Zombies are everywhere - on cinema screens， in books， and even invading our computers and banks. The Oxford English Corpus shows steadily increasing outbreaks of the undead over the last decade. Zombies have been a mainstay of horror films and popular culture since The Night of the Living Dead in 1968， but in the last few years some new forms of zombie have escaped from fiction into reality. First， there were the computers taken over by hackers and used to perform malicious tasks: a virus used to turn PCs into spam zombies. Then came zombie banks, insolvent institutions only kept functioning by government support. This use exploded in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008-9， with twenty times more examples in Corpus data for 2009 than for 2008.