Why no one in The Walking Dead uses the word “zombie”

This is something I’ve heard a lot about over the years, but that I never quite understood. Plain and simple, the shambling undead on AMC’s The Walking Dead series are zombies…right? Well, yes, but that word isn’t actually used in the show itself at all, and there is a reason for that.

Let’s take back it to the O.G. zombie movies from late director George A. Romero, who really got the modern zombie craze going with 1968’s Night of the Living Dead. This was basically the blueprint that all zombies stories would use for decades to come.

Fast forward to AMC’s The Walking Dead show, which is based on a comic by Robert Kirkman. AMC’s series has now spawned two spinoffs: Fear the Walking Dead and the upcoming The Walking Dead: World Beyond. (I’m excited about that last one because it’s about kids born after the zombie apocalypse, which sounds really interesting.) Across these shows, we’ve seen lots of different groups comes and go, and all of them seem to have a different name for the undead — Walkers, Biters, etc — but not one ever seems to say “zombie.” Why not?

Kirkman himself once attempted to explain the mystery like this: in the world of The Walking Dead, zombies never became a part of pop culture. So there were no George A. Romero movies, there was no Zombieland, and there certainly was no Walking Dead comic book. People never really knew what a zombie was until they were stuck in an apocalypse with them.

Although some zombie pop culture probably could have helped our bands of survivors. If Rick and his group knew what zombies were or had seen them referenced before in a movie or television show, then they’d likely know how to kill them. If zombies took over our world at this very moment, at the very least, we’d know to kill them by stabbing them in the head. That’s just Zombie 101. Instead, not only did Rick and company not know how to defeat the undead at first, they didn’t even know what to call them.

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h/t Screen Rant