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The modern zombie was created in 1968 with George Romero classic, 'Night of
the Living Dead'. This movie created the zombie that we know today from
film, video games, and books. It was the first-ever depiction of dead
coming back to life and trying to eat the living in mass hordes. Romero
wasn't inspired by the Haitian voodoo zombie; he was actually inspired by a
vampire novel from the 1950's called, 'I Am Legend'.
Richard Matheson, the author of 'I Am Legend', was attempting to bring the
vampire into the modern age with his novel. What he did was he created a
biological explanation for vampirism. It wasn't based on some curse or
ancient superstition, it was a bacterial infection. Then what he did, is
rather than having vampires be just a single solitary ghoul that lives on
the edge of town and eats a *** every once in a while, he turned
vampires into roving hordes that wanted to suck the blood of every last
living person on the planet. Sounds a lot like zombies, right?
14 years after 'I Am Legend' was published, a young filmmaker in Pittsburgh
wanted to make his first feature film, and he essentially wanted to make 'I
Am Legend'. He couldn't get the rights to it, it had already been turned
into a movie, and he didn't want to get sued. What he said was, "I'm going
to change the creature in 'I Am Legend' just enough so that I can't get
sued." He took out any last vestige of vampirism from them. Rather than
just having them go out at night, they can go out during the day. Rather
than having them be afraid of crosses, holy water, and garlic; get rid of
all that stuff. Then the last thing he did is he said, "Rather than having
my horde want to suck the blood of every last living person, I'm going to
have them eat the whole body, that way nobody can possibly sue me." He
thought he was creating a brand new monster that he called the Flesh
Eaters.
Romero created what he believed was a brand new monster, and the modern
zombie was born.