Living Dead =/= Zombie

[BillTheButcher]

It's an interesting question why almost everyone seems to think living dead necessarily means zombie. Arguably, a lot of zombies aren't even necessarily living corpses at all, but merely live people infected by a virus or (as a friend's story posited) by nanobots. Also, the original Haitian zombies were very, very different from what most people think when they hear "zombie'. The mindless zombie slave of Haiti originated the term, and by that standard none of the "living dead" are zombies at all. At the same time one can make stories about living dead which are emphatically not zombie stories. Mummy stories, for example, or Frankenstein's Monster style stories, or a story I once wrote where a man is murdered, unable to move, speak etc - in fact genuinely dead - but quite aware of what is happening to him. Is or is that not a living dead story? I had another story published on HPOTD ("Windfall") where the undead and preserved corpse of a WWII Japanese aviator killed people who came to the crash site of his bomber. I got complaints that it wasn't a zombie story, though it was filed under "Living Dead". I still maintain I am right and everyone else is wrong.

[brer]

I tend to use the terms interchangably. While a literal zombie is alive, and by definition, the living dead are dead, I often apply the term zombie to the living dead. True zombies are not really covered much in fiction anymore. The have been supplanted by the living dead since at least the fifties. I feel that if you are using the living dead as a plot device, than the story is a living dead story. There are exceptions. The example of the still aware dead man that cannot move is one of them. It could easily be filed under living dead, but would likely fit in under general horror better depending on the rest of the story. The story of the bomber pilot? I feel living dead was the property classification.

[blind2d]

Indeed. 'Zombies' were originally hypnotized people, or... GAWHAFHELkafkIEIOO!! Sorry about that, my brain just died. I think I need to stop posting here...

[Philly_SWAT]

I think that bringing back the beloved and often missed Vinn diagram could be helpful here... Where "A" is all zombies and "B" is the living dead. So a member of the living dead would in fact be a zombie, but just because you are a zombie doesn't mean that you are necesarily a member of the living dead.

[MoonSylver]

[BillTheButcher]

I think my point was that this is completely untrue.