Severed thus from his heritage, sent freewheeling into postmodernity with nothing to say on his own behalf (because he can’t talk, because he’s a zombie), our hero would seem to be in a position of great semiotic vulnerability. And so it has proved: all manner of meanings have been and continue to be plastered onto the zombie. Much can be made of him, because he makes so little of himself. He is the consumer, the mob, the Other, the proletariat, the weight of life, the dead soul. He is too many e-mails in your inbox, a kind of cosmic spam. He is everything rejected and inexpugnable. He comes back, he comes back, feebly but unstoppably, and as he drags you down, a fatal lethargy overtakes you. What is it, this victim’s inanition? We all feel it. One of the great statements of the zombie plague was uttered in 1989 by the Canadian punk band NoMeansNo, with its song “It’s Catching Up.” “Have you heard the news?” it begins, sardonically, over a ticking mesh of guitar and hi-hat. “The dead walk.” The last verse rises to a scream:

There are some things that never die

Things that never really were alive

I’ve shut them out!

I’ve slammed the door!

But I can’t keep them back

Anymore!

None of this is to ignore the plentiful variations that have been worked upon Romero’s zombie theme since 1968. Recent years, for example, have given us both the Sprinting or Galloping Zombie of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later and Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake, and the Comic-Existential Zombie of Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead. In the Boyle/Snyder model, the zombie is wild-eyed and very fast. The virus, too, has been ferally accelerated: now, scant seconds after having your throat ripped out, you stand up snarling and race off in search of prey. Shaun of the Dead is gentler and more profound: here zombiedom seems to germinate through a fog of hangovers, Monday mornings, lapses in conversation. Shaun refuses to become; his job (selling televisions) demeans him; his nice girlfriend wants him to give up smoking and stop spending so much time down the pub. He will not, he cannot, and the dead throng the streets. As the future peters out, the present blooms with zombies.

But sometimes a zombie is just a zombie. Strike that: a zombie is always just a zombie. The blow-’em-all-away success of The Walking Dead is no mystery: the show, and the comic-book series by Robert Kirkman on which it’s based, mark a triumphant return to zombie orthodoxy, to the non-galloping zombie and his icons. Once again, and with great gladness, we see shotguns, frantically tuned radios, smoke pillars of apocalypse on the horizon—the full zombie opera. The zombie himself has never looked better, dripping with wounds, full of conviction. With his dangling stethoscope, or his policeman’s uniform, or his skateboard, he exhibits the pathos of his ex-personhood. He flaps and sighs. He crookedly advances. He’s taking his time. But he’ll get there.