Why they don’t say ‘zombie’ on The Walking Dead – Looper

Robert Kirkman, who created theWalking Dead comic books and executive produces the television series, had an explanation for the omission while speaking to Conan O'Brien on the late night TV host's show. Based on Kirkman's comments, leaving the word "zombie" out ofThe Walking Dead hasclearly been an extremely deliberate omission all along.

"Well, zombie lore is very popular. We wanted to avoid that notion of, 'Hey, why doesn't that character just shooting that zombie in the head because it saw all those movies I saw,'" Kirkman explained. "We wanted to kind of give you a sense that The Walking Dead takes place in a universe where zombie fiction doesn't exist."

In other words, there would be no reference to the word "zombie" because the word simply doesn't exist in that universe. If no such creature or rather, monster has ever been seen, heard of, or dreamed up in the minds of artists, it's pretty unlikely that they would somehow come to call it the exact same thing we do in our universe.

Kirkman added, "No one inside The Walking Dead has seen a [George Romero] movie, so they can't get the rules from that. It felt like having people not use that word would kind of separate it from that, make it a little bit more clear."

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Why they don't say 'zombie' on The Walking Dead - Looper