Nah, it’s all about how you treat it.

Zombies are an idea, and they’re an idea that has had many expressions even before the zombie as we know it came to be, or the word itself was applied to them.

The word is based in vaudun/voodoo and related practices. But the idea of an undead entity with a hunger is timeless and beyond the word. Hell, the word doesn’t even start as something truly undead by the usual concept of undead. It’s more of a soulless slave for lack of a better description.

Zombies as they have shown up in film and fiction since Romero turned them into a genre take from all kinds of myths and legends.

All it takes is the creator of the fiction deciding what, if any, similarities there are to our fictional zombies. That’s it. It can be as much as these direct references to established fiction, or as little as no mention at all.

The walking dead did the “blind” zombie appearance best, imo. That world didn’t have any known culture references to zombies. And, if there had been, someone would have used the word, in universe.

While she catches a lot of heat for good reasons, Laurell K Hamilton is a great example of the middle ground. She makes plenty of references to movie zombies as a point of comparison to the way zombies work in her Anita Blake world. She does it with other movies and different supernatural creatures too. It works very well as a way to let the reader know that the fictional world is similar to ours, but with differences.

But you’re right, the harder you lean into existing zombie fiction, the more likely you are to end up in satire, farce, or other comedy. There’s just such a big history of zombie fiction that if you assume the characters have knowledge of that fiction, you retread that history. It’s hard to do that and stay serious/horror. It could work, but you’d have to go the extra mile of making the transition from fiction history into your fiction smooth. You’d need more exposition at the very least, someone explaining how and why there’s similarities between old fiction and the new fiction that explanation exists in

It’s the same with vampires for sure, and werewolves/therianthropes to a lesser extent. And any fiction writer is going to place their own stamp on any of it, if only by picking which myths and fictional versions they are going to use as a basis for their own work.

I’ve taken a different route in my fiction. Zombies in particular have multiple versions in-universe. Some of those versions are the basis for the in-universe fiction that is simply our real world fiction in that universe, with no changes. Others reflect myths, and there’s vers ions that are all mine. Did the same with vampires too. But the real world fiction is only referenced obliquely because I know that anyone reading my fiction (or playing in my ttrpg world) are aware of those things, and we don’t need to do anything other than stating “on screen” that it’s the variety of undead in my world that led to the fiction in the first place.