Who made up zombies?

Answer 1

Zombies come from tales of the Voodoo religion. Practitioners were able to revive dead people to living again. The phenomena is actually a clever use of the toxin of the puffer fish which paralysis people so that they are still living but incapable of movement. Knowing this is it simple to see how it would be possible to make people believe that you could revive a dead person. And from this it is easy to see how the concept of the walking dead evolved a little further to become what we think of zombies today. Warning puffer fish toxin is extremely poisonous and can easily result in death (has many times). Attempting to make a zombie by any means should not be done.

Answer 2

Zombies are generally defined as "living dead."

ZOMBIE: (Zom'be) noun - also zombi, zombies plural

1. An animated corpse that feeds on living human flesh.

2. A voodoo spell that raises the dead.

3. A Voodoo snake god.

4. One who moves or acts in a daze "like a zom-bie." {a word of West African origin}

The idea originated from the voodoo culture in the Carribean, which was used as the theme for novels by H.P. Lovecraft in the 1920's and 1930's. The 1929 book The Magic Island by W.B. Seabrook became the 1932 movie White Zombie, with Bela Lugosi. Some "B" movies reprised the theme in the 1940's and 1950's before the classic George Romero Night of the Living Dead(1968) established the theme of the dead spontaneously attacking the living.

Flesh-eating or brain-eating zombies have proliferated as a theme, including several serious films about bioresearch-induced versions (The Omega Man, 28 Days).

George A. Romero once said; "I like the zombies being us. Zombies are the blue-collar monsters." This is probably one of the most interesting things about zombies: the possibility that once the outbreak occurs, everyone can become a flesh-eating, mindless ghoul, even your favorite aunt.