When George Romero took off «Night of the Living Dead» Back in 1968, it set in motion a slow, voracious machine that would consume pop culture years later. By most accounts, the zombie genre had peaked and is now in the twilight of its relevance, but with a solid stable of zombie films still being produced each year, and a universe «The Walking Dead, branching into numerous spin-offs, like its antagonists, it will never die. Nowhere is this more evident than in the world around us, where anything even remotely playing with the same tropes is immediately labeled as zombie.
10. Bath Salt Zombie
2012 was such an innocent time. The first Avengers movie was in theaters, Barack Obama was president, and the media was convinced that zombie junkies were devouring faces on the freeway. Thus began the rise of the infamous zombie bath salts.
In May 2012, a naked man attacked another man on a Miami freeway. The attack was captured on video and occurred in broad daylight. The attacker, Rudy Eugene, bit off almost all of his victim's face, right to the bone . Police had to shoot him four times. Reports of the incident also immediately linked him to a relatively new and unheard-of drug called bath salts. Officials said users were going crazy, overheating, exhibiting incredible violence, and increased physical strength . Appeared and other stories , although nowhere near as terrible as the original. Basically, they were describing a drug that turns you into a zombie.
It is noteworthy that shortly after the toxicology report was published, in Eugene's body there was no no evidence presence of bath salts, only marijuana. It's not that they necessarily blamed marijuana, they just couldn't understand it. By the end of 2012, the stories had disappeared, and bath salts were practically disappeared .
9. Zombie mushroom Ophiocordyceps
The average person probably isn't very familiar with mushroom species. Aside from the mushrooms we eat, most other species are fairly unknown simply because most of us have no reason to ever know about them. But there is one small exception, and that's cordyceps. Thanks to the popular game series The Last of Us The Cordyceps fungus became a pop culture phenomenon, though it never appeared in the game. The game simply capitalized on an irresistible idea: fungal zombies.
Ophiocordyceps has been something of a darling of internet media and pop culture, as articles have appeared explaining how this bizarre life form works, including profiles in New York Times и Atlantic . In case you missed the initial flurry of articles, the fungus primarily infects insects like ants. A fungal spore enters the ant and begins to grow. The ant continues its activity, but the fungus consumes as much of the insect's insides as it can without killing it. Then, when it has grown sufficiently, the fungus can project itself onto the ant's head and appendages. It will use the ant's legs like a puppeteer, enticing it to climb to a high point on a blade of grass or something similar. Once in the right spot, the fungus glues the ant in place and flies out of its head. New spores are released and fall where other ants can become infected.
The parallels with zombies are quite obvious, as the fungus effectively kills but continues to exploit the ant and, of course, infects others from within. Fortunately, doing the same to humans isn't that difficult, at least as far as we know.
8. Haitian Voodoo Zombies
Before George Romero introduced us to the walking dead, there were a few other zombie films. Perhaps the most famous of these was 1932's "White Zombie," which cast Bela Lugosi as a Haitian voodoo master, which made sense to audiences in 1932. His zombies awaken from a trance.
There's a difference between Romero's zombies and what some would call voodoo zombies, one that even Romero understood. In fact, he didn't use the word "zombie" in his first film because he believed he had created ghouls , and zombies were creatures from voodoo. In this system, a boko or bokor, a practitioner of voodoo magic, can separate the soul from the body in order to create a zombie . It is not a flesh-hungry monster, but rather an automaton, an undead slave that carries out the bokor's orders and can even be used for good.
In 1983, the ethnobotanist Wade Davis He claimed to have found a scientific explanation for voodoo zombies, abandoning the magical explanation in favor of a toxicological one. His work was later criticized for being unscientific, which may have further created the mystery surrounding the idea of what voodoo zombies might be and whether there's any truth to them.
7. Zombie pigs
Depending on your worldview, the idea of a zombie pig sounds either amazing or downright terrifying. The truth about the zombie pig is a little less terrifying than the name suggests, but it does have some interesting scientific implications.
In the real story behind the headline, researchers managed to restore limited brain function in dead pigs. The pigs were obtained from a slaughterhouse and had been dead for several hours. But the team, working to understand how human brain death works and hopefully reverse it, managed to take these technically dead brains and restore some cellular functions. The pigs weren't brought back to life—they literally had no bodies—but it was an important discovery in understanding how death affects the brain and what could potentially be done to save human life in the future.
Fast forward three years, and the same researchers restored cellular function in dead pigs, marking another step in their efforts to expand the boundaries of the finality of death. Again, the dead pigs didn't rise or walk, but the possibility of preserving organs and other tissues well beyond what we previously considered death could hold great potential for saving lives and organ transplants in the future.
6. Zombie flies
We've been hearing for years that honeybee populations are in danger, but the culprit isn't always clearly identified. Climate change, pesticides, and other issues have been raised. But so too have zombie flies .
These flies lay eggs inside their host insects, in this case honeybees, and the larvae develop inside the host, killing it in the process. Flies have been observed killing wasps and even bumblebees in this manner, but this has not been observed in honeybees. until 2012 . The fact that they'd never been seen in honeybees before is truly shocking, as honeybees are so well studied. Even more surprising, when they were discovered and researchers went searching for them, they found the parasites in 77% hives in the Gulf of California.
The parasites force bees to abandon their nests and then fly aimlessly until they die and the larvae crawl out.
5. Zombie Fly/Zombie Mushroom Combo
We've seen zombie flies and zombie fungus, now let's meet zombie fly fungus. It's the worst of both worlds. Like the cordyceps fungus, the spores can infect a host, which in this case is a fly. The fungus spreads within the host and then takes control of its body, forcing it to a point where it dies. So far, so familiar. But somehow, it's getting much worse.
After death, the mushroom emits chemical signals , which attract males. These chemicals act as irresistible pheromones, luring males into mating. The unsuspecting males then reproduce with the very dead, highly fungal-infested corpse. The living male then becomes infected with the spores, after which the process repeats.
An additional worrying point is that the longer the fly is dead, the more attractive It becomes attractive to males due to the fact that more seductive spores are produced.
4. Zombie taxa
If you are a fan of paleontology, you may be familiar with zombie taxa . It's a tricky kind of fossil phenomenon that can fool a scientist into thinking they've discovered something dead, living where it has no business being.
For zombie fossils to work, something dies and fossilizes. That's fine for now. Then that fossil is transported by erosion or some similar process to some new location, much later in time, and then essentially re-fossilizes. If it's discovered and it's unclear what happened, you might find a Tyrannosaurus rex fossil, say, in the ruins of an ancient Roman city, and be completely confused. This is an extreme example that has never actually happened, but there have been cases where dinosaur teeth were found in fossils dating back to the long-gone extinction of these creatures.
3. Zombie Storms
Zombie storm is a term you won't hear from your local meteorologist very often, but if they ever do, pay attention. Typically, large storms follow a pattern of increasing in size to something large, like a tropical storm, and then fading over time, becoming weaker and weaker. A zombie storm does what the name suggests and comes back from the dead. When -that's a dead storm becomes strong and becomes a tropical storm again.
The National Weather Service appears to have coined the term in 2020 in response to Hurricane Paulette , which appeared to be on the verge of dying before gaining momentum again and becoming a tropical storm again. This phenomenon is rare, but several other instances have been recorded.
2. Zombie Deer
If part of what you associate with zombies involves wasting away and shambling without fear, then zombie deer makes sense. These unfortunate creatures have actually been around for decades and are victims of prion disease. diseases , called chronic wasting disease, similar to mad cow disease. This condition can take years to fully manifest, but it causes severe weight loss, aggression, poor coordination, drooling, and a lack of fear. So, all the potential signs of the walking dead, minus the desire to eat people.
Disease always deadly, and is also highly contagious. It exists in many states and in Canada, as well as internationally, so efforts to combat it are not going well.
1. Zombie frogs
By now, we've seen how the media is quick to label anything that appears dead but isn't a zombie. This certainly applies to zombie frogs. But in a funny twist, there are two very different zombie frogs, and they got their names for two very different reasons.
First up is one that seems a little easier to understand. Have you ever wondered where frogs go in the Northern Hemisphere during winter when the rest of the world freezes over? Well, they freeze with it. Species like wood frogs and some toads are adapted to freezing winters, freezing along with everything else. And not in a figurative sense, because inside the frog's body are formed real ice crystals . Their hearts stop and they no longer breathe. But until their internal organs freeze, which doesn't happen because they can convert their blood into their own kind of antifreeze , they will be able to thaw out when spring comes and return to their lives.
Much further south in the Amazon, there's another zombie frog, a tiny little man with a bizarrely pointed nose. And why this zombie? It's a little less impressive than you might think. They were named by a German herpetologist who noticed that when his colleagues dug around in the dirt on all fours looking for the frogs, they resembled... zombie . Go figure it out.