The well-loved zombie apocalypse series "The Walking Dead," which is now on its seventh season, sparked the world's attention and harnessed addiction in their geeks, floaters, roamers, rotters, biters and walkers. With dozens of episodes released thus far, watchers have come to the realization that the show has used various terms for the zombies except the word itself.
In this regard, no one can answer best than Robert Kirman, the series creator himself. Kirkman is known for creating some of the hits in the comic book industry. Some of his works include "Invincible," "Ultimate X-men," "Marvel Zombies" and his ongoing black and white comic book series, "The Walking Dead."
As to why the show featured zombies yet never once called them with the term, Kirkman's interview with Conan O'Brien answers it all.
"Zombie lore is very popular and we wanted to avoid the notion of, hey, why isn't that character just shooting that zombie in the head because of all those movies I saw?" Kirkman said. "We wanted to give you a sense that the walking dead takes place in a universe where zombie fiction doesn't exist. No one has seen a Romero movie so they can't get the rules from that. We felt like having people not use that word would kind of separate and make it more clear," he explained.
Though the interview is not the first occasion where he explained the reason for the said issue, his statements gave a more comprehensive answer to the question. His and showrunner Scott Gimple's idea is successful in setting their work apart from the common zombie films.
According to Kirkman, he still calls "The Walking Dead" a zombie show and he finds it funny that in the script he would find dialogues that go like "the zombies come here" and "the zombies come there." At times he would write a "zombie" dialogue and realize that he needs to correct it immediately. Nonetheless, the comic book writer assured that such are corrected behind the scenes.
"The Walking Dead" season 7 currently airs Sunday nights on AMC.
