The first modern zombie film never actually used the word zombie
In Haitian folklore a zombie is not a hungry monster but a corpse enslaved by a sorcerer. The flesh-eating version came from George A. Romero's 1968 Night of the Living Dead, whose script called its creatures ghouls. Fans and critics supplied the famous label afterwards.
The English word was first recorded in the 18th century, and dictionaries trace it to Bantu languages. The Oxford English Dictionary points to Kimbundu nzumbi, a ghost or spirit that torments the living, arriving via French and a French Creole, with Kongo terms as possible influences. In rural Haitian tradition, a bokor, a sorcerer, revives the dead by necromancy and keeps the body as a will-less personal slave. The bokor stands opposed to the houngan and mambo, the priest and priestess of formal voodoo.
Haiti also knows a bodiless zombie, the zombie astral, a fragment of a human soul. A bokor may capture one to boost his power or seal it in a decorated bottle and sell it to bring a client luck, healing or business success. Since God is expected to reclaim the soul in the end, this kind of zombie is only temporary. Western audiences met the voodoo zombie largely through W. B. Seabrook's 1929 book The Magic Island, which told a supposedly true story of zombies labouring on a sugar plantation.
Romero drew partly on Richard Matheson's 1954 novel I Am Legend. He wrote ghoul, a flesh-eating demon from Arabic folklore, in his original scripts, but used zombie throughout the script for his 1978 sequel Dawn of the Dead. By his account, critics, especially the French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, did much to attach the term to his creatures. The Return of the Living Dead in 1985 introduced the idea that zombies crave brains.
Video games spread the monster further. Resident Evil and The House of the Dead became hits in the mid-1990s, followed by Asian films like Bio Zombie and then Western ones such as Shaun of the Dead in 2004, and the zombie apocalypse became a genre of its own. From the late 2000s the undead softened into friends and love interests, as in Warm Bodies or the series iZombie, often read as stand-ins for marginalised groups seeking equality.
Source: Zombie
