One has to wonder if George Romero knew what he was starting.

Back in the year of my birth, 1968, when he took a tiny budget and unknown actors and made a now-classic called "Night of the Living Dead," it was just another low-budget horror movie. However, instead of a rubber-suited alien or slimy monster, the bad guys in this movie were us, only smellier, slower and with an unceasing appetite for (say it with me, now) BRAINNNNSSSS.

It was that touch that unsettled so many watchers. Due to budgetary issues, Romero couldn't spend tons of money on Tom Savini-caliber zombie makeup. So, the zombies mostly looked like your Uncle Carl on a three-day bender, or your Aunt Marge after a four-day Mary Kay convention in Vegas. They looked just enough like the people watching the movie to make us uncomfortable.

Later movies "fixed" that, of course, just like the Star Trek movies "fixed" their Klingons, but when Romero made his first foray no one had yet established just what a movie zombie should look like. Sure, there had been zombies in movies before, but not on this scale and not in quite this identifiable a situation.

Also, the zombies before Romero had been created by human action. Corpses removed from graves were reanimated by use of voodoo or other unearthly powers. In "Night of the Living Dead," the zombies just … were. They clawed their way out of the earth, hungry for human flesh, without anyone calling them.

"Night" blew the doors off zombiedom, but a lot of the films that shambled through should have been quickly dispatched with a well-placed headshot. There were a few good ones, and of course Romero returned to again redefine the genre a decade after his first effort with "Dawn of the Dead," which not only had Mom, Dad and Uncle Carl slavering after our brains, they were doing it at the mall, of all places. That newly minted temple to suburban capitalist fervor was overrun with flesh-feasting zombies in a nearly Marxist overthrow of materialist principles.

What made these early zombies scary wasn't their speed (they shambled) or their physical strength (the arms frequently fell off in battle); it was their numbers and their single-minded hunger. You couldn't scare them off. You couldn't reason with them. You could only kill or be killed.

The genre got a much-needed tweak with "28 Days Later," in which the zombies were no longer content to shamble along, picking off the slow and weak. The zombies in that British-made gorefest ran like Olympic sprinters and jumped like parkour masters.

Zombies have been a source of comedy, too, perhaps never more adroitly than with "Shaun of the Dead," in which the titular character, played by Simon Pegg, gathers a troop of fellow urbanites and barricades himself in a local pub, only to be undone by the mind-blowingly idiotic actions of his best friend. Trek fans will know Pegg as the new engineer Montgomery Scott, but he'll always be Shaun to zombie-film fans.

And now we come upon the work that fueled this entire trip down zombie-memory lane: "Pride, Prejudice and Zombies," by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith. Of course Ms. Austen, not being a zombie herself, actually had no role in the "… and Zombies" portion of the endeavor.

What Grahame-Smith has done is take the staid, proper, stuffy but much-beloved world of "Pride and Prejudice" and added zombies. To go a step further, however, he hasn't simply added "… and then their brains were eaten by zombies" every 10 pages. He's actually fully integrated the living dead into the world of Elizabeth, Mr. Darcy and the rest.

Elizabeth and her sisters are now Shaolin-trained zombie killers of the highest order, and all unmarried women are expected to be trained and ready to give their lives in order that England not be overrun by the "unmentionables," as the zombies are called.

These are Romero-style zombies, shambling and stupid. In fact, they can even be caught with traps baited with cauliflower, which they will mistake for stray brains and begin to feast upon.

The miraculous thing is, even with the zombie mayhem added, every page still reads as if it flowed from the pen of Jane Austen. The language is the same, the social constraints and societal expectations are still just as rage-inducing. There are just zombies in the garden.

If you prefer your zombies in smaller servings, get your hands on an anthology titled "The Living Dead," featuring such luminaries as Stephen King, Poppy Z. Brite, Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman and Harlan Ellison as well as King's son Joe Hill, who gets major bonus points for not using his full name, Joe Hillstrom King, and trading on his dad's fame.

In this anthology, you'll find everything from standard zombie fare to zombie carnivals and much more. The book ends with a zombie-infused version of Thornton Wilder's "Our Town," which will forever ruin the play for you.

For those with a more militaristic bent, I would recommend "World War Z," by Max Brooks. It's currently being made into a movie with a script penned by J. Michael Straczynski of "Babylon 5" fame. It's done in the form of a series of survivor accounts gathered a decade after the zombie war. I've read millions of words of horror novels, and hundreds of short stories and novels dedicated solely to zombies, and none of them gripped me the way this book did.

If you don't want to wait for "World War Z" in movie form, though, there are always plenty of zombie flicks around. The great thing about zombie movies is they're relatively cheap to make. You don't have A-list stars signing up to be zombies, and being the hero or heroine who defeats the zombie hasn't yet gained the career-inflating cachet of, say, going down on the Titanic. Zombies also don't generally need much in the way of special effects beyond gallons and gallons of fake blood and some strategically placed signs of rot and decay.

While most of these newer zombie flicks are forgettable, every once in a while you come across a gem. If you have cable or satellite TV with pay-per-view movies, you just might be lucky enough to have access to "Pontypool," probably the greatest low-budget zombie movie since Romero sent his black-and-white ghouls shambling across a series of back yards in the Pittsburgh suburb of Butler, Pa.

"Pontypool" is set in a small town in Canada, and takes place almost entirely inside a radio station built inside what appears to be an old church. It stars Stephen McHattie, who has been around the edges of sci-fi and mainstream movies for three decades, as a nearly washed-up DJ with a penchant for off-color and off-the-cuff rants. The supporting cast is made up of unknowns, and the movie pulls off that most admirable of feats: It scares the pants off you before you ever see the monsters.

In fact, the appearance of the first zombie is somewhat anticlimactic. What occurs during phone calls that come in to the radio station is far more chilling, because the movie lets our minds fill in the blanks. Sometimes, that can be a lazy cop-out, but here it's a visceral chill that lasts long after the movie's over.

And one of the best things about "Pontypool" is that, since it's straight-to-PPV here in the U.S., it's likely you'll be the only one of your horror-geek friends who's seen it the next time you all get together for a Romero revival festival.

Got a question? Comment? Spare bucket of money lying about? Drop me a line, anytime!