Why hasn't anyone in Walking Dead ever heard of Zombies before?

This isn't unique to Walking Dead, I've noticed it a lot. It is almost like these worlds are always alternate timelines where no one ever thought of Zombies before. Is that the case? Or is there some alternate reason why it seems like this?

It really pulls me out of the show sometimes.

Answer

In The Walking Dead universe there are no such things as zombies. They don't exist in the media and fiction of the universe either.

At least not before the outbreak. That's why they don't automatically use that word or understand what's happening around them.

Robert Kirkman explains this in the second episode of Talking Dead, a companion TV show that follows the new episode reruns on AMC:

One of the things about this world is that people don't know how to shoot people in the head at first, and they're not familiar with zombies, per se," Kirkman said on Talking Dead. "This isn't a world the (George) Romero movies exist, for instance … because we don't want to portray it that way, we felt like having them be saying 'zombie' all the time would harken back to all of the zombie films which we, in the real world, know about.

That's also why they call them "walkers," "roamers" and such. The word rarely used in the universe's lexicon (never in the show). The comic makes mention of the word in a joking context about how silly it is to call them Zombies; as well the game has the word used in chapter two when talking to on of the students met at the beginning.

Comments

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