Zombies: An Introduction

I hate zombies.  I really do.  I used to love zombies and zombie media, but then you ruined it for me.  All of you.  The "zombie fans".   Maybe that seems unfair, and I'm willing to be reasoned with, I am.  Until such time as a really convincing argument is made, however, I'm going to lay blame.
Now I may hate zombies but they became very popular for some reason about 10 years ago (or more, I can't really tell) and suddenly everybody was making zombie films, zombie comics, zombie t-shirts, zombie television shows, and anything else that the marketing department could slap zombie on.  I saw zombie defense pepper spray.  How does that work?
Would a zombie care one whit about tearing up?  They're dead.  And what made it "zombie" pepper spray?  It had an atomic green plastic case and a picture of a zombie on it.
Zombie paintball targets.  Really.  Because as everyone knows once a zombie sees that it's been marked, it quietly lies down and goes back to sleep.
BOLLOCKS!
Yet, people seem(ed) to like them, so they are/were everywhere.  The biggest problem with such a glut of the market is a decline in quality.  Once something is determined to be hot property the money people rush to push out as much of it as possible to grab all the dollars they can.  Happened with pirates.  Happens regularly with vampires.  Happened with zombies.  So much stuff.  An embarrassment of riches (more like an embarrassment of shit, really) for the zombie fan.  Also I noticed suddenly EVERYBODY HAD A ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE PLAN.  Yeah, well I had one when I was 12, so there.
So I asked myself, "why do people like zombie stuff so much?"
I think it is because you are all sick little puppies who want to smash skulls without any moral or legal repercussions and like the idea of a post-apocalyptic world where you have the freedom to loot, pillage, not bathe without an excuse, and, of course, don't have to pay your student loans.
Actually that last bit doesn't sound so bad.
HEY, MR. ROOK WILDER, AREN'T YOU A HUGE POST-APOC MAD MAX TYPE FAN?
Yes.  Are you suggesting those two things are linked?
Well, maybe they are a little bit.
So, Zombies.  What are they?
Here's where we get all technical.  Zombies are people that have been given a special poison by a bokor or houngan that makes them appear to be dead.  They are buried and then the bokor digs them up after capturing a portion of their soul in a receptacle, like a jar.  The bokor can command the person because a portion of their consciousness is in them, but another portion of their soul is trapped in the jar.  This be bad juju, man.
To put it in more realistic terms, a person that has been poisoned, given a form of brain damage, and revived, but is culturally dead, and so is neither alive nor dead, fit only to work as a slave in a field.
That's a zombie.
And that's pretty damn cool, but it's very few films that treat with that subject.  No, what people want is a corpse that has been brought a semblance of life via some mechanism, be it a virus (which is just bollocks), or magic (why not, it's made up anyway), or an alien parasite, to name a few.  The bodies are expected to be in various stages of decay and somehow transmit the zombie state to people they so much as lick.  That's what you all want.  Don't lie.
So like or not, this Halloween season I'm going to be Johnny-come-too-lately and talk about zombies, even if it makes me physically ill to do so.