Braaaiiinnnsss!: From Academics to Zombies

Reclaiming Public Spaces through Performance of the Zombie Walk

113 Reclaiming Public Spaces through Performance of the Zombie Walk Sasha Cocarla With the stench of rotting flesh, the guttural, animalistic groans and the haunting noise of their dragging limbs, zombies have managed to remain a frightful mythical monster in popular culture . Zombies are bodies without emotions, acting on primal instincts alone. They speak to everything that we as humans are not supposed to be. Their predisposition toward brains, flesh, blood and gore creates an uncomfortable fascination for horror fans. However, I would argue that the popularity of zombies in North America is also largely attributable to the fact that their very existence counters many dominant norms that circulate within our society, specifically calling us to question ideas surrounding beautiful bodies, life and death, structured spaces, and mass consumption. In a capitalist economy fuelled by the pathological need for continual growth, it becomes clear that the zombie of modern film and television often acts as a stand-in for the true cultural dupes of mass consumption: us (Dendle 2007, 51). They also symbolize apocalyptic events, when humans and all their daily spaces and practices are slowly taken over by the undead: Reclaiming Public Spaces 114 animated corpses. In popular zombie films, the undead are almost always portrayed in public spaces, walking—or dragging —themselves from place to place, consuming in the most literal of ways (i.e., eating human flesh). As they move slowly through public spaces, invoking fear in the humans around them, they take on a familiar appearance: us, just going through the motions. The commentary here is clear: we, too, can be zombies, even if our hearts are still beating. The popularity of zombies is found not only in the abundance of zombie films created over the years (Night of the Living Dead, Army of Darkness, 28 Days Later and Shaun of the Dead, to name but a few), but also in the ways that zombies have infiltrated our daily lives. The flesh and gore associated with zombies have managed to creep their way into nearly every facet of popular culture—works of fiction and comic books (The Zombie Survival Guide, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, The Walking Dead, Blackest Night); video games (Left 4 Dead, Resident Evil, Dead Rising); board games (Zombies!!!, Last Night on Earth); music (“Walk like a Zombie” by the HorrorPops, Rob Zombie, Zombie Girl); and even zombie pinups and porn (ZombiePinups .com, Porn of the Dead). One of the most interesting examples of zombies in everyday culture is the zombie walk, in which mass groups of the “living dead” congregate in large cities all over North America and Western Europe, and march in the streets. This is a relatively recent phenomenon, with the first documented, non-commercial zombie walk taking place in Toronto, Ontario, in 2003 (Dalgetty 2007). These walks are comprised of individuals, primarily teenagers and young adults, dressed and made up as zombies, walking, shuffling and dragging themselves slowly through urban spaces. As the zombies shuffle and drag themselves along, they cause a spectacle: they halt traffic, stop pedestrians from shopping “normally,” disturb onlookers and raise questions. Because our urban spaces are highly ordered and regulated places, the purposeful disruption of the zombie walk—the performance of the living dead in public areas—affords the opportunity to reclaim urban spaces and disrupt dominant ideologies, even if only momentarily. Very few monsters have managed to embed themselves within the popular imagination as successfully as zombies. Sasha Cocarla 115 Although most monsters originate in folklore, then move to literature and finally enter mainstream cinema, the zombie is one of the few monsters that has moved directly from folklore to the popular imagination (McIntosh 2008, 2). McIntosh notes that our fascination with zombies seems to trace back to Haitian folklore via the ethnographies of ethnobiologist Wade Davis. According to his reports, there are two types of literal zombies: the spirit zombies (zombie jardin) and the type that has made its way into popular culture: the body raised from the dead (zombie corps cadavre) (2). The zombies—or victims—are put into a near-death state by means of a poisonous mixture made in part from the toxins of a blowfish and then later revived through the use of another mixture (3). Through this process , the victims end up losing many of their mental faculties, functioning at a much slower pace than normal, allowing them to be easily controlled by the individual...