Trioxin (Return of the Living Dead)

Trioxin (aka 2,4,5-trioxin) is a fictional nerve agent featured in the Return of the Living Dead movies, which turns living beings into zombies.

It is shown as a greenish or whitish vapor, typically stored under pressure in large steel drums. It was originally created by the United States military as an herbicide to destroy marijuana plants; however, the Army was quite surprised when the gas also restored life to cadavers, dismembered body parts, and even dead animals and insects. Moreover, trioxin appears to be toxic, and a single exposure can both kill a person and revive him again.

"Zombies" created by exposure to trioxin retain all of their former intelligence and abilities, including the abilities to speak, run, and reason. Like normal cadavers, they suffer the effects of rigor mortis, which they naturally find extremely painful. They also crave human brain; one zombie explains that they require endorphins found in the brain to stave off the pain of being decomposing cadavers. Trioxin zombies cannot be killed by normal means or by damage to the brain. The only known ways to destroy zombies created by trioxin are by incineration or electrocution.

Though a volatile gas, 2,4,5-trioxin is fairly stable, and can withstand temperatures in the thousands of degrees. Attempts to cremate trioxin-spawned zombies typically release trioxin gas into the air, where it may contaminate rainclouds and fall to the ground. If the contaminated rainwater falls over a cemetery, it can potentially reanimate every corpse interred there.

According to the Return of the Living Dead series, trioxin was the cause of an incident on which the "fiction" movie Night of the Living Dead was based. Since the zombies created by trioxin could not be killed with a shot to the head, unlike the zombies in the film, they were stored in sealed drums for two decades. In Return of the Living Dead III, it is revealed that the U.S. military is deliberately experimenting with trioxin in an effort to create zombie supersoldiers.

2,4,5-trioxin is based in part on Agent Orange, a real-life defoliant used by the Army during the Vietnam War. The two chemicals share a number of similarities: both were used against plants by the United States Army during the 1960s, and both proved to have horrifying side effects. One of the two chemicals used to produce Agent Orange is called 2,4,5-Trichlorophenoxyacetic acid. Agent Orange also contained chemicals known as dioxins.

2,4,5-trioxin should not be mistaken for the real chemical trioxin, which is used by morticians to repair cells and maintain a corpse's contours after postmortem tissue constriction.

Trioxin in music:

Trioxin is a song by death/gore metal band Lord gore

2-4-5 Trioxin is also the name of a seminal Indianapolis, Indiana based punk band.