shambling long-dead corpses in the Russo mould (nothing short of dismembering them with explosives would keep them down), though much more easily killed "grunts" more like the Doom zombies were found in the early levels of each episode (these may well have been still living, but possessed or otherwise mind-controlled). The Wolfenstein 3D games also had re-animated corpses as enemies, these created by Nazi Mad Science.
 * Quake 4 features partially Stroggified humans whom for all intents and purposes behave like zombies, this is Lampshaded by another soldier.
 * The Doom novelization had especially creepy scenes where zombies, still bearing an imprint of their former lives, would mindlessly shamble to the grocery store, pulling rotting food from the shelves, walking past the cash register, and so on.
 * Quake's instruction manual explained that the Grunts had had cybernetics wired into their brain that stimulated their pleasure centers whenever they killed someone.
 * In Halo, the Flood, who originated from a galaxy outside of the Milky Way, are very capable of causing an apocalypse. The infection forms first turn any sentient lifeforms they come across into zombies. Eventually, the infected beings begin to deteriorate and bloat, releasing more infection forms, which go to infect other people and so on and so forth, until they gain enough biomass to form a variety of "Pure" Flood forms, including the Gravemind, a hyper-intelligent hive-mind containing the memories and knowledge of every single being in history to have been assimilated by the Flood. This intelligence manifests itself in the ability of the Flood to utilize complex technology, strategize, and fully communicate with non-infected beings (the last known Gravemind even had a tendency to speak in trochaic heptameter). They were so powerful, that the only way the highly-advanced Forerunners managed to defeat them was . Even afterwards, they had a bad tendency of overrunning their holding facilities whenever outside interlopers stumbled upon them; they completely consumed the Halo in the first game, and end up doing the same to the Threshold research facilities, Delta Halo, and the Covenant capital city of High Charity in Halo 2. They got to Earth in the third installment, and were only stopped by Covenant Separatists who glassed the much of the continent they landed on (to the chagrin of some of their newfound human allies). They also consumed the massive Forerunner instillation known as the Ark, where.
 * The Flood are in fact . The only organic sentient beings that seem truly immune to infection are those lacking sufficient calcium reserves and/or a central nervous system.
 * The third game also has a multiplayer mode where someone is "infected" and spreads it by killing people with the energy sword, and they come back to do the same. Eventually, you have a few regular people left heading for the high ground to snipe as much as they can before being overwhelmed. It is very unlikely (though possible with a few skilled players working together) for survivors to last until the end of the round. Infection variants on modified maps make up the Living Dead weekened event, which plays on random weekends as well as on Halloween.
 * Well, the third game was when it was made official and programmed in as a gametype by Bungie. It was played unofficially in custom team slayer games as early as Halo 2, by designating one team a zombie team, and the other a human team. This put everybody on the honor system though, since you had to manually change teams yourself. This, combined with the fact that some hosts went by Russo rules where you have to get killed by a zombie and only by a zombie to turn, while other hosts went by Romero rules where all deaths should make a convert, predictably lead to chaos and frustration when dealing with inexperienced, stubborn, or otherwise plain stupid players.
 * Counter-Strike had an influence on this, where the most favored zombie mode, Infection, has the opposing side as fast-running zombies, and the other as CTs/Ts. Whoever is hit by a zombie is turned into one, and so on. The second popular mode, called Zombie Riot, is a typical zombie apocalypse and is players versus computer-controlled zombies, with no infection.
 * According to creators, while playing with the AI for Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, they discovered that playing an outnumbered team of bots with knives only served as a makeshift zombie apocalypse scenario. This led to the creation of Left 4 Dead.
 * The Time Splitters games are rather fond of zombies, and gives them amusing names like Gilbert Gastric, Daisy Dismay, and Mr. Fleshcage. The third game even had them quote a recurring line from Shaun of the Dead as a tribute, because Time Splitters 2 had a cameo in the film (as the FPS game that Ed and Shaun play).
 * Blood, a game created around horror movie tropes, had its fair share of zombies (the tougher variety's appearance taken directly from Romero's Night of the Living Dead). In the sequel, living dead were replaced by people taken over by supernatural wormlike parasitic beings.
 * The Half Life series has its ubiquitous, iconic Headcrabs and the zombies they create when they attach themselves to a suitable host and commandeer its nervous system. Although incapable of infecting others directly, they otherwise behave identically to Romero zombies (Zombie Gait, mindless, dangerous in numbers, prone to Infernal Retaliation et cetera). In the original game they were weak and somewhat annoying enemies, rarely present in more than small groups. In Half Life 2 and its Episodes however they cause two instances of this trope:
 * The Combine commonly use Headcrabs as a biological weapon, storing them in artillery shells which are fired on entrenched locations, the shell both causing structural damage and killing any nearby humans due to its impact or the Headcrabs it releases. When the Combine discovered Ravenholm, a small mining town used to shelter a large number of people who had fled from Combine control, it was subjected to massive bombardment by these weapons, and by the time Gordon arrives the only things he finds are corpses, hordes of Headcrab Zombies, and one shotgun-wielding Badass Preacher.
 * In Episode One the entirety of City 17 experiences this, the liberal use of Headcrab Shells during The Battle of City 17 and crippling Combine control of the region resulting in the city's underground infested with Headcrabs and zombies and the city itself under almost constant attack. With  they are the only living things remaining in City 17 and even they are fleeing by Episode Two, creating a constant stream of zombies into the surrounding regions that attack humans and Combine alike. That Gordon Freeman, what a great hero.
 * The MMORPG Urban Dead. Unlike other examples, the zombies in this game are intelligent since they are controlled by players. While they do have a limited vocabulary, zombie players have come up with creative ways of in-game communication. And that's not even counting the Metagame on the forums. It also emulates the Romero model of zombies getting smarter. As they learn more skills, zombies can open doors, move faster, attack better, talk (sort of), track you down, and make a lot of noise to draw attention when they find a safehouse full of survivors. If one counts the RP, they're also highly mutated, undying, and God help us if they break from the quarantine.
 * The final level of The Simpsons Hit and Run is populated by zombies that can be run over, due to Kang and Kodos
 * The game The Sims 2 has zombies (introduced in one of the expansions). A mod on one of the most popular modding sites, MATY, changes their behavior so that they will fight and infect other characters in the game. The mod, aptly enough, is called Zombie Apocalypse. It should be noted that the zombies without the mod do not do this, and control essentially the exact same as a normal sim, the only except being that they won't die of old age. (Though they do think about brains a lot...)
 * They Hunger, set in a small town and acres of farmland and ruins, appears to use modified Russo rules - the zombies are tough, but they're still killable and don't drop from headshots, BUT they die if they're shot anywhere for long enough. It also includes semi-infected zombies who are smart enough to still use guns, and two of them are bosses.
 * The grunt troops of the Scourge in Warcraft III and World of Warcraft are all zombies, reanimated by the Lich King or his necromancers. In Warcraft III, most of them are infected by contaminated food supplies rather than being killed by other zombies, although the Lich King is known to raise troops that have died in battle against the undead. Those who are freed from the Lich King's control before they decay too much will regain their sentience, but obviously remain as rotting corpses. In month leading up to the release of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, suspicious crates and infected roaches found their way into various World of Warcraft cities, giving characters that came into contact with them the scourge toxin, turning them into rampaging, virus-spreading ghouls.
 * The Scourge forces also expand on the standard reanimation of dead corpses due to there being a number of necromancers deliberately creating more dangerous undead, leading to zombie giants, giant zombie dogs, zombie dragons, and huge constructs made from combining the flesh of women and children.
 * Death Knights are subversion in that the one's that joined the Lich King willingly aren't dead at all. All the others are powerful warriors that died at the hands of the Scourge and were immediately resurrected as the Lich King's elite troops. Due to this they haven't had time to adequately decay and usually just have paler skin. Also they retain their memories and personality after being resurrected, though they are still bound to the will of the Lich King.
 * While Lordaeron and Northrend are of course the major victims of this trope, being the Scourge's bases of power, Duskwood in the kingdom of Stormwind is currently dealing with animated skeletons that (probably) have nothing to do with the Scourge. The town of Raven Hill is in ruins, and Darkshire is constantly on watch. Of course, they also have to deal with feral worgen in addition to the undead.
 * What happened to Quel'thalas counts, only about eleven percent of the original population survived.
 * As the title character of Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse, you get to play a zombie, bringing terror to the Zeerust utopia of Punchbowl.
 * Possession, which, in addition to being able to lead a variety of zombies (slow, fast, intelligent, mutated, you name it) has the main character as a sentient zombie unleashing chaos on a corporate-controlled city.
 * Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines, a CRPG set in the Old World of Darkness:
 * There's a mission called "You Only Die Once a Night" where the Hollywood graveyard caretaker Romero(!) asks you to keep hordes of mindless zombies from breaking out of the cemetery. Infuriatingly enough, Romero has only given you the job of watching the graveyard so he can go out and buy porn! Some people neglect any duty they're given, it seems, which is why you're given the option of finding a prostitute for Romero instead of staying behind to cause a zombie apocalypse. Or, if female and with sufficient looks and poise, seducing him instead. The title card hilariously reads "Romero gets some lovin'." Romero specifically states getting bitten doesn't cause zombies, but it sure does hurt like hell.
 * There's also an earlier mission where you have to track down and kill the members of a cult of vampires that deliberately infects their meals with a horrible virus. You have to fight your way through a horde of zombies before you can take the last one on.
 * Space Quest V has the mutant Pukoids fulfilling this trope.
 * In the Japanese PS2 game The Zombie vs. Kyuukyuusha ("Zombie vs. Ambulance", and yes that's the real title), you drive around a zombie-infested city in an ambulance, attempting to rescue people and take them back to the hospital that serves as your home base so you can inoculate them against the zombie plague. If you take too long getting people back to base, they turn into zombies and start damaging your ambulance from the inside. And you can upgrade your ambulance so it can take more damage and more easily plow through hordes of zombies.
 * This game is part of the Simple 2000 series of budget titles, which also features a game called The Oneechanbara ("Zombie Zone" in the West), in which you play a bikini-wearing samurai girl who goes around slicing up zombies. While the gameplay isn't particularly brilliant, the game is definitely fun. It's proven so popular that sequels have been released on the Wii and X Box 360, and there's even a movie. As a side note, in Oneechanbara, the Zombie Apocalypse is actually caused by the lead characters -- well, they, and some of the villains. They have a "Baneful Blood" curse. If blood touches their skin, it builds power in them -- with the downside that this power will eventually drive them insane and kill them. Meanwhile, their blood kills people and turns them into contagious zombies.
 * Battle for Wesnoth's Walking Corpses, and their level-up, the Soullesses. They follow the Russo rules, for the most part: any unit killed by a Walking Corpse or Soulless becomes a Walking Corpse or Soulless on the side of the Corpse that killed them, simulating The Virus.
 * Postal 2: Apocalypse Weekend features Mad Cow Tourettes zombies (apparently Tourette's syndrome sufferers who ate mad cow-infected meat). They normally shamble slowly, but can sometimes be seen stumbling forwards quickly (catching the player off-guard); they throw chunks of their own flesh to attack; their heads must be completely destroyed to kill them (merely cutting them off will do no good); and (for no other reason than the fact that the world of Postal 2 is already messed up as it is) you can resurrect dead zombies by pissing on them.
 * A new MMO currently in Beta, Dead Frontier, takes place after a Zombie Apocalypse with the player as one of a handful of survivors who must constantly make supply runs into the city, which has been overrun by zombies of many shapes, sizes and speeds, to procure food, medical supplies, new weapons and ammunition. It's important to note that most everyone has a place in the new society, such as doctors, engineers and even chefs, and those who try to go it alone may find themselves as zombie food more often than they'd like.
 * The FPS S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Shadow of Chernobyl has zombies in one part of the game, who are actually stalkers who have been mind raped by psychic emissions in certain parts of the zone.
 * In City of Heroes and City of Villains, zombies are counted among the servants of the Banished Pantheon and the minions of Dr. Vahzilok. Also, the Halloween events feature zombies that spawn from trick-or-treating, and the 2008 incarnation featured zombies crawling from the ground en masse. Finally, the Mastermind Necromancy primary set lets player villains summon their own zombie minions.
 * In City of Heroes, there's also Dark Astoria, a Zombie Apocalypse relegated to a single town. It was destined to happen though, considering that there's Romero Heights and Raimi Arcade.
 * An infinite number of zombies usually appears early on in Castlevania games. Fortunately they're much easier to kill than the average movie zombie.
 * In a similar fashion, countless zombies (and other things) plague our hero in Ghosts N Goblins.
 * A new game call The Last Guy features the zombie hero(?) rounding up the various survivors of a zombie apocalypse. From the looks of it, the zombies have devolved (or evolved) into large, dangerous, non-human things, however.
 * The PSP game Infected, as in the quote above, features a massive zombie apocalypse in New York City, played Smash TV style. The player is Officer Stevens, whose blood is not only immune to The Virus, but actively destroys zombies, who are nigh-invulnerable to everything (it's implied they destroyed a tank battalion, and were able to wield weapons) by causing infected blood to explode. This results in the guys in charge of the quarantine to strap a blood gun to one arm of Stevens, give him/her weapons, and run around NYC, splattering zombies. For the record, the game is hilarious and fun, but short.
 * System Shock 2 had zombies as the first stage of infection by alien parasitic worms, including shambling, strange speech patterns, no vital signs, etc. Oh yeah, and they're still conscious, aware of what they're doing against their will, and apologise while they attack you and beg you to kill them. Later stages were considerably more monstrous, and quite un-zombie like.
 * The original System Shock had early mutants enemies that acted like normal zombies.
 * Little Red Riding Hood's Zombie BBQ. A grown-up Little Red Riding Hood vs. zombified versions of classic Fairy Tale characters. Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
 * In Elite Beat Agents, one of the missions involves helping a peanut salesman fighting off against giggling zombies that start to attack the town. By sheer luck, the zombies happen to be allergic to peanuts. Huh.
 * It was more like that the peanuts tasted so bad that the zombies were returned to normal after ingesting them. Also, they spread the plague via kisses, and the episode's animation during the song segments was done in the style of FPS.
 * Siren - these are particularly notable, as they retain some of their intelligence and memories of their former life, and although they become murderous and gradually lose the ability to speak language intelligible to humans, they try to re-enact their living life if not over-ruled by the Hive Mind; as the game was first released in Japan in 2003, and EU and US in '04, this actually predates the use of this concept in Land of the Dead, although not the precursors to it seen in Day of the Dead.
 * The game Overlord features an area infested with zombies, as a mysterious and agonizing plague turns its victims into the living dead.
 * Two prominent freeware games from Ska Software, Survival Crisis Z and Zombie Smashers.
 * The flash game Super Energy Apocalypse: Recycled features a zombie apocalypse where zombies grow stronger the more pollution there is.
 * MadWorld has the Hunter's Castle, which had its entire foundation shipped from the quaint country of Zombikistan, but it also came with it's chief export: ZOMBIES! They're even tougher than the normal version, being able to regenerate until somone decapitates them.
 * The Virus in Prototype is something like this, only about ten to fifty times worse. For one, unlike most Zombie Apocalypses, it spreads like highly contagious disease, rather than just happening to already dead people or like something more akin to rabies. Then you get to things like the Hunters and Hydras.
 * Discussed and specifically averted in Tsukihime, though in regards to a Vampire Apocalypse instead. Shiki naturally points out that if there are vampires, and they have to feed so much, then why are there still so few? Arcueid points out that A. vampires don't get along well with each other and fight a lot and B. organizations such as The Church hunting them down, so they keep a low profile and avoiding making too many minions to avoid unwanted attention.
 * This seemed to be the original concept behind Raving Rabbids, but they decided to go with party games.
 * In Fun Orb's Zombie Dawn game, you play as the Evil Overlord responsible for the zombie apocalypse. Unlike most zombie apocalypse stories, these zombies are being controlled by someone - you. Also, the government is actually pretty competent. Anyone attacked by a zombie instantly comes back as one.
 * Plants vs. Zombies, you have to fight off a zombie uprising in your own backyard using nothing but aggressive plants.
 * In Zombies Ate My Neighbors the zombies are fairly weak (they can be killed with squirt guns), and aren't contagious. However it is possible to temporarily be turned into a zombie by drinking a mystery potion, causing your character to wander around and kill any survivors they touch.
 * Zombies are a part of the Necromancer's army throughout most of the Heroes of Might and Magic series. They also happen to be slow and weak units (compared to most units of the same tier). You can't even make that many of them. It is however possible to make a looot of skeletons in most of the games. In an average sized map it's not too hard to build an army with over a thousand skeletons, thus creating a skeleton apocalypse.
 * Metroid Fusion has a not-quite Zombie Apocalypse in the form of the X-Parasite. Once infected, the victim dies and is consumed, and the X mimics its form and abilities perfectly, eventually asexually dividing into more copies. If killed, it infects the killer or simply regenerates the body. They can even infect corpses to mimic them. One parasite can take over an entire Space Station in seconds. They are truly one of the most dangerous forms of The Virus in existence, beating out even the Flood in apocalypse potential. Easily.
 * Mass Effect has Husks, undead creatures who were impaled on spikes by the geth, though they usually serve as flunkies for other enemies. However, in Mass Effect 2, one level on a  has nothing but Husks onboard, as well as their suicidal cousins Abominations, and Scions which are thirty husks smushed together in a single, twisted creature. On harder difficulty levels, where the formerly Goddamned Bats Husks have armour, the whole level has a very Survival Horror feel to it.
 * Borderlands: The Zombie Island of Doctor Ned has you trying to clean up one of these with More Dakka. The Jakobs PA system has even been hacked to refer to it as such.
 * It wasn't hacked, that was a joke about prerecorded telephone help lines or something to that effect, they basically fill in the blanks with whatever horrific occurence is happening at that moment in time (which makes the claims of Jakobs being #1 in safety all the more hilarious).
 * There's something like this in the Mount and Blade mod- Solid And Shade, though it isn't an infection. Essentially, the main character is a necromancer and just animates the bodies himself. Though it feels a lot like an infection or apocalypse, since a good way to get corpses is killing them with your zombie army and then reanimating them. It is not uncommon to loose your entire army in a fight, and then get them back with the corpses of your foes. The zombies are semi-intelligent, as they can use weapons, but not sentient. They can be killed by anything that can kill a human, but are much more difficult to kill. They don't appear to require food, although not having food will lower the morale of the party overall (most likely because you still need it) and, due to game mechanics, zombies will abandon you if they have a low morale.
 * In a bit of irony, the player starts with a corpse in his inventory to start necromancing faster. According to the backstory, this body belongs to the necromancer he killed to get the book of necromancy in the first place.
 * There's another mod called Chronicles of Talera that features a faction called the Blighted Plague. It's basically a faction of egalitarian Necromancers that brought back the corpses of the dead to overthrow the aristocracy. At first they were good guys, but after discovering tools to capture the souls of their enemies they began a civil war that really doesn't play any role whatsoever in the actual game.
 * Fallout 3 features the annoying Feral Ghouls. Ghouls are created through massive amounts of radiation, which caused their typical "walking corpse" appearance (and please, don't call them zombies). Most of them are nice, polite people who just want to be left alone. However, some of them, due to the outstanding radiation poisoning or through brain degeneration, become little more than feral animals, infesting the subway system and the Capital Wasteland. During a mission, you can help a small community of ghouls (intelligent and feral ones alike) by letting them sneak in a tower-fortress, thus unleashing a Zombie Apocalypse on the local residents.
 * Red Dead Redemption's Undead Nightmare DLC has this as the main premise -- but like the rest of the game, it's set in the Old West. Yes, it's just as awesome as it sounds.
 * PCRPG Dead State is set in central Texas during a zombie apocalypse.
 * King's Quest IV is one of the earliest examples of the trope, which is even more disturbing because it takes place in a fairy tale country of princesses, fairies and magical talking creatures. It is, frankly, terrifying. Fortunately for most young players at the time of it's release, they came late in the game. Due to the general unforgiving hardness of a Roberta Williams title, it was uncommon for any player to get that far without help.
 * Dead Island is about a zombie apocalypse in a tropical island resort in the South Pacific.
 * The early 80's Edutainment Game Agent USA is a G-rated Zombie Apocalypse, with people turning into walking balls of TV static and infecting others.
 * Arma and Arma II both featured popular zombie mods that turned an ultra-realistic tactical FPS into a zombie survival game. The use of massive maps and realistic effects and equipment makes them extremely immersive.
 * While the text/ASCII-based Hell MOO doesn't feature an actual zombie apocalypse (they go for the standard nuclear warfare), there is a zombie virus and some locations, especially the basement of the Bradbury hotel in Slagtown, are filled with them. Since all NPCs can be killed (with varying degrees of difficulty) and anyone who dies of zombie rot rises as a zombie if their corpse isn't butchered, one or two tough NPCs getting infected can easily result in a zombie plague hitting Slagtown; usually the Freedom City Police is skilled and tough enough to keep the spread outside their borders, but it can make wandering into Slagtown or Gangland suicide for a newbie.
 * In Starcraft 2, this happens to a group of refugees due to a zerg bioweapon. Raynor's raiders burn out the infested and help the refugees settle in on another planet-- where it promptly happens again.
 * One of many possible creations in the Pandemic series, you can create shambling, insane, rotting(though technically still alive) infected who spread across the planet.
 * Call of Duty first gave us Nazi Zombies, which was the reason many played World At War. The game mode returned in Call of Duty Black Ops where it got so bad zombies attack the Pentagon, four cult monster hunters had to be called in and at the end, the Big Bad reveals it's all an Evil Plan to cause an apocalypse.
 * Dead Space features the necromorphs, these zombies are not just reanimated humans but 'reshaped' necrotic tissue who don't go don't until you blow of a limb or three. Head shots are useless against them.
 * The curse of the Darksign in Dark Souls. Those born with it are marked as Undead and never permanently die, always coming back, losing a bit of their humanity each time. Eventually, they all lose their minds and become Hollows, highly aggressive, near-mindless beings that attack all others. This, plus the habit of throwing the Undead into the Undead Asylum, has destroyed countless nations.
 * Spoofed in Disgaea 4: A Promise Unforgotten with the A-virus, which is slowly turning all of the Netherworld into mindless zombies -
 * The mobile game Rebuild involves a group of survivors building fortifications around a few city blocks and holding off vast zombie hordes. Your goal in the game is to recapture a number of blocks, look for survivors and convince them to join you, produce food and shelter for everyone, keep everyone happy, research technology to help defend against the zombies and cure infections, scavenge for supplies (food, weapons, dogs, binoculars, crowbars, etc.). Once you manage to secure the town, you are given the option of starting over in a new location with 5 people.
 * Kingdom of Loathing had the Gray Plague, which, as players found out through Time Travel to Seaside Town, 28 Days Later, killed the infected population and brought them back as zombies.
 * Downloadable PC Game Zombie Driver casts the player as an Action Taxi Driver in the midst of an infested city where the outbreak was caused by a chemical explosion. The cabbie must rescue people trapped in various buildings and return them to an extraction point. He gets paid by the mayor for zombies killed and survivors rescued, so he can buy bigger and badder cars and weapons to run down zombies.
 * X Box and Play Station 2 game Darkwatch is sometimes subtitled "The Curse of the West", said curse being a Zombie Apocalypse unleashed on The Wild West by a vampire lord whom the protagonist, an outlaw gunslinger, accidentally set free when he thought he was robbing a gold train.
 * Though all three Diablo games featured undead, only Diablo III features an actual Zombie Apocalypse casted by the Skeleton King New Tristram after a mysterious meteor crashed into Tristram's cathedrale. Whereas in the previous games the zombies were mere mooks that you would meet and kill, this game features them much like a classic example, with them attacking villages and able to turn people they bit into zombies.
 * In Adventure Quest Worlds,.
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Web Comics
""Humans taste like chicken! Zombies taste like crap!""
 * The premise of All Manner of Bad.
 * Brawl in the Family's third Halloween episode started with Kirby walking towards Dedede, zombified. Soon, the entire cast was zombified. They all moaned 'braaains...' and began closing in on Mother Brain from the Metroid series. Now there are a bunch of zombies roaming the land, moaning, 'braaaaaiiiinss....' (except Mother Brain, who moaned, 'Meeeee....')
 * According to the Demononlogy page in Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures, one becomes undead only if they die within 24 hours of receiving a scratch or bite from an undead creature. This implies that the wound itself is not automatically fatal, and that if one died more than 24 hours after receiving it they will stay dead.
 * Dead Metaphor is a comedy set in a world plagued by zombie outbreaks. Zombies are very Romero-like in their actions and their desire to consume flesh -- although the human population treats the zombies more as an annoyance than a threat.
 * Dead of Summer is one of these, as experienced by the city of Baltimore. The Protomen have a key role later on.
 * Played with in Dead Winter; the city is full of zombies, but they're normally not a threat until a large number is encountered without an escape route. Other humans are far more dangerous.
 * The Adventures of Dr. McNinja's titular Dr. McNinja has faced one, of course. Zombie ninjas, no less. And zombie Ben Franklin. . McNinja is convinced the zombies have risen in revenge for him mass-murdering them in the previous storyline (for the greater good, of course). It's that kind of comic.
 * The 2008 Halloween Cameo Caper will feature a variety of zombie-types, from a couple of different comics, invading a mall.
 * Last Blood with one hand plays along with this trope and with other hand subverts it. While that world, indeed, had experienced Zombie Apocalypse and majority of zombies are near mindless, hungry creatures,
 * Night Zero. Professionally made webcomic/graphic novel utilizing staged real-life photos.
 * Sluggy Freelance gives a quite elegant and reasonable-looking explanation for why zombies must eat brains (and other organs as well): as dead corpses, zombies are decomposing all the time, but are able to regenerate eaten parts. So if zombies want to keep their intelligence, they simply must eat brains. Or, to put it another way: "To keep our wits about us we need to eat the wits about us."
 * Additionally, the comic also address the issue as to why zombies do not attack other zombies:


 * Also worth noting that Sluggy has so far had: straightforward ordinary zombies; people turned into socially dysfunctional geek zombies by brain-eating mosquitos; ghouls from another dimension which were treated with similar tropes to zombies but turned out to be of different origins; military research into weaponising zombies; and a zombie-themed restaurant. Not in that order.
 * Something Positive's "Kawaii of the Damned" storyline is something of an Affectionate Parody of the Zombie Apocalypse.
 * The printed version of Van von Hunter has zombies that crave brains, but are actually intelligent. After they have tasted some really good brownies made by gnomes, they changed their chants from "braiiins" to "brooownies" instead, and raid gnomes for more brownies.
 * In The Whiteboard, the two weeks to either side of Halloween 2010 featured a zombie uprising that Doc and Roger had to take down. This story arc updated daily, instead of the strip's normal M/W/F schedule.
 * Lampshaded in this XKCD comic.
 * The Zombie Hunters reconstructs this against the backdrop of a near-future Post-Apocolypse. It's been a few years since The Virus nearly wiped out the human race and turned Earth into a Crapsack World, where multiple subspecies of The Undead roam freely. The known remnants of humanity and government have settled on an Island Military Base, to attempt to Find the Cure and rebuild society, which would be fine if it weren't for the tensions between the two castes, uninfected and Infected. The Infected are a minority population of Zombie Infectee Action Survivors who contracted a dormant form of the virus due to low exposure at close proximity. Highly contagious, they can infect others through their own bodily fluids, and will inevitably reanimate after death. Consequently, Infected are both segregated from and forbidden from romancing the uninfected. They're also required to wear identifying armbands and ID tags, pass through checkpoints, and obey curfews while among uninfected, and the young and unskilled are exploited as highly-expendable, underequipped, yet vital Disaster Scavengers. The story revolves around a motley, dysfunctional crew of these so-called "Zombie Hunters", living within the margins of their Dystopian society, and training in an older Half-Human Hybrid Token Heroic Orc (who's contempt for his station parallels their own) while trying not to get eaten on the job.
 * Bob and George, in a Halloween special.
 * The Pocalypse has a Zombie Apocalypse, along with a Robot Apocalypse, a Plant Apocalypse...
 * Wapsi Square: Discussed
 * Squid Row : here in an Imagine Spot
 * Underling I knew this day would come.
 * Zombie Ranch takes place over two decades since the dead began to walk. In this case humanity not only managed to survive the disaster -- they have adapted so thoroughly to the reality of the undead that they not only have new laws and customs regarding them, but have managed to turn zombies into a prized consumer commodity.
 * In Sinfest, Tomie insists on ending a book like this.
 * In the Urban Rivals comic the Nightmare clan raises an army of zombies to attack Clint City, they were beaten when Blaaster goes Thriller on them and sends them off a cliff to the sea. No really.

Web Original

 * We're Alive is an audio drama podcast about people trying to survive a zombie apocalypse.
 * Dead Ends is one of these in interactive story form.
 * MEOW: An utterly hopeless zombie apocalypse with Cute Kittens.

Western Animation
"Zim: Nothing stops Zim. Nothing! Not even this filthy army of zombies!"
 * The Simpsons' third "Treehouse of Horror" episode has a segment involving Bart getting a book from the "Occult Section" of the school library and attempting to reanimate deceased family cat Snowball I with it; he accidentally reanimates the human graveyard instead.
 * In a "Treehouse of Horror XX" segment, a tainted Krusty burger causes a 28 Days Later-style outbreak, which leads to the Simpsons barricading themselves inside their house, where they learn that Bart is immune. The zombie hordes burst in, the family escapes, Homer gets bitten but it's hardly much difference, and Bart gets to cure the masses by bathing in their soup.
 * Although the entire incident was a prank, in a Halloween episode of Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, the "zombies" seem to follow Romero Rules (if you excuse their cry for brains); Mr. Herriman is "killed" and returns as a zombie soon after, a zombie bite turns someone else into a zombie, etc.
 * Mighty Max had an episode where Max had to travel to Haiti to help his mother investigate the strange behavior of the locals. They had a Zombie Gait and were pretty strong, however they were possessed by slug-like symbiotes (you could kill the slug to free the victim) and tried to attach more slugs to make more "zombies". Eventually Max finds a hive full of them and kills the Queen slug. The victims were fully aware of what they were doing, a unique trait for these zombies.
 * My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic, out of all the possible cartoons, also plays with this trope. At the beginning of "Bridle Gossip", Twilight Sparkle and Spike wonder why Ponyville's streets are suddenly deserted and why everypony is locking themselves inside their houses. After pondering some possible answers, Spike decides that some kind of zombie apocalypse is going on.
 * There is an episode of The Smurfs called "The Purple Smurfs" in which Lazy gets bitten by a "purple fly". This turns him purple, makes him aggressive and causes him to bite other smurfs. The same thing then happens to those smurfs. Check it out for yourself here.
 * As noted above, this is an adaptation of a storyline from the original Smurf comic book.
 * 6teen had a one-hour special in which zombies raid the mall setting of the series, and the main characters try to avoid being bitten. Of course in the end it's all revealed to be a dream had by Judd from watching too many zombie movies.
 * The Batman had a zombie apocalypse in the episode "Strange New World", courtesy of a toxin created by Professor Hugo Strange. It was eventually revealed that.
 * Hilariously subverted in Invader Zim, where the zombies unleashed by mall cop Slab Rankle in FBI Warning of Doom prove to be just as stupid as almost everyone else in the show.

"Dib: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
 * Also played for a Noodle Incident in ''Backseat Drivers from Beyond the Stars":

Membrane: SON! There had better not be any walking dead up there!

Dib: It's nothing you need to worry about. And I said I was sorry about that!"


 * "He's not trying to raise the dead again, is he? Always with the dead, that boy..."
 * South Park:
 * A bad case of pink eye was going around. Due to some Worcestershire sauce being used to embalm Kenny, he comes back as a zombie and starts infecting people. The local doctor, when visited by some of the infected, mistakes the condition for pink eye and prescribes some topical cream. Stan, Kyle and Cartman, with the help of Chef (who does a great Thriller bit) attempt to stop the zombie threat.
 * Another episode displays some homeless people as zombies in a parody of 2004's Dawn of the Dead 2004. Though they're more an inconvenience then a threat (doesn't stop the adults from treating it like one though).
 * The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy no surprise has a few cases of zombies. One caused by an evil metorite that sucks out people's brains, another caused by the smell of tainted brownies.
 * Mad Snail Disease in SpongeBob SquarePants, though it was entirely fake.
 * In a season 3 episode of Transformers, the Decepticons are tricked by the Quintessons into releasing a powerful creature called the Dweller. The Dweller drains the energy of any transformer it can capture, turning them into an "energy vampire". Despite this title, they behave almost exactly like zombies - they move slowly, though not quite shambling, and drain the energy from others to make more energy vampires. They even lose all color, becoming gray and lifeless in appearance.
 * In Transformers Prime the first five episodes concerned the use of Dark Energon, which revived Transformers into a mindless, zombie-like state. They dont spread the virus around, and Dark Energon only affects dead cybertronians, but given that is is AFTER a galactic war, corpses are not exactly in short supply, especially not back home...
 * Amd then there's the fact that Megatron would have used this zombie army to wipe out humanity. So, a very unique variant of this trope is presented.
 * An episode of Jimmy Two-Shoes had everyone in Miseryville turn into pickle zombies.
 * Operation: Z.E.R.O., The Movie of Codename: Kids Next Door had ultimate evil Grandfather unleash a Senior Citizombie- apocalypse on the world.
 * Superfriends had one of the series' scariest stories with "Day of The Plant Creatures" when a meteorite crashes into a swamp and cause a flood of plant creatures who rampage and infect every animal into one of them while the Super Friends race to find a way to stop the disaster.
 * Parodied on The Amazing World of Gumball episode called "The Joy". Miss Simian plays the role of the protagonist, and even has a video camera that she uses as an Apocalyptic Log

Other

 * For their April Fools 2008 issue, The University at Buffalo's Spectrum college newspaper reported, among other things, about the emergence of the Necro-Animatory Syndrome virus, and the rise of the ambulatory dead ("zombie" being an "outdated and offensive term," though Bush is quoted as nearly using it) out of Cape Canaveral, where the NAS virus had apparently come back with a space shuttle crew. Articles included general information, survival guide, how to recognize an NAS sufferer (not very hard), and what to do if you're bitten (die with dignity, and with a friend to take you out immediately).
 * This fake BBC article claimed that a Zombie Outbreak had occurred in Cambodia and was hushed up by the government. It was debunked on Snopes.com but is still passed around from time to time.
 * The BBC put out another article, this time playing on the Swine Flu scare (H 1 Z 1, a mutation of the H 1 N 1 virus that reanimated the victim after death, who then showed signs of the usual zombie behaviour). It is of course, fake, but the comments on the page are well worth reading.
 * Some smart-ass hacker in Austin, Texas broke into the controls of two electronic road signs in January of 2009, replacing their usual notices about upcoming construction with warnings of, among other things, "Zombies ahead!". Drivers were amused; city safety officials were not.
 * And then there's this joker

Real Life

 * Zombie Squad is a disaster-preparedness group that uses the metaphor of a Zombie Apocalypse to encourage people to prepare for real-life emergencies, on the principle that if one is prepared for the dead to rise from their graves en masse to feed on the living, and the collapse of civil order that would inevitably ensue, that dealing with something as prosaic as an earthquake or hurricane is small potatoes.
 * "Zombie Apocalypse" is a common brainstorming scenario for first responders because it's widespread enough to implicate all of the major disaster relief agencies, but also fictional so it doesn't flare up the usual interservice rivalries.
 * ZombieFit is a parkour/fitness class designed to prepare participants for the ever-present threat of a zombie apocalypse.
 * The Humans vs. Zombies massively multiplayer live-action tag game.
 * Most nerds/geeks/etc. have put some amount of thought into the subject. Pretty much all of them have plans.
 * While nearly every (pick your term) has put some amount of thought into it, there is now an entire nerd subculture dedicated to zombies in the same way trekkies are primarily dedicated to Star Trek, with the amount of thought put into their discussions making the Zombie Survival Guide look like Plan 9 From Outer Space.
 * Mathematical modelling of an outbreak of zombie infection produced by the University of Ottawa, published in the academic journal Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress, which basically comes to this conclusion unless the undead are eradicated quickly.
 * Foreign Policy magazine had a feature article on how different schools of International Relations theorists would approach the Zombie problem.
 * The author of the article, Dan Drezner of the Fletcher School for Diplomacy (aka the best foreign affairs school in America), has published a monograph called Theories of International Relations and Zombies. It covers the major paradigms of IR theory and the "corpus" of zombie literature and film. It's an excellent introductory text to IR theory for beginners, and the results show that while a zombie apocalypse would suck, it's unlikely to be the end of humanity. It's also really damned funny.
 * Any day now...
 * The Cracked website has dedicated a few lists to analyzing a possible zombie apocalypse in real life.
 * This article explains the ways it could happen and how likely it is.
 * This article debunks the lethality of a zombie apocalypse, showing how it would never get very far. A notable example is pointing out how rabies doesn't exactly sweep through the world, so why would zombie infections?
 * Covering all the bases: in the event that it does happen, this article discusses how Hollywood Tactics would promptly get you zombified.
 * This article examines the appeal of zombie invasions.
 * Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (aka the CDC) is getting into it, with its warning the public about preparing for a zombie apocalypse, as a tongue-in-cheek way of getting people thinking about disaster preparedness.
 * Other organizations have done the same as the spread of a zombie apocalypse apparently models highly infectious epidemics pretty well.
 * It's possible that zombie tropes may be partially rooted in rooted events during The Black Death or similar plagues. Mass graves were used at times, and high fevers can cause delirium or even brain damage. So if someone was buried haphazardly but recovered from the plague enough to free themselves, witnesses would see an inarticulate, clumsy person covered with sores leaving a graveyard, which would look a lot like a "zombie" even when the trope was unbuilt.
 * There may have even been plagued victims supposedly "attacking" random people, uninfected or not. Though this is all likely due to severe Hallucinations and clumsy walking.And of course, no Plague infected people would actually eat people they came in contact with.
 * There is also a group called the Zombie Research society dedicated to fact gathering (as such) about zombies.
 * Zombie Tools is a small company in Missoula, Montana that forges a variety of knives, swords, machetes and other nasty bladed things out of 5160 spring steel and other quality materials. They're designed specifically to cleave through flesh and bone, and therefore zombies.

-Braaaaaaiiiins....