Guest Post: When is a zombie not a zombie? by Seth Patrick You must have noticed it. In zombie movies, the word ‘zombie’ is often treated like a swear word. In Sean of the Dead, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost joke about not using the Z-word; in World War Z, the military use the term ‘Zack’ instead. In The Walking Dead too, the Z-word is avoided, calling them ‘Walkers’. The intention, according to series producer Robert Kirkman, was that the world of The Walking Dead is like our own except that nobody ever came up with the concept of zombies – at least not in the George Romero sense. It’s a hard thing to pull off without it just seeming like the characters have really not been paying attention all their lives. This whole idea even has its own entry in TVTropes: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NotUsingTheZWord In the French TV series The Returned (my novelisation has just been released, plug plug), people living in a remote Alpine town are...