The first concept of zombies was quite different from the ones we are familiar with today. They were simply people who had been put under a magical spell which turned them into mindless slaves. This idea began in Africa, but was further developed in the Caribbean islands, most notably in Haiti. The pulp B-movies of the 1950's made frequent use of this kind of zombie.
In 1966, a B-movie called Plague of the Zombies, and introduced the idea of zombies as reanimated corpses. However, as I understand it, aside from the fact that they were dead, they were basically the old "mindless slave" version of zombies.
In 1968, a young aspiring filmmaker named George A. Romero gave us the movie that would change everything: Night of the Living Dead. Although the word "zombie" is never used in the film, the modern concept of zombiehood was born: dead people being reanimated, attacking and eating living humans, who then became zombies themselves.
This wasn't a huge leap from Plague of the Dead, of course. If Romero had seen that movie, he could have simply combined the "reanimated dead" aspect with other preexisting ideas, like vampires who create more vampires by biting people, and - viola! - he would have invented the "Romero zombie".
Is this how it happened? Has Romero ever revealed where he got the idea for his zombies?
Answer
Referring the information from wikipedia.
The idea of zombies came from I Am Legend, George A. Romero wanted to start from the beginning when the whole process of humans turning into zombies started.
"I thought I Am Legend was about revolution. I said if you're going to do something about revolution, you should start at the beginning. I mean, Richard starts his book with one man left; everybody in the world has become a vampire. I said we got to start at the beginning and tweak it up a little bit. I couldn't use vampires because he did, so I wanted something that would be an earth-shaking change. Something that was forever, something that was really at the heart of it. I said, so what if the dead stop staying dead? ...
And the stories are about how people respond or fail to respond to this. That's really all [the zombies] ever represented to me. In Richard's book, in the original I Am Legend, that's what I thought that book was about. There's this global change and there's one guy holding out saying, wait a minute, I'm still a human. He's wrong. Go ahead. Join them. You'll live forever! In a certain sense he's wrong but on the other hand, you've got to respect him for taking that position."
Reference from Night of the Living Dead
The idea of flesh eating and dead people returning back to life came from their (John Russo and George A. Romero) initial draft for their horror movie.
A. Romero under the title Monster Flick, an early screenplay draft concerned the exploits of teenage aliens who visit Earth and befriend human teenagers. A second version of the script featured a young man who runs away from home and discovers rotting human corpses that aliens use for food scattered across a meadow. Russo came up with the concept that they would be the recently dead only, because they could not afford to bring long-dead people out of their graves, or at least "we" thought. He also came up with the idea that they would be "flesh-eaters." Romero decided he liked those two ideas and without them, it would have been labeled a true 'rip-off' of "Richard Matheson's I Am Legend" novel
Reference from Night of the Living Dead
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