• Starz Inside: Zombiemania, 10-11 p.m. Tuesday, Starz

I was concerned last year when Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy began ripping one another's steaming entrails out in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a rewrite of Jane Austen's classic novel. I was downright alarmed when the American cinema embraced the sensuality of rotting ambulatory corpses in Zombie Strippers. And I began marking off the days until the Apocalypse after reading the public taunt a friend left her brother while playing last spring's ubiquitous zombie-combat game on Facebook: ``I sucked out your brains and spit them to the floor, you zombie dog!''

Still, after watching the berserkly funny documentary Starz Inside: Zombiemania, I've concluded I didn't know the half of it. Patrons of the fine arts are paying artists to paint their portraits as zombies. ``A head wound. A complete side of their face gone. Deluged with maggots and flies and stuff. Or, you know, pustules,'' says one zombie artist, ticking off the customized features available.

The more communally minded assemble for zombie walks, lurching parades through city streets in full corpse makeup. Though good manners remain important even when your eyeballs dangle outside their sockets: ``No brain eating,'' warns one zombie etiquette maven. ``When you start eating brains on your zombie walks, you've gone too far.''

And zombie self-defense lectures, at which experts answer questions about the preferred weapon for decapitating a member of the walking dead who doesn't understand the word no, or even arrrrrgh! (The machete, if you must know: ``It's light, it's easy to carry. . . . You don't have to train.'') The leading authority in this burgeoning new field is Max Brooks, author of what he describes as the ``tongue-in-rotted-cheek'' Zombie Survival Guide, though he haughtily insists: ``I don't think there's anything remotely funny about being killed and eaten by zombies.''

Zombies were a staple menace almost from the inception of the horror film, but in movies like 1943's I Walked Like A Zombie, they were merely mindless stooges carrying out the orders of evil overseers. It was not until zombieteur George Romero's 1968 drive-in cheapie Night of the Living Dead (budget: $6,000) that zombies went viral, both literally and figuratively.

Romero's signal contribution to walking-corpse lore was the conceit that the victims of a zombie attack become zombies, turning them into what Brooks calls ``a walking disease'' that multiplies itself exponentially until nobody is safe. Romero also inadvertently married zombies to politics when he cast black actor Duane Jones as his lead.

Jones got the role solely because he would work cheap. But with racial violence wracking America in the wake of Martin Luther King's assassination, a black character decapitating and disemboweling white people by the score -- even white people who were already technically dead -- inevitably assumed epic political proportions.

From there, it was an easy leap to zombie as the universal metaphor for anything from Viet Cong to consumerist drones. ``We didn't recognize how political the film was,'' says a rueful Romero in Zombiemania. ``We just thought it was cool.''

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