Likewise, the Undead Nightmare add-on for the video game Red Dead Redemption is loaded with zombie critters. Pretty much all the animals John Marston hunts in the regular game have zombie versions. Plus, totally awesome zombie horses you can ride!
In The Rising, by Brian Keene, the zombie virus affects all animals. There is a memorable scene involving a zombie goldfish. Personally, my disbelief buttresses can sustain dead humans coming back to life and being able to identify and feed on living humans, but the idea that people were surviving in a world where mosquitoes and chiggers were also zombies was too silly for me, and I stopped reading.
Bigfoot War 2 features zombie bigfoots (bigfeet?)
Zombies!!! The boardgame has zombie dogs (at leats in an expansion)
Brian
A half zombie dog (or rather half of a zombie dog). The atrocity that was Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis featured zombie rats. The 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake featured zombie dogs, but that was dropped from the final script. I’ve always wondered if chimpanzees or gorillas reanimated in the universes of Romero’s Living Dead films, or World War Z, or The Walking Dead.
I think zombie animals are fine in a setting where zombification cannot follow an exponential curve. If zombification requires the attention of a necromancer or only occurs in certain unhallowed places, I have no problem with someone raising a man’s weight in zombie dogs instead of a human zombie. I would have a problem with a setting where a zombie dog can kill another dog and now you’ve got two zombie dogs - it would feel too much like the author is cheating to get the result they want.
And going back 300 years we have the legend of Tailrings, the zombie cat created by one of the Salem witches. So it’s not like zombie animals are new.
Well, lots of animals and some vegetables can become vampires in actual folkloric legend. In Gil’s All Fright Diner (A. Lee Martinez) there is a scene both hysterical and terrifying involving zombie cows and a passing reference to a flock of vampire turkeys earlier causing problems. I would definitely buy a horror novel in which both those concepts are fully fleshed out.
Points for remembering, but it’s actually Sue. /nitpick
I actually came in to mention the Game of Thrones ones, as they’re the creepiest, IMO.
There’s a children’s book by David Macaulay called Baaa, which is not quite the same thing as zombies, but always makes me think about it - it’s a kiddie version of Soylent Green featuring a quickly-evolving set of sheep in a post-human world.
I would like to make a film called Zombie Wombats. I figure Syfy would love it.
Dead Alive has a rat monkey whose bite turns people into zombies, and one person into a giant rat monkey. Not sure if it is supposed to itself be considered a zombie.
There was some debate this season of Walking Dead whether or not a certain cow was zombified.
It’s not quite the same as a zombie, but since vampire hamsters have been mentioned, I’ll mention the vampire dog in the Forever Knight series.
In the Anita Blake series it’s mentioned that before she learned to control her powers the protagonist would accidentally raise animal (and human) zombies, and occasionally be followed around by them.
Googling on the subject of zombie animals, I find that Diablo III has zombie dogs.
Bah; serves me right for relying on memory.
Apocalypse Cow by Michael Logan is just out in the UK. It was joint winner of the first Terry Pratchett Prize.
The strap line is ‘forget the cud, they want blood’
Don’t forget the classic dracolich.*
*technically a wizard’s consciousness inhabiting the animated skeleton of a dragon, but I think it still counts.
Oh, **Tris **reminded me of another set of books - the Abhorsen trilogy by Garth Nix. The protagonists there have power over all sorts of stuff, including death (in a limited fashion), and can re-animate the dead. They are generally treated as more resurrected than zombified, but there is the strong implication that is a choice on their part, rather than a hard-and-fast rule.
In other undead genres, I don’t know any examples, but I would be really surprised if there weren’t any examples of cat mummies in fiction somewhere due to all the real Egyption ones.
There was a zombie cat named “Patches” in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
These are quite wonderful - and I am not usually a zombie fan.
For Romero, it’s humans only that get zombified. Walking Dead appears to be the same (at least the show, dunno about the comics, sometimes they don’t match).
I’d like to see a zombie try to eat a gorilla though. I’ve seen a zombie vs a shark, but never that.
I love these kinds of threads where I get to read about fun stuff and then I actually learn something new.
Here I found out about Tailrings, the zombie cat from Salem and the use of the term ‘strap line’ in the UK for I think we here in the US call a ‘tag line’.
So very fun.
Thanks!
Oh and ‘Shark vs. Zombie’?
The shark always wins.
At least in my set of experiments here in my lab deep within the mountains of Eastern TN.
Trust me on this one.
I’m a doctor!