theology&geometry

Phew. Memphis Zombie Massacre 2010 is in the books. We pulled it off again, and I think it went incredibly well. This time our numbers shot up and my own conservative estimate is about 500 people came out to participate. The number of people who came out to watch the insane processional had to be in the hundreds as well. I talked to a few onlookers, including a couple who’d gotten to Club 152 hours early to secure a spot on the patio, since they’d heard something interesting was going to be going down there. I hope they got a good show from where they were sitting. Our little “Thriller” performance was enticing enough that some bystanders jumped in and joined, which is so awesome it makes me grin. They knew the moves and it looked fantastic. (If you got video of the dancing, please please share it. I don’t have a clip of the whole thing and I am dying to see it from start to finish.)

The MZM team busted ass this year to promote the event. We’ve been trying to get the word out since February or so, using Facebook and Twitter mostly. (MySpace, as much as I would love to be contrarian and defend it, was mostly fucking worthless this year. The first couple of years, it completely drove our promotional attempts. I have no doubt that MySpace is largely responsible for the existence of the Memphis zombie walk, considering it was basically the primary way we spread the word in 2007. In other words, I spammed the hell out of people’s walls until enough people paid attention in 2007 and 2008. Yes, that was me. Sorry. But this year? MySpace was a complete afterthought. For whatever reason, our MS event page was spontaneously deleted some time in April, which really pissed me off. And we have been getting nothing but spam comments and messages for months. Karma, maybe. But these messages aren’t useful like our spam was. Ahem.) I sent PDFs of our handbills and flyers to anyone who wanted to download and distribute them, which I’m betting also helped. I asked some volunteers to get zombified and hand out flyers at MusicFest, but I have no idea if that actually happened (I had to work).

We got a pretty cool break from Edith at Fox13, who asked us to come be on Good Morning Memphis the day of the walk. I got off at midnightish that morning, slept a few hours, and then stumbled down to the studio at 9, only to see that Patrick and Duane, my makeup gurus, were already hard at work gorying up two very generous volunteers. I was nervous as hell (I am not a TV-ready kind of person, which you can tell because I got pretty rambly a couple of times) so Edith very kindly let me take a peek at the questions they were going to ask me so I could at least get a sense of what to talk about. I think it went well, and I’m glad Patrick agreed to be on camera at the last minute so I wouldn’t have to talk about makeup. (Video is here!)

The walk itself went pretty smoothly. Our pre-walk staging in that MATA lot down by the farmer’s market seemed to work just perfectly. Lots of parking space and plenty of green grass to soak up the makeup detritus. Having people hang out down there for a while put some relief on the congested Ernestine & Hazel’s corner.

A couple of hours prior to the start time, Kerry and I roamed around Beale and South Main, putting up directional posters. Until about 5:30, the crowd looked pretty sparse. We both got kinda nervous about that. But then it just exploded between 6 and 6:30. Like she says in her post, it was absolutely teeming. I couldn’t believe it. Before I could actually get up to the front of the horde and hold them up so our makeup crew could clean up and join us, someone had started the crowd in motion. That made the control freak in me twitch a little (but how stupid to think a mass of zombies can really be controlled). But it was hardly a big deal; Duane and Patrick caught up to us in no time and left our staging area beautifully clean. They are professionals.

On my list of things to get for next year: A velvet rope for the start so that we can make sure we’re ready to go before we go. A bullhorn (still don’t have my own). And the phone number of the guy on the Segway. (If you are reading this, please contact me!)

The variety and creativity of the zombies who came out absolutely floored me. It does every year. That’s without question my favorite part of the event. We had the Left4Dead crew running around, Adventure Time zombies, zombie Waldo, zombie Lady Gaga, World War II zombies, shopping zombies, zombie nurses, zombie brides, Disney tourist zombies, Wii injury zombies, sock-hop zombies, a Furby zombie, a Drank zombie, a viking child zombie … I could go on indefinitely.

On the agenda for next year: I think it’s time to evolve into a charity event. Now that we’ve got a pretty solid fan base, it’s time to see if we can use our numbers and our creativity to improve the community. Lots of cities’ zombie walks are food drives, so we’re definitely looking into that possibility. But we’re open to other suggestions as well.

Also on next year’s agenda: Get my ass in shape. I was dragging and my photos and general good time suffered for it. Year one, I was hopping around and running from the back to the front to the back again with relative ease. This year the extra pounds and the lack of endurance had me in a bad place. I’m glad other photographers were out there to pick up my slack. Yeesh.

Anyway, bonus: I got to meet (and have an incredibly awkward-faced photo taken with) Dr. Harold Toboggans, a Memphis institution. Once again he tried valiantly to appeal to the horde’s sense of reason, but I’m not sure he made much of an impact with them. Zombies are, if anything, quite stubborn.

Big big thanks to all the volunteers and everyone who helped get the word out about the walk. Big thanks to everyone who came out to support it, especially my pals who made it out. There is no way this event would continue to grow without everyone’s help, and for that I am quite amazed and grateful.

At the risk of forgetting someone (I am almost positive I will, and if I do, please know that I don’t mean to, but I am scatterbrained and will beat myself up for three years after I realize my mistake), I have to thank some people by name.

Thanks to Patrick French and Duane Craig for their total generosity with their makeup magic. Thanks to Kerry Vaughan for getting and hanging those badass posters. Thanks to Christin Reeder and her crew for orchestrating the “Thriller: dance-off in front of Club 152. Thanks to Shane McDermott for his awesome 2010 flyer art. Thanks to Jamie Sanford for all his fantastic zombie artwork, which adorns our various social media userpics. And thanks to Leah Wells for this cool writeup on Smart City Memphis. Thanks to you and you and you, and you especially.

Ladies and gentlemen, I tip my hat to you all. Let’s do it again.

Related reading and viewing:
Dr. Toboggans
Fertile Ground
Midsouth Makers
Bait and Switch
Video from The Flyer
The Flickr group
Style Sessions
The CA‘s Party Line: Video and story
My Flickr set

I finally made it out to some haunted houses this weekend, starting with Nightshade Manor Sunday night and the two Nightmarez Haunts in Cordova last night.

Nightshade Manor was decent last year, but it seems like it improved this year. They added a hallway lit by strobes where heads and chains and (plastic) barbed wire hang from the ceiling so that you bump into nasty stuff as you make your way through. There was no dude who chased us out with a chainsaw, though. But I guess seeing my friend Shane walk through the entire house in a French maid outfit (complete with ghost-deflecting duster!) made the lack of chainsaw-wielding maniacs worth it.

(Also, as Shane and his girlfriend are vegetarians, I had to wonder how they felt about the room featuring the writhing, headless pig hung from the ceiling, and the fat man walking past us with that pig’s head on his dinner plate. I mean, human gore is one thing, but animals?)

Patrick, who runs the Nightmarez Haunt, was awesome and kind enough to invite me to go through the haunts (there are two of them: a creepy 3-D clown haunt and an insane asylum) and then come backstage to see how everything works behind the scenes. I have to tell you, being behind the heavy black curtain for half an hour seriously made me reconsider my career trajectory. Because those people have so much fun. I know it takes a lot of money and a lot of time, but I imagine it’s got to be worth it when you can scare the crap out of suburban teenagers who think they’re invincible.

The clown haunt is exceedingly weird. It’s blacklit, and there’s neon paint splattered everywhere, including the floor, so that everything you look at looks three-dimensional. I saw some seriously demented clown artwork and masks. And I lumbered my way through one of those revolving mirrored funhouse tunnels without falling down. Score!

The asylum haunt was my favorite of the two (I wouldn’t say I’m afraid of clowns, but I have a low tolerance for them). You walk in and a crazy doctor is operating on a patient, and the doctor starts talking to the group about the patient’s problem (dagger through the skull) and how he’s going to fix it. The patient, of course, is the fellow in the wheelchair in this photo, and he doesn’t have too much to say about his ordeal. So the doctor tells you you’re about to take a tour of his facility or whatever (I don’t remember the exact speech, but you get the idea) and that YOU’LL NEVER MAKE IT OUT ALIVE, BWAHAHAHA! He ushers you into some kind of elevator/transporter, and he closes the door, and it’s pitch black. I was in there with two girls I didn’t know and Patrick, who was hamming it up to make it even scarier. People start beating on the box, and it starts moving all around and it’s quite creepy.

I won’t give away everything, but I will give serious, serious props for two rooms in the haunt: The meatlocker room (elbow your way through bodies hanging in plastic, some of which are twitching) and the open, barely lit room leading to the kitchen.

That was the absolute scariest moment of the whole thing for me. Most of the haunted houses keep people moving along through narrow corridors with occasional wider rooms that display scary things. This held to that convention mostly, but suddenly you’re exiting a hallway into a very dark, very large room with low-hanging moss and vines above you, and absolutely no idea where in the room to go. You can see shadowy movements in the distance, in the corner. And light coming from somewhere. But it’s up to you how you make your way across that room.

Me? I ran. Okay, fast-walked.

It was awesome.

From what I can tell, the big difference between Nightshade and Nightmarez is the acting of the volunteers. Nightshade seems to have more actors (they’re paid), but for the most part, they follow you around, staring at you menacingly from beneath their makeup or masks. It’s creepy. Very much so. But it’s not scary in a jump-out-and-make-you-scream way. Nightmarez relies on actors (volunteers) who will ham it up based on the story. There was the doctor, of course, who was kind of silly and not too threatening, but then there are other demented doctors and nurses running around, interacting with people and asking if they’re next for their appointments. Then you’ve got patients who are up and running and scaring the bejesus out of you when possible.

All the haunts put their proceeds to good causes, which is excellent, but even if they didn’t, I’d recommend everyone go and check them out.

Nightshade Manor: 1301 Heistan Place
Nightmarez Haunt: North Germantown Parkway at Trinity Lane