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No. There are several reasons for this, which The_Questioner touched on, but couldn't be bothered to describe in detail (and honestly I can see why).

First, before we can ask "can zombies ever happen" we need to first correct the statement. Zombies aren't an event, they are a thing. So the real question would be, "can a a person for any reason become a zombie" which of course on a large scale would cause a "zombie apocalypse".

There are two "theories" about how zombies can become a reality:

1. reanimated dead bodies. This has loads of issues.

The way the body works is complicated. Bodies coming out of their graves has loads of issues, for one thing, they have no blood (blood is drained from the body by a mortician) and all of their living cells have died; the brain dies entirely after only 10 or so minutes without oxygen, so naturally without blood for years, there is absolutely nothing there that can be "reanimated". The way zombies are depicted, they have motor skills, the ability to see and comprehend visual stimuli, and they are able to reason somewhat- in that they know that the hunger they feel (which in and of itself means their sensory apparatus and nerve system have somehow come back to life) requires brains of living humans, and they also know how to get them. This implies that the Visual Cortex is still functional (which it won't be) and that their eyes (which usually decompose within a year or so) are still usable; even though the body has been drained of blood and therefore there is no oxygen supply to any of the bodies cells to perform the requisite cell respiration, which of course nobody is considering here, because they prefer (with the exception of The_Questioner) to instead illustrate their own ignorances. Also, once you are dead, you're dead. You don't "come back to life". That's utterly retarded. The only way you would come back to life is if you were never dead in the first place (which of course occurs when people think you are dead but you really aren't)

2. a "disease" that makes people act like zombies

This is more plausible, but only in that it isn't entirely falsifiable. However, there are a few problems.

A disease that causes people to want to eat other peoples brains will also need to have the effects of Dementia, in that it destroys parts of the conscious mind. But how would such a disease come to be? And more precisely, it would have to be pretty damn complex to be able to re-engineer peoples brains to want to eat other peoples brains. And it doesn't explain why, in the movies, they seem to also suffer from an advanced case of leprosy. First, bacteria is completely out- bacteria infects, it doesn't reprogram. Viruses work by reprogramming the DNA in a cluster of Cells so that those cells create more viruses. However, what creating a zombie pitulates is that a virus can reprogram not only cells, but it can also reprogram neurons to fire through different sets of axons in order to change the behaviour of the host, and even to disable any form of conscious, or reasonable thought. This is absurd- It changes the virus from a simple, non-sentient being to a sentient being capable of reprogramming something that even we, after years of study, cannot understand fully. I say it would have to be sentient because there will no doubt be any number of complications resulting from having to deal with brains, because they will not all have grown the same way. Much as a solitary mud wasp, upon capturing a grasshopper to lay it's eggs end, will pull it by it's antennae, but if a researcher tears off the antennae and mouth palpi, the wasp goes off and finds another grasshoper, despite being able to pull the grasshopper via it's front legs; the wasp, in this case, is pretty much following a computer program. A computer program cannot know ahead of time what different conditions will result, and the wasps brain is configured for only a small set of eventualities when it captures the grasshopper. And a wasps brain is many millions of times the size of a virus, which is a single cell and therefore can have no organized thought, and therefore can never acheive sentience. Arguing that a virus could reprogram a human brain is like arguing that a barstool could learn to play guitar. It's utterly absurd and defies any reasonable discussion.