The one good thing about the walking dead is that they don’t drive.

All it really takes to outrun a zombie is a car. Also, a bullet to the head will stop one cold. And that may explain why so many men prefer zombies to vampires: zombie stories pivot on men’s two favorite things: fast cars and guns. Better yet, zombies almost never talk. Vampires, especially of late, are mostly a female obsession. Works like “Twilight” and “True Blood” suggest that the best way to defeat a vampire is to make him fall so in love that he resists the urge to bite. And that’s a powerful, if naïve, female fantasy: a mate so besotted he gives up his most primal cravings for the woman he loves.

Vampires are imbued with romance. Zombies are not. (Zombies are from Mars, vampires are from Venus.)

Zombie movies didn’t die off, but they were overshadowed by vampire mania that has dominated popular culture in a nonstop streak from Anne Rice’s book “Interview With the Vampire” to “The Vampire Diaries” on CW. Finally, perhaps as a backlash against all the girlish, gothic swooning over “Twilight,” zombies are making a comeback.