In both its comic book and television incarnations, The Walking Dead asks a fundamental narrative question: Why do the dead come back to life? This is a question posed by other entries in the zombie subgenre too, most notably George Romero’s series of six zombie films (from 1968’s Night of the Living Dead to 2009’s Survival of the Dead), none of which offer an explanation for the epidemic beyond the pseudo-biblical “when there is no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the earth” dialogue from Dawn of the Dead (1978). Some individual zombie movies, however, hint at deeper psychological causes behind the zombie apocalypse; some give us a protagonist whose unconscious desires are so ferocious that they bring back the dead and reshape the world.

To explore this desire-driven category of the subgenre, I begin with a long look at Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963)—not explicitly a zombie film, of course, but a profound influence on George Romero and later chroniclers of zombie catastrophes. Next, I discuss Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004) as a contemporary example of a zombie movie in which unconscious desires drive the carnage and the plot. Then I turn to the subjects of this anthology—Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore, and Charlie Adlard’s The Walking Dead comic book and Frank Darabont’s TV adaptation of The Walking Dead—and argue that both versions are a critique of the desire-driven zombie film. The Birds and Shaun posit reasons, however metaphorical and uncanny, for their apocalypses; The Walking Dead,  …