zombies of toronto

7/27/2019 Zombies of Toronto

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photo essay

The Zombies of Toronto

Bryce Peake

Every October, the dead rise in Ontario.

Thousands of bloodied actors take to

the streets of Toronto to perform their vision

of the impending apocalypse, foreshad-

owed by the signs of increased global vio-

lence. Through the zombie walk, Toronto is

re-imagined in an age of darkness. Human-

ity is plagued by itself: corpses cover thesidewalk. Some lurch slowly toward the

strongholds of civilization; others lie dead

on the ground waiting to be reanimated. On

the day of the zombie walk, post-apocalyp-

tic Dundas Street is known not for its

unique shops and high-end boutiques, but

for its standing pools of blood and morally

vacated, costumed inhabitants.

The earliest recorded zombie walk oc-

curred on June 23, 2001, as a promotion forthe Trash Film Orgy, a midnight film festi-

val in Sacramento, California (http://www.

myspace.com/trashfilmorgy). According to

most zombie walk enthusiasts, however,

Toronto is the origin of the contemporary,

nonpromotional, cultish zombie walk phe-

nomenon, which started in 2003 and con-

tinues annually. From there it spread around

North America, and today it is a global phe-

nomenon occurring in Melbourne, Vancou-

ver, Portland (Oregon), Boston, and many

other larger international cities. The official

Toronto Zombie Walk Website describes

zombie walks as what zombies do best,

besides eating brains: they lurch, shamble,

and drag barely hinged limbs down the

street (www.torontozombiewalk.ca). The

event is loaded with different meanings for

participants; the most pronounced theme,

however, is an implicit and explicit critique

of war and violence.

Many of the participants in these zombie

walks cite the films of George Romero as

the inspiration for the visible genre of the

zombie. Indeed, Romeros 1968 Night of

the Living Dead transformed the American

horror genre. Earlier monsters had been lo-

cated in the past or in a far-off future. Now,

they were us, here and now. Horror quickly

became science-fiction, and science-fictionbecame horror. The Atomic age produced a

new style of monster who reflected Cold

War anxiety. Zombies embodied fear that

communism would conquer North Ameri-

can identity, turning citizens into mindless

hordes. The massacred bodies of the post-

apocalyptic dead reflected terror over anni-

hilation, the all too real possibility of an en-

croaching nuclear holocaust. Today, zombie

cinema has evolved from Warsaw to al-Qaeda. The zombies of 28 Days Later

(2002) and I Am Legend (2007) are no

longer slow and stupid, but fast and strong,

organized in small groups. The zombie mo-

tif remains, yet the monsters have been

Bryce Peake The Zombies of Toronto 65

Zombie walks [are]

what zombies do best, besides

eating brains: they lurch, shamble,

and drag barely hinged limbs

down the street.

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anthropology NOW Volume 2 Number 3 December 201066

transformed in ways that more closely re-

semble terrorist sects and sleeper cells than

the masses we feared we might become.

The zombie walk is an icon of the persist-

ing intimate connection between zombie-

imagery and war-time society. It represents

new meanings for a continuing cultural in-

security about who we are, who the enemy

is, and whether s/he is us. The Cold War

zombie imagery of the past, however, was

characterized by consumption. The cinema

experience allowed the audience to experi-

ence its hidden fears in an imaginary form.

The zombie walk, however, is a participa-

tory event: by producingand embodyingthe things that we know we fear, the zombie

walk represents a cultural critique, or at

very least a reflection of what it means to

live in the war-torn, terrorist infected 21st

century neoliberal state.

Through the Toronto Zombie Walk, par-

ticipants express cultural anxieties over

death and warfare. The immense destructive

imagery of the zombie apocalypse and the

metaphors for fascism and government hos-tility resonate deeply with contemporary

anxieties over terrorism and war in the

world. In light of this, zombie walks serve

an essential social function: to act as a

means for working throughand for some

protestingthe structural conditions of war

and violence that so often serve as the con-

text of zombie cinema. In both the photo-

graphs and quotes from participants and ob-

servers, it is possible to see that the idea of

war underlies many peoples understanding

of the event. For participants and observers

alike, the connection between zombies and

warfare is by no means a stretch of the

imagination. It is through this understanding

that I have tried to answer the two questions

often posed by ill-fated protagonists in zom-

bie cinema: What does it all mean?! and

Why are they here?!

References

Boyer, Paul. 1994. When Time Shall Be No

More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Cul-

ture. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard

University Press.

Diamond, Jared. 2005. Collapse: How Societies

Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Penguin.

Janovich, Mark. 1996. Rational Fears: America

Horror in the 1950s. Manchester, UK: Manches-

ter University Press.

Thucydides. 431 BCE. The History of the Pelo-

ponnesian War. Available at http://classics.mit.

edu/Thucydides/pelopwar.html.

Bryce Peake is a PhD student in anthropology at

the University of Oregon. He received his MA in

Cultural Production from Brandeis University,

which funded this project. His research explores

the ways that media and space reflect and are

used to work through cultural anxieties over

space, time, violence, and memory in North

America and Gibraltar. Peake is the photographer

for all of the zombie photos.



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BBBBBBRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIINNNNNNNNNSSSSSSSSS we moaned as we wretched and writhed

on top of one another, forming a sea of indistinguishable flesh and blood. We quickly became an army of the

living dead, as we aggressively grabbed and pushed anything in our way, the author recalls.

Their eyes became red and inflamed; inside their mouths there was bleeding from the throat and tongue, and the

breath became unnatural and unpleasant.... [T]here were attacks of ineffectual retching, producing violent spasms

(Thucydides 431 BCE, describing sites of the Peloponnesian war in 400 BC).



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As Jared Diamond (2005) has pointed out, pandemics and constant warfare are scourges that have accompanied the rise of

civilization. The zombie walk, reflecting ideas of plague and mass violence, enacts the underside of civilization.

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This would mean something more if we could have mobilized it as a political protest. We could represent those people

pointlessly killed in this f***ing war on terror you guys [the United States] started. That would scare the s**t out of people.

Imagine trapping a politician in the middle of thousands of zombies, [and imagine the politician] trying to crawl out. I

wonder if he would understand the feeling of hopelessness that people in Iraq experience? (Pat, an anti-zombie task force

member, 2008).



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During the Cold War, the brain-eating zombie epitomized anxiety about the loss of

identity, the threats of political subversion, and the potential of mind-altering chemical

weapons. The cinematic zombie became a way for the American people to imagine

the realities of mass death and destruction while in the shadow of the atomic bomb,

without admitting its likeliness. Today, passing newspaper stands with papers that

inevitably addressed the War on Terror, I couldnt help but wonder if we lived under

our own shadow of the bomb, and the zombie walk was our way of engaging with

that anxiety (authors journal, Reflections on the Toronto Zombie Walk, Sunday,

Oct. 19, 2008).

The threats which distinguish

1950s horror do not come from

the past or even from the action

of the lone individual, but [they]

are associated with the processesof social development and

modernization. (Mark Janovich,

1996, p. 2).



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Down to 1945, prophecy interpreters typically envisioned the burning day in naturalistic terms... such as

death by tornado, earthquake, or volcano, or death by supernatural destruction at the hands of space aliensand/or deities. With the coming of the atomic bomb, everything had changed: it seemed that man himself had,

in the throes of war, stumbled upon the means of his own prophesized doom (Paul Boyer 1994, p. 115).



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I think the big inspiration for peoples costumes is the classic zombies of the Romero films. You know, the ones that are

reanimated by some space magnetism from an asteroid (i.e., a natural disaster, whereby a magnetic field re-starts a

corpses heart)? I remember watching that, wondering if the atomic fallout metaphor could be put any clearer (Nick,

a plain zombie, 2008).



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The aftermath of the zombie walk? Well, theres blood and fake limbs left all over the place. All over shop windows, the

sidewalks, park benchesyou name it and it probably has blood on it. Sometimes, people spend the rest of the day sitting

around like theyre corpses, which freaks customers out a lot. If you had no idea that there was a zombie walk, and just

showed up here, youd think there had been a civil war right here on Dundas street (Sarah, Dundas Street shop employee).



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It seems like [zombie movies] are always about the body being f***ed up by science. Now we have I am Legend, where

zombies are the result of some military-made cure for AIDS or something, and the 28 Days-Weeks-Months-Whatever

movies where some dude is bit by a monkey being made into the ideal soldier (Sherry, a zombie bride, 2008). Such

experiments can be viewed as reminiscent of Stalins scientific approaches to chemically enhanced citizen-soldiers and

genetically altered primate militias.


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