This Zombie Moment: Hunting for What Lies Beneath the Undead Zeitgeist

"Zombies are always the monster for fear of something larger than yourself, whether it's the recession, or going on boats without pirates attacking, or countries far, far away plotting our doom. Zombies make sense right now."

Comments (0) By Gendy Alimurung Wednesday, May 13 2009

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Each zombie walk he hosts benefits a charity: animal rescue, or Toys for Tots, or the L.A. Regional Food Bank. People donate canned food, or toys, or cash; let it not be said that the dead don’t care for the living. “Sometimes we get zombie dogs, or zombie babies. Zombies are great because there isn’t one particular zombie. People can identify. There is so much variety. They don’t have special powers, and they’re not supernatural. Plus, I like to think about what would you do if this really happened.” He dabs his forehead, careful not to smudge his gray face paint. “I would probably move to an island.”

Pittsburgh, he tells me, is the zombie-walk capital of the country. (Pittsburgh, by the way, is the same exact place where those doctors at the Safar Center reanimated those dead dogs. Coincidence? I’m just saying.) “They have the biggest walk there at the place where the original Night of the Living Dead was filmed. You know, at the mall? They get thousands at that one. Ours is tiny by comparison. But I just talked to a couple people who flew out from Chicago and Boston to be a part of it. It’s touching.”

Anne Fishbein

Walk, don’t run: Construction worker of the dead, Anthony Dalbis of SoCal Zombiewalk.

Anne Fishbein

Beauty and brains?

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He invited some of his Knott’s Scary Farm coworkers to serve as zombie wranglers today. The wranglers keep people from venturing off the sidewalk into oncoming traffic and otherwise getting out of hand. “Everybody’s sue-happy these days,” Dalbis says. He’s careful to read some of the rules out loud on a megaphone before each walk: “Never, ever touch, bother or ‘scare’ anyone during the walk. Those types of actions can be considered harassment. . You have no idea if the person you try to ‘scare’ is a money-hungry attorney. . The Walk is performance art and you simply must look and walk like a brain-dead zombie (without the actions of actually attacking anyone to eat their brains!).” There are some fairly serious method actors in the bunch, I guess. The disclaimer concludes with the strangely liberating, potentially chaotic and vaguely Marxist statement, “Remember, We Are All One and No One Person is in Charge.”

The zombies are dispersing into the convention center. I see them later on, perusing Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead DVDs at the Troma Entertainment booth, shopping for Vampira T-shirts and Bride ofChucky posters. They drop coins into vending machines, order pizza, argue with their loved ones. They cry that they are tired and want to go home. They can’t wait to come back tomorrow. They stand in line at the restroom and complain about the cost of stuff and otherwise go about their day. The real message of the zombie — and this is disturbing to some, comforting to others — is that death isn’t anything special. It’s just like life, only slower, and with more moaning.