Eat Me: The Growing Popularity of Zombies |
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| Written by Tobin Dalrymple |
| Sunday, 01 June 2008 19:00 |
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Beneath the stone archway of the Centre Block of the Canadian Parliament buildings, three officers are rapidly losing control. In their neon vests and navy jackets, they are locking arms and screaming into walkie-talkies, trying to pacify the terrifying mob of 300 blood-soaked zombies surrounding them. “I need a corporal down here ASAP!” yells a mustachioed cop into his radio, spittle flying into the cold autumn air. The zombies are moaning, coughing and grabbing the air like old drunks. And they — with scoops of brain trawling down their chins, open wounds writhing with maggots on their necks —want in. Witch-like screeching thunders from the gaggle, relentlessly. More and more zombies either push toward the giant archway or wrestle on the grass below. At precisely 5 p.m., the clock tower strikes and the crowd explodes into a battlefield howl — angry, courageous, felt in the gut like a passing freight train. One tourist wearing a white cap walks by, holding his daughter’s hand, and he is laughing. A group of three other tourists, squat ladies in yellow and black raincoats, approaches from the eternal flame. “Excuse me? Can you take… our… pic.. ture… please…?” one woman asks, receiving an approving grunt in response. The lady’s belly rumbles with joy as she places her arm around the decomposing beast — she is already rehearsing her newest anecdote for her friends back home: “The strangest thing occurred while we were in Ottawa… ” As far north as Yellowknife, you can find kids putting on latex scabs and slapping the pavement, leaving behind a trail of too-syrupy-to-be-real blood. It’s called a Zombie Walk, and if you have not yet been lucky enough to see one, chances are you will soon. Walks are organized through social networks such as Facebook by a group of goths, punks, hipsters, dads and their daughters. Once they dress up like the living dead and assemble, the masque will march, slur and shuffle through city streets and malls, often ending up at a cemetery, or somewhere equally dramatic. Think Yeats’s slouching beast of the apocalypse, then add some fake wounds and tattoos and multiply by 300. The first walk was in Toronto in 2002 with less than a dozen zombies moping about. Since then, the meme has exploded: in almost every major city north of Texas and, increasingly, across Europe, zombie walks happen every October. New walks are planned weekly on zombiewalk.com, and last year a record-breaking group of about 900 zombies gathered in a mall in Pittsburgh. While walks happen only once a year in each city, the zombie is by no means limited in exposure. This zombie stuff is everywhere. There are a number of recent Hollywood blockbusters based on the zombie genre — 28 Weeks Later, The Invasion, and Shaun of the Dead, to name a few. There are comic strips starring the beast and a famous batch of video games, Resident Evil, where, you guessed it, people fight zombies. Originally, the zombie was a victim of enslavement and oppression, not the cool pop-horror icon it is today. In the 1800s, Haitian storytellers used the word “zombi” to describe a brainless labourer under the spell of a Voodoo wizard called a bokor. In the Voodoo stories, a bokor poisons a man to appear dead, digs him up after he’s been buried, wakes him up, then feeds him a cocktail of hallucinogens and narcotics to keep the man’s will to a primal, dumb, uninhibited level.  Today the modern and ubiquitous incarnation of the zombie is the slow-walking man-eater popularized by director George A. Romero in the Living Dead film series. The first of these films was made in the ‘60s and, since then, scores of spin-offs have remade and re-employed the genre. In these cult classics, the zombie is usually a flesh-hungry, re-animated corpse overcome by a virulent infection; the only cure is often decapitation. These films flag a point in time when we can actually see our anxieties taking centre stage in film. Since then, the socio-political landscape has never been so antsy: think Cold War and the great atom bomb scare, AIDS and its Reagan-era depiction as the gay plague, terrorism, Anthrax, chemical warfare, West Nile, Global Warming and Bird Flu: it’s a shaky, infectious world. No wonder our favourite horror creature — promising the apocalypse through its deadly, unstoppable pandemic — seems so familiar. Sigmund Freud would have a lot to say about this. In an essay entitled “Das Unheimlich,” he argued that some concepts eventually take on two contradictory meanings — that which was once welcoming becomes foreboding. This is the uncanny, and it is something Freud believed signals the ever-presence of anxiety in our lives. A knee-jerk, we’re all gonna die-type feeling for the everyday mundane. So, what we hide from others and ourselves ends up seeping its way into our culture, art and language. With zombies, it’s similar. By being drawn to the despicable and deadly, we are celebrating who we really are, deep, dark, down inside. We are welcoming the forbidden, tacitly, in our celebration of these brain eaters. Adding to this familiarity, there are zombie fans who project a sense of zombie veracity. Leading these illusion makers is 84-year-old Hugo Pecos, a round-headed man with a wisp of grey hair and a plum nose. He is the founder of an unofficial branch of the US Government, the Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency. “To me, the appeal of a zombie outbreak is definitely the idea of living in a world where society has broken down,” Hugo tells me in an e-mail. Hugo, it seems, shares my Freudian analysis of the creature, saying, “[T]he zombie taps into some primal dread we have carried with us since the days we lived in caves.” For the Ottawa zombie walk, I meet up with some of the organizers “Zombies are just people at a base level acting on just instinct. That’s cool because it’s like ‘eat, sleep, fuck, kill’ you know?” says Jessamy Stursberg, a college student and avid zombie walker. Applying corn-syrup blood to her chin, she pauses, and bites her lower lip, concentrating. She grabs a few grains of rice and jams them into a wet mound of latex on her neck. “These are going to look like maggots,” she explains, and then she scratches on a layer of dark black eye shadow over her grey-coloured cheeks. Her long dark hair is tangled with hairspray and crushed leaves and a rubber bone pokes out of her torn jeans. She looks awful. “Actually zombies don’t usually have sex in movies,” she corrects herself, returning to the topic. “But, still, they are creatures at the base level.” Jessamy, 24, has helped organize zombie walks in Ottawa for the past two years. During the events, she acts like a director, and pleads with the ghastly masquerade to stay in character by pointing and grunting whenever someone does something un-zombie, like forget to limp or speak. Partly, she does this because she really wants to scare civilians: it destroys the whole event, she says, if half the crew is just strolling with their buddies, chatting. She insists on doing my makeup. She applies a pale, bloodied face, and makes extra sure my lips look white, telling me pale lips are key to looking dead. Then we head down to catch a bus to the meeting spot. At every stop along the 15-minute bus ride, new zombies trickle in, filling the seats and aisles. Cheers erupt as we arrive at a stop downtown and at least 30 ghouls are lined up to board. At the designated starting point, the arboreal front lawn of a big green cemetery, hundreds of the things are waiting already. They stand in stark counterpoint to the daisy-yellow and red-wine leaves plumping the maple bows above their heads — perfect symbolism, I think, for this story: lively dead things. There are zombie dads with their zombie children, clown zombies riding giant giraffe zombies, French zombies, chef zombies and dead bride zombies in sticky red veils. Most are busy with last-minute preparations: gargling fake blood, applying some mud to their faces or rolling in dead leaves for that just-crawled-out-of-the-grave effect. Two more bus loads arrive and — now numbering in the 300 zone —we head out as one grotesquely impressive parade. The players grasp at the windows of the cars driving by. Many end up walking in the middle of the road. Police officers from their cars command on loudspeakers to “stay on the sidewalk.” As Jessamy and her front-runners guffaw in my direction, I realize I’ve barely been stumbling or moaning and – gasp – I have not uttered a single plea for brains. I try to kick myself into gear, but it’s pointless. I feel like I’m missing Eventually, we arrive at Parliament Hill. The sky above is as pale as our faces and promises rain. After some pushing and shoving, it becomes clear the armed security guards will not be letting us in. Since we aren’t that interested in getting arrested we retire to the lawn below. There is no one left to scare and nowhere left to march. The players exit left and right. Time to go home, get out of this makeup, make dinner. There is red syrup dripping down the concrete steps and the mustachioed security guard is now chatting with a young woman dressed like a zombie: “Oh yeah?... so you guys just do this for fun? Well…thanks for coming,” he says, shaking his head as he walks away. He strolls back to his colleagues, a look of astonishment painted on his face. He smiles at the thought of what he will tell his wife back home: The strangest thing happened at work today…
© 2008 Tobin Dalrymple; licensee (Cult)ure Magazine.
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beforehand. There are about 12 college-aged hipsters in a shabby two-bedroom apartment, and everyone is putting on makeup, having drinks and changing into torn up clothing.
out. For these people with me, roaming the streets as some monster appears to be a sublime event. Even in their glossed-over, raving-mad eyes, I can spot a glint of that “in-the-moment” pure experience state, as if they were racecar drivers or Olympians.
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