Vampires may lurk in the shadows, conjuring up blood soaked images that prey on our most primal fears, but zombies are an altogether different creature. There's something about zombies. Zombies arent overly complex. They dont grow extra pubic hair when the full moon shines. They dont turn into bats, or baseballs. They arent wrapped in bandages like an escaped mental patient with an unhealthy knife fixation. They are simply walking corpses. Puss filled, organ dripping, missing limbs and eyes, corpses that walk. Sexy, huh? If you've seen horror flicks or played any kind of survival/horror game, you know that there are primarily two flavors of zombie. (Besides Boo-berry and Shock-a-lot. =P)

There's the slow moving zombie. These guys are actually kinda cool. Like grandma with a bad hip, the slow moving zombies sort of wanders towards you, a dazed look on their faces. Not in any great hurry, they'd happily eat your brains, if only they'd move faster than a Pinto. There's probably a higher risk of you getting hit by lightning than getting eaten by a slow moving zombie. This whole slow moving thing, actually makes them kind of cute, in a sick way. You might see one shambling your way, and think, hey, he's not so bad. Aside from the flesh peeling and brain eating, you two might have been friends. He already knows the Texas Two Step, hell, and he's probably lonely, etc. But before inviting a slow moving zombie to your junior prom, just remember, he would definitely take the opportunity to turn you and your friends into cherry snowcones.

The fast moving zombie has two things going against him right away. First, well...he's a zombie. Second, he has a nonstop urge to constantly run the New York Marathon. I dont know what kind of disease it is that both turns you into a disease ridden, brain eating corpse, and gives you an uncontrollable urge to work on your cardio, but I dont want it. These guys are majorly annoying, because they want to eat you and they have the energy to pull it off. Anyone else think that's odd? In movies, you see fat, out of shape guys getting gnawed on in one scene, and in the next, they're still fat and out of shape, but now they run like Secretariat. If zombification is the only surefire cure for obesity, then we're in a lot of trouble. Though its at least comical when these guys are running towards you and get hit by an object of some kind. Good times.

Left4Dead introduced gamers to a graveyard full of new kinds of zombies to deal with. There's The Boomer, a sort of pseudo zombie/Dimetradon hybrid that wants to eat your brains and spits acid at you. That's major bad breath right there. I'm not sure how many Prevacid you'd need to soothe that things tummy problems, but I'm guessing a lot. Straight out of your favorite MMO, there's the Tank, a massively hulk like zombie. (Think Kimbo Slice on steroids). My favorite is probably The Witch. She's like those mourners at the cemetary, sobbing for loved ones that have passed on like 300 years ago. "Oh, Washington, you died so young!" The best part about her is you don't have to fight her at all. I do, of course, cause creepy dames who sob at other peoples' funerals are just that. Creepy.

While the vampire seemed to dominate many horror films of the 1990s, the zombie has become the go-to creature of the last few years, with recent remakes of the Romero franchise and films like 28 Days Later, in which zombies attack London following the accidental release of a deadly virus.

Peter Dendle, associate professor of English, at Penn State, suggests this is because the zombie character stands so clearly opposite our multi-tasking culture. "The zombie is slow, mechanically inept, it can barely use tools, it's a Luddite, it's technologically challenged," he explains. "I think that's exactly part of the point, that this technology-saturated generation has fixated on this creature specifically because there's fascination as well as repulsion. There must be something viscerally satisfying about the simplicity of the zombie's cravings and impulses. And we also must find something unacceptable about it, about its general demeanor, how slow it is and how old it looks."

Perhaps what is most frightening about zombies is that unlike most creatures in horror films, the zombie is us.

"There is something about the fact that, unlike space aliens or demons, zombies look like sick people," Dendle acknowledges. "They look like diseased, unhealthy, contagious outsiders. And yet human. So it does hit home in that sense."