Let’s be honest, you don’t have to be an avid viewer of The Walking Dead to get an idea of what it’s all about. After all, the title does kind of give it away.
Essentially, it’s a show about a group of people doing their best to survive in a post-apocalyptic zombie-infested world.
With the seventh series of the show now in full swing, many of its fans will have noticed that the word ‘zombie’ is never actually used by any of its un-zombified characters.
According to Robert Kirkham, one of the men that created the comic book of the same name upon which the show is based, the absence of the ‘z’ word is far from coincidence.
“Zombie lore is very popular,” He told US TV host, Conan O’Brien. “We wanted to avoid that notion of, ‘Hey, why doesn’t that character just shoot that zombie in the head because it saw all those movies I saw.
“We wanted to give you a sense that The Walking Dead takes place in a universe where zombie fiction doesn’t exist. No one inside The Walking Dead has seen a movie, so they can’t get the rules from that.
“It felt like having people not use that word would kind of separate it from that [zombie fiction], making it a little bit more clear.”
