For decades, the argument of who'd win in a fight between zombies and vampires has left horror fans perplexed (well, the ones in our office anyway).

Yet after years of glittery tween-vampires ruling the limelight, zombies are finally biting back. But while The Walking Dead is winning the supernatural war on TV (and rightly so), it's not the first time the undead have shuffled onto our screens.From cannibalistic comic relief to electrified, underwear-soiling eviscerations, here's our pick of the greatest zombie episodes to hit the small screen.

When the crew of the Ascendant find themselves set upon by the reanimated corpses of a ship they tried to save, they soon find that they're not the only mindless, lifeless, shambling characters inhabiting the Andromeda universe.Victims of the tried-and-tested zombiefier, the eponymous 'biological agent', this distinctly family-friendly form of zombie spreads infection through 'kissing' a purple haze full of spores onto their victims, who are then possessed by a chatty race of parasites intent on galaxy-wide domination.

The age-old fanboy dilemma of whether Batman could take on a zombie invasion and win is finally answered in this eerie episode.When madman Hugo Strange unleashes a plague on Gotham, the city's people are turned into what Batman can only describe as 'zombies'. The hollow-eyed, grey skinned, groaning monstrosities attack with a mob mentality, and we finally get to see Batman lay the smackdown on the Boy Wonder and Batgirl (that they're zombified doesn't lessen the nerdgasm).

Joss Whedon is a man renowned for his creative 'Big Bads' (lets just forget Adam ever happened, shall we?), but any good Buffy fan knows that the early episodes of each season were traditionally taken up with filler villain-of-the-week fare.So it was no surprise to see Sunnydale besieged by a dumber breed of reanimated corpse in its third year, as Buffy's irksomely oblivious mum brings a voodoo-ised Nigerian mask into the family home.The mask duly summons all manner of zombie to gatecrash a 'Welcome Home' hootenanny, which at least gets the party started (and simultaneously manages to off one of the series' most punchable characters, Joyce's BFF Pat).

While fans are more likely to remember this crossover with Fox's other supernatural series - the ill-fated Millennium - for Mulder and Scully's first kiss after seven years of sexually frustrated build-up, it also introduces the X-Files universe to the joy of necromancy.The deductive duo are called to Tallahassee after reports of the dead breaking out of their coffins and the bodies going AWOL. Inevitably, Mulder must team up with Frank Black to bring down the army of undead via some strategically placed headshots as Scully tries to escape their bitey advances by waffling on about how illogical the whole thing is.

The Simpsons' annual spooktackular has seen Springfield twice overrun by the undead, most memorably in the short story 'Z For Zombies'.Bart's attempts to resurrect family pet 'Snowball I' mistakenly brings the cemetery's entire population back to life, who proceed to chow down on Flanders, Principal Skinner, Krusty et al.Armed with a shotgun, Homer fights back the horde, leading to one of the best lines in the show's 20-year history; as the family gasp in shock at the smoking remains of a recently shot-gunned Flanders, Homer flippantly exclaims: "He was a zombie?"