But what the living dead lack in speed, they make up for in other qualities.
These examples highlight the positive ways that the living dead can be used to spark interest in other ideas.
Still, there's a real downside to these constant references to the living dead.
Any species that has managed to invent duct tape, Twinkies and smartphones stands a fighting chance against the living dead.
"Night of the Living Dead is a cult classic with an embedded audience who will come to see it repeatedly, " says Bernstein.
In almost all of them, the living dead are introduced in minute one, and by minute 10, the world is a wasteland.
This June National Amusements will roll-out a colorized, digitized 3-D production of Night of the Living Dead at some 500 of its cinemas.
The original title of his directorial debut was Night of the Flesh Eaters, but the distributor made the change to Night of the Living Dead.
Decades after George A Romero scared the life out of cinemagoers with the classic zombie horror Night of the Living Dead (1968), the movie world has been plagued again with shambling corpses.
Because the living dead resonate so strongly with the present cultural moment, it is no surprise that various promoters and policy entrepreneurs have used them as a "hook" for their own causes.
Another is The Night of the Living Dead Pixels, a graphic novel (shown above) that allows you to choose your path, with terminal pages featuring QR codes that trigger videos on your smartphone.
This year's fare of the living dead in cinemas and on TV has included the start of season three of The Walking Dead, films Cockneys Vs Zombies and Resident Evil: Retribution and children's animation ParaNorman.
Why are the living dead taking over our lives, and why have so many other domains of American culture, from architects to academics to departments of the federal government, been so eager to jump on this macabre bandwagon?
As you will know (don't yawn) if you read this column, this economic malaise has been characterised by many weak businesses being put on life support and turned into the living dead, or (to use what is now a cliche, so sorry) zombies.
Characters on stage include Baron Samedi, Voodoo divinity of the dead, and the zombie, a living-dead slave.
In Europe, though, he has been the accepted star, with no one, living or dead, to upstage him.
Any relation to persons living, dead, or Scientological is, of course, entirely coincidental.
The singer has 41 million fans on Facebook and is the most popular reggae star, living or dead, on social networks, according to Starcount.
These include a case of two puppies buried alive by their owner and another in which more than 30 rabbits and guinea pigs were found living among dead animals and slurry in a hutch.
And yet every summer legions of living-dead rock bands from the 1960s and 1970s rise up from their graves and drag their decaying carcasses across the stages of America's arenas, stadiums and county fairs.
Mr. MATTHEW GUTMAN (Reporter, The Jerusalem Post): Israel often does pay to get hostages back, living or dead, and often pays exorbitant prices for it -probably prices that other countries wouldn't pay, in terms of both money and other prisoners.
In such ancient times, few if any humans were living around the Dead Sea.
You can trawl through cinema and find few more beautiful, more unforced, or more fleeting representations of the bourn between the living and the dead.
He had been living as a dead man for years, and without her sudden presence in his suffocating cloister, coaxing and tempting him, he would certainly have died a dead man.
Her novel Beyond Black, about a medium who is tormented by her acquaintances, both the living and the dead, was shortlisted for a Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction.
Surprisingly, the conceit of looking down from heaven works nicely, since Ms Sebold avoids the precious, making Susie's paradise agreeably ordinary, a place where the dead learn to let go of the living while below the living learn to let go of the dead.
"The people who need to be remembered most now, and helped, are the living, not the dead, especially those suffering from post traumatic stress, " she says.
Whether they came to protect the living or avenge the dead, they appear to have been motivated by reports, many of them true, of Christians killing Muslims.
The living traditionally visit their dead relatives in early November, which gives rise to a frenzied cleaning of tombs and headstones throughout the country in the second half of October.
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