The reason The Walking Dead doesn't use the word 'zombie' revealed by creator

Do you ever wonder why in The Walking Dead they call zombies everything BUT 'zombie'? They're walkers, biters, floaters, geeks, lurkers, roamers, rotters—you get the point.

Robert Kirkman is here to explain why.

Kirkman, who is the comic book co-creator and executive producer on the series, explained to Conan O'Brien the real reason why zombies aren't called zombies by any of the characters. Zombies didn't exist in The Walking Dead world before the outbreak.

"Well, zombie lore is very popular. We wanted to avoid that notion of, ‘Hey, why doesn't that character just shooting that zombie in the head because it saw all those movies I saw.' We wanted to kind of give you a sense that The Walking Dead takes place in a universe where zombie fiction doesn't exist," Kirkman said on Conan.

"No one inside The Walking Dead has seen a [George Romero] movie". Romero wrote zombie films like Dawn of the Dead, Night of the Living Dead and The Crazies.

"So they can't get the rules from that. It felt like having people not use that word would kind of separate it from that, make it a little bit more clear," Kirkman said.

However, Kirman isn't against the word zombie personally. "I still call it a zombie show myself," he explained. "In the scripts, it's just the dialogue that we keep it out of."