The zombie traces back to Haitian Vodou folklore, where it first meant a corpse stripped of its will and made to labor. Through film and games it hardened into the image of a swarming, flesh-eating dead thing, and in tabletop role-playing it became the slow but tireless low-tier undead.
Because death here is not a stop, it shares a register with our world’s dread of the thing that should have ended but does not.