Zombie Walk

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A participant in a zombie walk in Calgary.

A zombie walk is an organized public gathering of two or more people who dress up in zombie costumes. Usually taking place in an urban centre, the participants make their way around the city streets and through shopping malls in a somewhat orderly fashion and often limping and gnawing their way towards a local cemetery.

1 Customs
2 History
3 Charity Events
4 See also
5 References
6 External links

[edit] Customs

Promoted primarily through word of mouth and online message boards, zombie walks are an underground activity. During the event participants are encouraged to remain in character as zombies and to communicate only in a manner consistent with zombie behavior. This may include grunting, groaning and slurred, moaning calls for 'brains'. It should be noted that zombie behavior is a hot topic of debate. Purists who draw their definitions from the original Living Dead films will claim that a Zombie would never have the ability to call for 'brains' and furthermore that a zombie needs only living (or freshly killed) flesh for its sustenance and not the brain in particular.

[edit] History

One of the first zombie walks was held in October 2003, in Toronto, Ontario, with 6 participants.^[1] The first widely documented zombie walk occurred in Vancouver, B.C., on August 27, 2005, with over 400 participants. That walk proceeded through the Pacific Centre Mall, travelled on the SkyTrain (referred to for the event as the "SkyBrain") and continued 35 blocks to the Mountainview Cemetery. ^[2]

On August 19, 2006 Vancouver and San Francisco held simultaneous Zombiewalks, with zombie walkers surprising people in an Apple store in San Francisco and a beach in Vancouver.^[3]

At the 2006 Vancouver Zombiewalk, an incident occurred in which a driver attempted to push his way through the crowd of zombies that was headed down Robson St. This resulted in some minor injuries among the zombies, severe damage to the car, a number of ICBC insurance claims, and coverage on CBC Television.^[4]

On Buy Nothing Day, November 25, 2006, in Montreal, a crowd of Zombies invaded the downtown core to take part in a "Shopping Spree of the Dead"[1] and ridicule the compulsive aspect of Christmas shopping.

In the largest zombie walk to date, 894 participants gathered at the Monroeville Mall in Pittsburgh, which served as the set of the classic zombie film Dawn of the Dead, on October 29th, 2006.^[5] In addition to an attempt to enter the Guinness Book of World Records, the event was a benefit for the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank.

Official Monroeville Mall World Record Attempt Photo

Other sites that have had zombie walk events include: Florida State University, Louisiana State University^[6], São Paulo^[7], San Francisco, Burlington, Vermont, The University of Minnesota^[8], Montréal, Calgary^[9], Ottawa^[10], Brisbane^[11], New York City^[12], Baltimore^[13] , Seattle, Porto Alegre^[14], Helsinki ^[15], and Halifax. [2]

[edit] Charity Events

Organizations like Zombie Squad have used zombie walks to raise awareness for community service events being sponsored such as food drive and blood drives. This is normally associated with blood drives for the American Red Cross as a play on the spread of zombie infection through blood contact as popularized in films such as the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead and Geoge A Romero's Land Of The Dead