Zombie

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Zombies are monsters which are mindless and created from humans. Everything else depends on the legend or tradition.

In certain African and Haitian mythologies, zombies are created by administering a potion that places the drinker into a state of near-death where they obey the commands of whoever made the potion. This is where the term "zombie" (or "zombi") comes from. More broadly, zombies in fantasy are corpses re-animated through magic. Usually, they are animated and controlled by necromancers. They tend to be slow, clumsy, and weak, but because they are relatively easy to make in large numbers (especially if there are any graveyards or battlefields close at hand -- in fact, particularly nasty necromancers will do things like annihilate an entire town or army and re-animate everyone), they remain a staple of the undead hordes.

Zombies in modern settings tend to be the by-products of science rather than necromancy. Some animating agent, usually a chemical or virus (though radiation is not unknown), causes corpses to move around, and for some reason makes them hunger for living flesh. Optionally, people who are killed by zombies may themselves rise again as zombies; in such cases, this reanimation can usually be prevented by destroying or removing the head, or incinerating the corpse (decapitation and fire usually work well on putting down zombies post-reanimation as well). George Romero's Night of the Living Dead movie set the tone for the archetypal modern zombie, to the point that zombies of this archetype are sometimes called "Romero zombies", even though nobody actually says the word "zombie" in the movie itself.

More recently, especially in video games, another pattern of zombie has gained popularity: the so-called "fast zombie" or "28 Days Later zombie" (though the creatures in 28 Days Later are not proper zombies at all, as they are still alive, albeit infected with a rabies-like behavior-altering virus). As the name suggests, these creatures are fast and aggressive, and can be terrifying in small numbers, especially if they can infect with a single bite.