The zombie has undergone a transformation in the eyes of many people, influenced greatly by the media of television, movies and video games.  Most modern zombies are corpses of people reanimated by some evil entity or unseen force, and they are hungry for human flesh.  The reason for this is not truly explained, but they are always hungry to kill and devour humans.  Also, most zombies in the modern age are grotesque, hideous beings, grossly misshapen by the reanimation process, and possess extreme strength and sturdiness.  In fact, modern zombies cannot be easily stopped or killed.

In several movies, in order to stop a zombie, you had to strike a killing blow to the head of the beast.  A gun shot or a baseball bat was usually sufficient to accomplish this mission.  One of my favorite movies, “Night of the Living Dead”, showed a zombie as a mindless, hungry monster that would not stop until either it were dead or you were dead.  The only way to stop these zombies was to strike a killing blow to the head, either with a gun shot or something equally devastating.  It only showed the zombie as a slow moving creature, however, and this has changed in more recent depictions of zombies.

The zombies of today are fast, almost animalistic creatures that still have the same head shot weakness that its predecessors had.  They move with speed and agility, and can often be heard growling as they are trying to feed on human flesh.  They are still mindless, unstoppable forces of necromancy, but they are just much faster and more formidable than before.  The most advanced zombies that you are going to see, however, are in the realm of video games.

In video games, zombies are not only fast and imposing, but they are also much more formidable, generally having claws or the ability to carry and use weapons.  The “Doom” series of games shows the zombie as a very formidable foe, some of them carrying rifles and others carrying shotguns.  They also think like the soldiers that they used to be rather than being a mindless juggernaut.  Another game showing the worst of what a zombie could be is “Dead Space”.  In this game, zombies have blades attached to their arms, or they have little beasties inside of them so that once you kill them, you have to kill all of their spawns as well.  The method of killing a zombie has also changed.  In Doom, any well placed shot (or three or four) would take one of these beings down.  In Dead Space, it requires removing limbs to drop them, and then they hit you with the regenerating zombie that no matter how many times you kill it, it just keeps regrowing its limbs and coming after you again.

As you can see, zombies have changed quite a bit from the tales of folklore to the modern age.  From what I can see, the change is not necessarily for the better, either.  In the modern age, they are much faster, more aggressive and deadlier than they were in the days of folklore.