Every modern zombie narrative descends from Romero's 1968 film, which is where the creature stopped being a Haitian folklore figure controlled by a master and became an anonymous reanimated corpse in a crowd, spreading by bite. Z Nation takes that inheritance and plays it as a road series: a cross-country escort of the one person whose blood might be a vaccine. The rules it runs on, the bite that converts, the head as the only reliable target, and the group that fractures from inside, are all Romero's and are treated as given rather than explained.