They found that many Australian workers actually considered themselves zombies. "They described themselves as 'braindead' or 'zombified'," Schlusser said, and so the pair decided producing a genre version of the real living conditions of today might be closer to the truth than a more realist piece of theatre.

The Zombie State points to the real appeal of the zombie renaissance - beneath the dismembered, face-chomping exterior, there's something attractive about a figure that needn't worry about mortgages, health insurance and child-care payments. It even features an Aussie PM tossing a bone to "working families" as he builds up his private store of 2020 "Braaaains".

"There's something about the zombie 'coming from within' and, for all intents and purposes, being one of us," says Emma Westwood, writer of the recently released Monster Movies. What Godzilla was to the post-atomic movie-goer of the 1950s - initially a symbolic threat, eventually a sympathetic icon - the zombie is to a generation left cold by consumer culture.

Zombie stories aren't about heroes, political or otherwise. "It's a feature of the genre that the stars don't shine," says Schlusser. "The leads are kind of irrelevant. You want to get to the bit where the hordes of zombies are knocking on the glass doors. You don't really care who's inside."

Sam O'Reilly's Fringe Festival show Night of the Devil Zombies will test that theory. Set in a real house during a zombie outbreak, audiences will barricade doors and windows, find supplies and weapons as they fight off an encroaching undead army. The director's experience as a sound designer will recreate the chaos outside: planes overhead, faltering news updates, power failures.