10 scariest plagues from sci-fi and fantasy

The Walking Dead: World Beyond _ Season 1 – Photo Credit: Macall Polay/AMC

9. Zombies, from…so many things

If there’s one plague that has found an outsized place in the public imagination, it’s zombies. To list all the stories that feature these creatures would be a borderline impossible undertaking…but suffice it to say that there is an immense amount of zombie fiction out there, and that just about every one has a slightly different take on how humanity falls victim to the inexorable tide of the living dead.

Take The Walking Dead, where some unknown virus has infected all of humanity so that when they die, they turn into Walkers. Or White Zombie, considered the first feature length zombie film, where the mindless abominations were the result of voodoo magic (which, incidentally, is where the lore of zombies actually stems from).

In Night of the Living Dead, it’s believed that they’re caused by radiation from a fallen satellite. And in Resident Evil, one of the largest and longest-running zombie video game series, they are a product of a bioweapon made by a seedy corporation, and in later installments, caused by a parasitic organism.

Like I said, there’s no shortage of methods by which zombies are created. The results, however, are typically quite similar. People die…only to rise from the dead and become decomposing, walking corpses that have the singular drive to feed on any living creature they can get their decaying fingers on. The zombies typically become so widespread and unstoppable that they just about annihilate humanity.

Suffice it to say, let’s be glad this one exists only in our imaginations.