BRAINS AND GUTS, that’s what it takes to lurch through a zombie crawl. Last year’s Zombie-O-Rama in downtown San Jose produced a mob of crawling zombies that has been estimated at 1,500. If that number is accurate, this gathering is in the top 10 of zombie mobs nationwide.
Participants in last year’s Zombie-O-Rama acted less like undead demons and more like Santas, in that they collected a significant amount of food for the Second Harvest Food Bank. “Second harvest” seems like a euphemism for devouring humans, but not in this case.
One local businessman who’d rather be anonymous described the carnage. “I work in the SoFA District and was surprised to walk out and see a scene out of Night of the Living Dead on First Street. In front of the cleaners where Market and First split, there were a lot of people in ripped clothes, bandaged and smeared with blood, swinging one leg in front of another jerkily, arms distended. They tended to travel in packs. I guess I hadn’t gotten the memo.”
San Jose copy editor Kelly Preston was on-scene. “What was it like? It was a lot of fun. I wasn’t sure what to expect, and it just totally blew me away,” she recalls. “There were so many people there.”
Preston had a costume assembled a couple of days in advance; not liking sticky stage blood, she decided to go as a gas-masked zombie hunter. She’s repeating the costume this week, only with a half-mask—”The full one is too hot.”
Rob Corbin went to the crawl dressed as a zombified Circuit City employee. “I was coming up the road,” he remembers, “and my wife was chasing a bystander who had been waiting at the crosswalk. He circled back away from her and came around the corner right into me … and I jumped at him. It was fun.”
The Second Annual Zombie-O-Rama in San Jose, which takes place on Aug. 25, aims to repeat the disgusting magic with a free screening of 2009’s Zombieland, a zombie fashion show and a monster pub crawl throughout downtown.
Events staged by the Cacophony Societies in San Francisco and L.A. may have anticipated this kind of mass costumed event; in the early 1990s, the S.F. Cacophony society organized a mob of unruly Santas to invade Union Square during the height of the shopping season.
As for zombies themselves, it is claimed that Sacramento originated this kind of mayhem in 2001. Over the last decade, cities from Melbourne to Philadelphia have seen gangs of walking dead organized for fun or charity.
There have been impromptu flashmobs of zombs haunting smaller city entertainment districts and bars. There have also been well-organized events, from the annual Zombi-Com in Fort Meyers, Fla., where a half-ton of food and 33 units of blood were collected, to the even larger Zombie-Com in New York City.
Clearly, more than just an urge to congregate is at work here. Zombies make a useful metaphor for what’s happening in society, like their horror-movie brothers in symbology, the ever-popular vampires.
Just as the vampires suck the lifeblood from the middle class—Wall Street bankers, for instance—or from the earth itself—like BP—so zombies represent the undead victims left to forage in a ravaged economy on an overheating planet. As I was finishing this article, The New York Times even used “zombie” in a headline to describe the enfeebled mortgage agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which suffer from continuous “bleeding” of resources. Maybe the next zombie crawl should be around the Federal Reserve building.
Dead and Loving It
Spokeszombie for the San Jose Zombie-O-Rama is writer and cartoonist Jon Hastings, whose makeup for last year’s Halloween party at Slave Labor Graphics downtown made him the poster boy for this year’s San Jose zombie jamboree.
Hastings’ work includes the comics Smith, Brown, Jones Alien Accountants and the children’s book Tarabella Smoot and the Unsung Monsters; his upcoming book Murmur, in collaboration with J.D. Arnold, is a four-year-long project he describes as “Finding Nemo done by Stephen King.”
But what use, you ask, is a QV for someone already dead?
As “Zomb Hastings,” Jon accompanies wife and co-spokeszombie Terry to the crawl. She, a UC–Santa Cruz theater arts major, helped him create his unique look of peeling latex, and protruding false skull made out of a chunk of yogurt container—”plus I sacrificed one of my beloved Hawaiian shirts.”
Hastings’ love affair with zombies occurred after experiencing a double bill of Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead. “I was not a big horror fan, but after I saw those two I was up at 3am kicking back doors to see if there were zombies behind them. This year, he proposes to be “a run-over businessman zombie”:
“I got a nice business suit, shredded it, and ran the car over it.”
Dan Vado, owner of the comic and fine-art publishing shop Slave Labor Graphics, is de facto organizer of this year’s San Jose Zombie-O-Rama. Last year, he had noted the package of free downtown movies at the Starlite Cinemas and wondered if they might be able to show something that had a little more guts to it.
“They showed The Shining one year, so obviously they weren’t worried about content,” Vado says from his South First Street office. Being dead, the crowd last year was peaceful.
“I didn’t hear about any incidents when they were wandering around,” Vado says. “The cops seemed bored and amused for the whole thing. Zombies were taking pictures of themselves with the police. It wasn’t your club crowd; there was no alcohol on sale. It was a much more family event than I envisioned.”
Among the improvements promised for this year’s Zombie-O-Rama is more organization to avoid any incidents: last year, zombies crossing intersections too slowly resulted in anonymous hate mail for Vado. “Why anonymous? Did he think I was going to sic the undead on him?”
Preston comments, “There’s this photo online of this person who is really very zombied out, and she’s holding a baby. So naturally everyone is going ‘bad parenting!’ I saw that baby, and it was laughing and having a blast—it was all in fun. My friend Lee brought her son, 10-to-11-years old at the time, and he went to the free makeup thing at Slave Labor Graphics earlier that day. I mean, you go downtown and you see 1,000 zombies—what kid is not going to be all over that?”
The San Jose Downtown Association’s estimate of 1,500 undead revelers makes the cavalcade of zombies one of the nation’s largest. “The estimation seems a tad generous to me,” Vado says. But it was a wild success compared to what had been expected: maybe a few hundred at best.
“Even if we don’t do as well as last year, we won’t consider it a great failure. When you get to a point when you’re building an event, these things go in plateaus, and our beginning point was a high water mark. This is something that could be massive and huge eventually.”
Vado has a few tips for the budding zombie maker: “Use liquid latex as a base. If you don’t have a good base, you’ll just look sunburned instead of dead. Some plant life as garnish is another tip. Don’t pick the flowers downtown! Your clothes make a statement. If you don’t get some good ripped thrift-shop clothes, you’re just going to look like a dude wearing makeup. You want to go 100 percent all the way.
“Be uniquely you. Don’t be the other guy’s zombie. If you’re a baseball fan, get a jersey. If you’re a dead Deadhead, wear what Jerry would wear if he came up from 6 feet under. Be funny. You’ll be seeing people whose costume is the culmination of weeks of work. The guy I remember from last year was someone who had a giant nail through his head, and he writhed next to a lamppost like he’d been hammered into it.”
Had Vado dressed up? “Ah, I didn’t have time to get gussied up last year—I put on some face makeup and dead leaves and called it a day. We had 200 to 300 people coming in for a makeup that day; a friend of mine who is a professional clown started making up zombies.”
Cathartic Gore
Ms. Monster, azure-skinned horror hostess from Hel, “which is essentially right where San Francisco is, … on another plane of reality clearly,” is a blue-skinned “half-zombie” noted for her live introductions of scary (or scarily bad) cinema at area clubs. When one needs a zombie expert, she’s a think tank unto herself on the subject.
In her opinion, the zombie fad is dead: “So dead in fact that it walks again … and again … and again! How did it go? Monkeys, pirates, zombies? And the zombie thing, it just never went away.”
A veteran of many zombie mobs, Ms. Monster advises joining in whenever possible.
“Zombie walks are a perfect mindless at-dusk excuse to get your gore on. It is cathartic. A release of tensions, and fluids, in a community format. All are welcome, even the unholy. When we stumble together, we stumble as one.
“What makes all these people all over the world embrace zombie walks? What makes people embrace horror? To become one with the walking dead maybe allows us to catch a glimpse of life by confronting our fears. What if you became that which you feared?
“A zombie is a rebirth of sorts. You’ve gone the distance of life, now, you ask: What has death and gore have to offer?”
Hastings believes that the appeal can be summed up in one word: “BRAINNNSSSS!”
Dan Vado’s analysis is simpler: “They’re fun!—if you’re a zombie, you get to put your brain away, you’re not you. The zombie is the working class of the undead. Vampires are needlessly cruel, even in current vampire lore that tries to make them nice.
“By contrast, zombies are working men. Here you are, risen from your dirt nap, and you wander around. Seriously, what are we these days? We’re slaves, waiting for greener times ahead when this recession is over, trudging off to work, doing something we don’t like. I get home from work, and my wife says, ‘You look like a zombie.’ Being a zombie is one of those things where it speaks to experiences in America, more than any other monster.”
Working Dead
Well, go ahead and bite me, I’m sold. One of our local literary successes, former Santa Cruzan S.G. Browne, just sold his book Breathers to Diablo Cody a week before the novel was published, so we can judge that the craze isn’t over yet. Similar literary satires (such as the delicious genre bender Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) have lured fickle hipsters back to the bookstores.
But I do have lingering doubts. Not to dampen the parade, but isn’t it all just a bit morbid? The idea of posing as the rotting dead may be a bit more ashes and sackclothish than it seems.
The bad-ass appeal of zombies partakes of the same loaded quality that’s found in any makeup-covered mob. But the threat of zombies is an ancient one: not just the revenge of the dead, but a mob of them. Poet James Dickey (who created everyone’s favorite terrifying camping experience in Deliverance) said that his book was powerful because it was about the ultimate fear: the fear of being done to death by strangers.
A crowd in masks has been bad news since ancient times. Take the fate of those in Ancient Greece who ran into a group of female Bacchus worshippers called the maenads (who supplied the root for the word “maniac”). If they caught you watching them carouse religiously, they’d do pretty much what a hungry mob of zombs does in movies released every week.
Consider the myth of impious Pentheus, killed by his own Dionysus-crazed mama: “While Pentheus was imploring her, she tore his right arm out; her sister Ino wrenched the other from his trunk. … When Agave [his mom] saw his bleeding limbs, torn, scattered on the ground, she howled, … and when his head was wrenched out from his mangled corpse, she clutched it with her blood-smeared fingers.” All there 2,000 years ago, just waiting for George Romero.
And speaking of violent places, when you go to chronically depressed New Orleans, you can watch lots of the kids doing that horrible Shields and Yarnell paralyzed-robot shtick for quarters.
Seeing them perched on their plastic milk cartons, immobilized and begging silently on Bourbon Street, I always thought of the Gang of Four’s lament in “Paralyzed” for Thatcher’s unemployed: “Paralyzed. My ambitions come to nothing. … I was good at what I did. The crows have come home to roost, and I’m the dupe.”
The vultures would be roosting in the case of the zombs. Here he is, the already-dead shuffler, without the wherewithal to work or to buy, left with no personality—or even face, really. Dead, but possessed only by that unkillable urge to consume.
To which guff one could respond with the only good lines in Twilight: New Moon.
Coming out of a theater, Bella Swan’s pal, Jessica (Anna Kendrick), finally comprehends the critique lurking inside a typical zombie movie: “And, like, is it supposed to be a metaphor for consumerism? Because don’t be so pleased with your own, like, self-reverential cleverness, you know? Like, some girls like to shop.”
Ultimately, donning the mask of the rotter is just another way to rub shoulders, toss back some pots, scope some undead fashionistas, cruise some booths and watch the ever-underrated Woody Harrelson grease some of the blighters at an amusement park in Zombieland.
Why not go out and enjoy yourself? You only live once. Unless … ?
