Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Zombies (33 page)

He went on to say that even though it’s a game, Humans vs. Zombies can drive people to act just as desperately as they might in a real undead outbreak. Sklover himself once feared he would have to quit the game because he was going out of town and the rules state that you need to be on campus at least once a day. There were only a handful of players remaining, so Sklover set a trap for his human counterparts and fed them to the zombie horde. All’s fair in love, war, and zombies.

The game has been profiled by the Associated Press, the
Washington Post
, the
Boston Globe, ESPN The Magazine
, and a whole lot of college papers. Stephen Colbert even named Humans vs. Zombies the number one threat to America in 2008.

Imagine being trapped in a sealed building packed with zombies. You have a few weapons and supplies, but in the end, you know the raving horde will overwhelm your defenses and you’ll be killed. OK, now imagine doing it for fun. Welcome to Zombie LARP, or live-action role-playing games.

In an abandoned underground NATO bunker in the heart of Germany, zombie enthusiasts come together to play out just that scenario. Five stories underground and in almost complete darkness, they try to survive using only their modified Nerf rifles and their wits. A head shot kills the attacking zombies that approach from all sides. Anything less, and you’re toast.

IT specialist Manuel Kuss believes that the undead are relevant across the cultural landscape because they feel inherently real. That’s why they work so well in movies and video games, and the same holds true in LARP:

In a recent game, a group of players barricaded themselves in a house, and a horde of zombies spent an entire night trying to fight their way in. After two or three hours, one of the survivors inside got so scared she had a panic attack.

Kuss has been participating in LARP for more than a decade, but he says that zombie-themed games are a phenomenon of just the past few years. Until now, live fantasy role playing has been the stuff of
Star Trek
aficionados or Renaissance Fair enthusiasts. The documentary
Darkon
, for example, follows a long-running medieval fantasy gaming club in Baltimore. The film won the Audience Award at the 2006 South by Southwest Film Festival. That was three years before the first zombie LARP was played in Germany. Who knows? Perhaps three
years from now, zombies will be LARPing in your neighborhood.

Zombies have infected all manner of pop-culture conventions for years, from San Diego’s massive international comic-book and geek-culture convention Comic-Con to regional horror and science-fiction gatherings around the world. Often conventions that have nothing directly to do with zombies include the living dead in their programs to drive traffic and spark interest. In 2011, Combat Con, a Las Vegas gathering of medieval fantasy role-playing and western martial arts enthusiasts, featured panels on zombie defense and preparedness. Zombie Klingons have even been spotted shambling through the halls of
Star Trek
conventions.

My favorite infusion of zombies into general pop culture is the Zombie Apocafest. For several years BrickCon, the annual Lego enthusiasts’ convention, included an extensive zombie apocalypse display created entirely from little interlocking bricks and plastic doo-dads. Dubbed the Zombie Apocafest, this mini-cityscape overrun by Lego zombies was built by a horde of dedicated artists. Awards were handed out for best zombie survival vehicle and best zombiefied building.

Though horror conventions across the planet invariably include zombies as a main feature, it wasn’t until 2010 that the first dedicated zombie-culture convention was launched. The annual ZomBcon took place in Seattle in late October and featured some of the biggest names in zombie culture, including George Romero and Max Brooks.

The three-day program offered presentations, workshops,
and unique fan events such as the Prom of the Living Dead, an Evil Dead Wedding, and professional scientists and strategists discussing the real-life possibilities of survival. As ZomBcon producer Ryan Reiter observed:

Zombie walks and games like Humans vs. Zombies are present in almost every city around the world. Zombie video games and movies generate huge interest. It was only right that zombies should finally get their own convention and stop having to piggyback on somebody else’s gig.

ZomBcon returned to Seattle in 2011 with plans to move to different cities and countries in the future.

While the convention did feature non-zombie activities in its first two years, such as screenings of the movies
Fight Club
and
A Clockwork Orange
, as well as special guests from the vampire series
True Blood
, it is the first major convention to commit to giving the starring role in its event to the modern zombie.

Along with zombie walks, zombie proms are current cultural favorites. They’re very similar to the actual prom you remember from high school, but instead of living students in dated prom outfits, they’re attended by zombies in dated prom outfits. It’s cathartic and occasionally beneficial for charities.

In a dual rejection of the conventional romantic requirements of proms and Valentine’s Day traditions, the band Saint Motel’s third annual Zombie Prom was held in Los Angeles on Valentine’s weekend in 2011 at the historic Alexandria Hotel. As with most zombie proms, the evening included a costume
contest and the crowning of the Zombie Prom king and queen. A portion of proceeds from the event was donated to the Brain Research Institute at UCLA. The next weekend the Que Sera club in Long Beach, California, hosted their third annual Sweetheart Massacre Prom featuring zombie bands and a zombie burlesque show starring Miss Fever Blister. Although some zombie proms get more press than others, you can find them across North America. The zombie prom craze was even adapted to the big screen in the 2008 film
Dance of the Dead
, in which the nerds, geeks, and outcasts of a high school save their more popular classmates on prom night by battling invading zombies with garden tools and guitars.

The first all-zombie band to make a splash in the United States was Nashville’s Zombie Bazooka Patrol when the video for their song “Zombie Shake” aired nationally on
The Early Show
in 2007. They also appeared that year in full zombie face paint on Fox’s short-lived reality show
The Next Great American Band.
It was a promising start, but the show crashed and burned, as did the band soon thereafter.

Hailing from Madison, Wisconsin, the Zombeatles have made a name for themselves over the past several years by performing garage-rock parodies of classic Beatles tunes with new zombiefied lyrics. Musician and horror director Rob Zombie chose the group’s video for their song “A Hard Day’s Night of the Living Dead” as one of his top YouTube picks of 2007, and in 2009 the band released their album
Meat the Zombeatles
and companion mockumentary
All You Need Is Brains.
The Zombeatles continue to tour across the U.S.

On the left coast, Zombie Surf Camp in San Diego plays
surf horror punk with their own spin on zombie music and lyrics. With some songs that can be interpreted either plain human or with a zombie bent, such as “What’s Eating You?,” the costumed undead quintet has played everywhere from a local Rotary Club to a Hells Angels rally. When asked if the band’s recent success is due to an uptick in general zombie popularity, member Moon Zoggy says he can’t be sure:

When we play, we put out a lot of energy. I’d like to think that people are responding to that rather than our rotting corpses, but realistically, I have to assume that it’s a factor that mostly seems to work in our favor.

And finally, Dead Man’s Bones is an indie rock band led by acclaimed film actor Ryan Gosling. The band has collaborated extensively with the Los Angeles–based Silverlake Conservatory of Music Children’s Choir, started by musician Flea of Red Hot Chili Peppers fame. Although not strictly a zombie band, Dead Man’s Bones does explore macabre themes in their music, and their song “My Body’s a Zombie for You” was the winner of the 2009 Zombie Research Society Award for excellence in zombie culture.

Zombie Strippers
is a 2008 trashy, straight-to-video movie starring porn star Jenna Jameson as, you guessed it, a stripper who turns into a zombie and eats all of the patrons at her club. She even inexplicably does a naked dance routine as an undead flesh eater. So if you’re into that sort of thing, you might want to check it out. The movie received a bit of attention when it was released for no other reason than it starred a naked Jenna Jameson.

What you may not know is that there are actual zombie strippers dancing at actual clubs across the United States and in other countries. Classed up a bit, they are normally called zombie burlesque shows. A perfect example is the Bada Bing Babes of Jacksonville, Florida. On March 28, 2011, this burlesque troupe painted their scantily clad bodies like zombies and danced the night away. The audience even got in on the action with the help of a professional makeup artist who zombiefied anyone who walked through the door.

For those who like their zombies a little more hard-core, the 2006 film
Porn of the Dead
features zombie-on-zombie sex. I don’t understand the appeal, but apparently some find it more titillating to watch zombies than humans. Fans of the film hope its “artistic merits” shine through, but I don’t think they’re talking about the creative makeup job or the dialogue.

In 2009, the Zombie Research Society posted a pie chart that breaks down the difference between human sporting interests and zombie sporting interests. In zombie survival terms I’m not sure how helpful it will be, but it does illustrate an important fact: zombies have almost no hobbies other than eating you. While humans enjoy baseball, basketball, badminton, car racing, pole vaulting, and so forth, zombies apparently enjoy only three sports: competitive eating, shotgun dodging, and a bit of golf. The golf is a stretch if you ask me, but you get the point.

But it turns out that if you’re human and dressed up as a zombie, playing sports can be fun. The catch is that you also have to move like a zombie, which makes some sports less viable than others. Alternatively, you could stay human and
practice interacting with zombies in a sporting atmosphere. The two most prominent zombie sports so far, zombie kickball and zombie shooting, demonstrate either option.

Human kickball is a game consisting of two teams, three bases, one home plate, and a big red ball. Played like baseball, the object is to score more runs than the opposing team. Zombie kickball is similar to human kickball except that the undead participants shamble from base to base in no particular hurry. The outfielders shamble too. The game kicked off in Portland, Maine, in 2006 with an annual charity match between opposing zombie teams. It’s a loosely organized but well-attended community event with enthusiastic players representing all walks of life, including local politicians, pillars of the community, artists, and social misfits, along with zombie fanatics and athletes just looking for a cool kickball game.

Zombie shoots involve live human players shooting life-size zombie replica targets as a kind of fun-meets-pandemic-self-defense-practice. In October 2008, the Langhorne Rod and Gun Club in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, hosted a moving zombie shoot featuring mobile targets on pulleys stationed around a walking course. The event was so packed and got such word of mouth in gun circles that they had to limit the 2009 entries and handle accommodations for out-of-towners traveling from afar. In July 2011, firearms manufacturer DPMS Panther Arms in St. Cloud, Minnesota, hosted their fourth annual Outbreak Omega, an all-day zombie shoot featuring several hundred competitors vying for prizes. The event has grown every year and seems poised to become one of the country’s premier zombie shoots.

There is no end to the zombie products available these days. I’ve seen zombie-repellent spray, zombie-proof underwear, zombie energy drinks, zombie beef jerky, zombie eyeball candy, zombie necklaces, zombie garden gnomes, zombie artwork, zombie weapons of all sizes and shapes, and even Russian zombie nesting dolls. But vegan zombie brain cupcake soap wins the award for the strangest product I’ve encountered in recent years. Why are there gooey green brains in a cupcake? Why are they cola scented? I have no idea, but like everything else zombie related, it works!

So surf the Web, visit your local zombie products retailer, join fellow enthusiasts, and enjoy all things zombie as long as you can, because when the real zombies arrive you won’t have time anymore to practice your zombie kickball, attend those zombie conventions, or rearrange your zombie garden gnomes in the front yard.