George Romero didn’t invent zombies. It may be hard to imagine the existence of zombie movies before his 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead, since Romero did invent most of the modern tropes. But the term existed long before Romero came along, and older representations of zombies can be seen in vintage horror movies like Victor Halperin’s 1932 White Zombie and Jacques Tourneur’s 1943 I Walked With a Zombie. That’s the tradition that another master of horror was working in when he made his own contribution to the genre.
