Can The Walking Dead Zombies Talk?

In the history of the zombie genre, those shuffling meat-munchers have been known to do more than just moan and groan. The likes of "Warm Bodies," "Return of the Living Dead," "Z Nation," and "iZombie" have all seen members of the undead actually get chatty on occasion. But did that particular element ever find its way into "The Walking Dead" at any point during the show's 11-season run?

The small screen adaptation of Robert Kirkman's hellish, post-apocalyptic comic books included some true horrors, many of which were brought about not by the titular terror wandering the world but by the last dregs of humanity trying to avoid them. Admittedly, though, the one thing that stayed consistent was the walkers themselves. Traveling down stairs, alone or in pairs, everyone knew where they stood with the show's undead (which were born from a virus in France and only ever focused on chowing down on anyone else who was still alive). What they didn't do was talk. However, near the end of the series, the zombies began showing signs of intelligence, as the show's creatives began bending the rules they'd played around with for the previous decade.

By the final season of "The Walking Dead," walkers were able to operate doorknobs and climb walls, thereby suggesting that there was, in fact, something going on upstairs after all. That being said, there was one occasion in which viewers were shocked to see what appeared to be walkers actually speaking, only for the series to reveal they were something far more deadly.

Of all the threats that the heroes faced in "The Walking Dead," perhaps the scariest of the bunch may have been the Whisperers. These antagonists made their debut on the show by way of their signature method of stealth: walking among walkers. Season 9, episode 6, "Who Are You Now?" (itself part of one of the better seasons of "The Walking Dead" overall) shows the Whisperers wearing the decaying skin of the undead, allowing them to hide among herds of walkers and, well, whisper to one another while on the hunt for Rosita (Christian Serratos) and Eugene (Josh McDermitt). Led by Samantha Morton's Alpha and later Ryan Hurst's Beta, this haunting lot brought a new wave of terror for the uninitiated, briefly suggesting that the walkers really had gotten scarily smart. 

This nightmarish idea of talking walkers eventually made it return thanks to Beta's mental decline during his final days. Distraught after losing his friend and leader Alpha, Beta's grip on reality begins to slip, leading him to start imagining that actual walkers (and not just his fellow Whisperers) are now talking to him. While the whole thing turned out to be a hallucination, it was still pretty unsettling to see and teased what Kirkman's universe would look like if a rotting, long since dead local turned to our heroes and started chatting. 

Of course, as a handful of "Walking Dead" spin-offs continue to guide us through this world, there may yet come a time when a walker really does have something to say.