I get such a bizarre sense of satisfaction knowing that every spring zombies wander the streets of downtown Memphis. Yes, sure, I love horror movies and Halloween, but the annual Memphis Zombie Walk is as much performance art as it is homage to Romero or Fulci. I imagine we’ll watch Friday’s march from afar to avoid traumatizing our little miss, but everything you need to know is below, straight from this year’s head of the undead:
This is the third-annual zombie walk in Memphis. Friday, April 24, at 6:30 p.m., we’ll step off in front of the New Daisy on Beale, heading down this route. We offer professional makeup help for people who need a little boost. This year, our artists will be stationed at Handy Park starting at 4:30 p.m. Friday. The line gets pretty long pretty fast, so it’s best to come early. It’s even better to do your own makeup at home and show us how creative you can be (fellow organizer Patrick offers online tutorials at www.hauntedweb.com). Our artists zombify you for free, but tips are appreciated.
Aside from coming already zombified or getting zombified by our artists, you also have the option of placing a duct-tape X on your shirt and positioning yourself somewhere along the route, and the horde will devour you.
The zombie walk is a public art performance spectacle sponsored by a small group of volunteers. It’s not tied to politics or a particular cause or business or charity or anything like that — it’s just a chance for people to get dressed up and come out and have a good time and give the tourists downtown something to talk about. We tend to see a lot of horror-movie enthusiasts come out.
We always try to schedule it to coincide with art trolley tour night, because that helps guarantee that there will be foot traffic along South Main. We always start at Beale Street for the same reason. Crowd reaction is usually just as interesting as the zombies themselves.
The past two years, we’ve had roughly 300 zombies come out to join us. We’re always hoping for bigger crowds, so we’ll see how this year pans out. We do our organizing mostly online, via MySpace and Facebook. We’re online here: http://myspace.com/memphiszombies, and we have a Twitter account at http://twitter.com/memphiszombies.
You can find more images from the inaugural and 2008 zombie walks from theogeo on Flickr, but I warn you: they are not for the faint of heart. Seriously.
An interesting twist this year was the presence of the Shelby Memphis Zombie Response Unit, a local anti-zombie vigilante organization and Doctor Harold Toboggans, a psychiatrist specializing in Zombie Therapy.
They each meet the zombies with differing amounts of success.
See these fine specimens of humanity here:
http://www.myspace.com/smzru
http://brentdiggs.com/blog/memphis-zombies-video-retrospective/