Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/10/2011 (5134 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For an event celebrating the dead, the Winnipeg Zombie Walk is a pretty lively event.

The annual walk features a few hundred people dressed as shambling corpses, roaming downtown searching for brains to eat while donating food and money to Winnipeg Harvest.

They are zombies with unbeating hearts of gold, and since they don’t eat anything but humans, they can spare some tins for the bin.

“They don’t need tins, they need brains,” says Jeff Bromley, a member of local rap group Filthy Animals, which served as parade marshal last year and will headline the official Zombie Walk afterparty, Defcon Z, on both floors of the Osborne Village Inn Friday night.

Participants dressed like zombies will gather at Stephen Juba Park Friday beginning at 7 p.m., where they can watch fire dancers and get their photos taken for a donation to Winnipeg Harvest. The walk will begin at 8:30 p.m., moving to The Forks and the Legislative Building before stumbling into Osborne Village.

The live entertainment begins sometime around 10 p.m. with Laika, Zombie Assault, Igor & the Skindiggers and Filthy Animals playing The Zoo and DJs Dial-Up and Dan L. playing music at Ozzy’s. The $10 admission gets people into both floors.

“In a strange, maybe borderline macabre way, it brings people together,” says Bromley of the event. “We need more of that in this world. If you can get that many people downtown having fun, it’s almost like another community. It’s a celebration,” Bromley says.

His group, which includes P-Nutty (Ryan Genaille) and Big Bear (Gerry Sawatzky), led the walk last year and used that footage for a 10-minute short film directed by Ryan Cheale that served as the video for the Filthy Animals song Killing Me.

The 10-minute short got the attention of the editor of Los Angeles-based horror/music/film/comedy magazine Girls and Corpses, who decided the Filthy Animals were worthy of a feature profile for the mag’s next issue, due out later this year.

“It’s a ghetto Thriller. It’s like a short film-music video hybrid.

“It isn’t really us fearing the zombie apocalypse as much as it is the fear we’re not going to get beer anymore,” Bromley says with a laugh.

The walking undead have a long literary and cinematic tradition, but they truly became a pop culture phenomenon following the release of George A. Romero’s 1968 film Night of the Living Dead.

More recently, films like 28 Days Later and Zombieland, video games like Resident Evil and Left 4 Dead and comic-turned-television series The Walking Dead (Season 2 premières on Sunday on AMC) have been at the forefront of the zombie-apocalypse genre, which has also spawned books, board games, card games and the Zombie Walks, which originated in 2001 in California and are now held in cities across North America, England, Australia and Ireland.

“I think people have always been fascinated with death and the other side and not really knowing where we’re going and what’s to become of us when we expire,” Bromley says. “In Dawn of the Dead, George Romero had all the zombies returning to the mall because they have to consume; that was built into them.

“I think people are fascinated with what becomes of us when we’re not alive, and I think people like to see different directors and visionaries show their vision of what the zombies become. In recent years you’ve seen people break traditions with zombies running and that sort of thing, so it’s cool to see how things have evolved.”

Friday’s Zombie Walk is free and open to people of all ages. A zombie code of conduct has been posted online with some rules to follow. You may be “dead,” but the police will be on hand to ensure there is no vandalism (ie., smearing or splattering fake blood on public or private property), no open liquor and no harassing people who are not getting into your ghoul time.

 

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Defcon Z is the official Zombie Walk afterparty, but that isn’t stopping other shows from getting involved Friday, most notably the Zombie Rock event at the Pyramid Cabaret, featuring the Wind-Ups, Rockdoras, Les Sexy and Noble Thiefs.

Admission is $7 for zombies and $10 for the living.

rob.williams@freepress.mb.ca