Zombie Walk Interviews

This local Minnesota news piece goes farther than other items into the reasons why people participate in these zombie walks. I am extremely curious about this phenomenon, and wish I could undertake more in-depth interviews with a number of these individuals. What a field day for a psychology major in need of a thesis.

Zombie Walk:
Death Imitates Art

Faced with a few dozen young people in ragged clothing, mumbling and shuffling, covered in fake blood, the bystanders had to ask: What ... is this? And why is this?
Well, it’s a zombie walk.

But people pretending to be zombies are not the best conversationalists, so mostly they just moaned and sometimes cried “braaaiiinsss,” as zombies are wont to do. And while this was a good hint for the first question, it doesn’t speak to motivation.

Organizer Ben Hodapp, 20, is a huge fan of zombie movies and learned online about people in other cities dressing as zombies and going for a walk.

“I thought it was pretty hilarious,” he said, and thought it would be fun to do himself.

Getting people to dress up like zombies and stumble around Mankato was easier than one might imagine. He just set up a Facebook and people joined. More than 180 people said they were going and hundreds more listed themselves as “maybes.”

In the end, between 25 and 30 people met in the Wal-Mart parking lot at about 5 p.m. Friday afternoon. By 5:30, they were off.

Jeremy Warden, 17, dressed up as a zombie for Halloween last year and came prepared. He even brought a cup with fake blood, corn starch mixed with food coloring, for his compatriots to throw on their face to simulate a fresh meal of blood. He even burned his jeans with a lighter and smeared the ashes over his limbs.

Each zombie had to decide for him or herself what “type” of zombie they’d play. Talking or moaning? Stumbling or sprinting? Flesh-eating or brains only? “Well, I figure zombies don’t remember how to talk, so I’m just going to groan a lot,” Warden said. Some of them walked for three hours under the hot sun but lacked a zombie’s infinite stamina, so a sprint was out of the question.

Hodapp cut his beard into a Fu Manchu mustache, bought a camouflage vest at a thrift store and went walking as a redneck zombie. Chris Menton donned a gown to be an escaped-from-the-hospital zombie. Amanda Kleist wore a blue-green dress, emulating a prom-night zombie.

Hodapp had planned some rules for the group. No harassing passersby. No scaring children. Don’t walk in the street. Don’t get drunk first. “I’d rather not get it shut down for a stupid reason,” he said.

Still, they were asked to stay as in-character as possible, to “keep somewhat of an illusion of a zombie horde,” Hodapp said. They had a route picked out that stuck to Madison Avenue, but in the end the temptation to wander through the mall was too great, just as it was for the zombies in John Romero’s 1978 zombie classic, Dawn of the Dead.

Onlookers’ reactions differed. One mother shielded her child from the group, while another asked for a photograph with her baby, said Kleist, the prom zombie.

Hodapp says he’d like to make the zombie walk into an annual event. There often isn’t much to do in Mankato for people under 21, he said. Hannah Moon, spattered with blood and clutching a torn-up doll, agreed. It’s fun to “dress down,” the 17-year-old said. “Summer can get boring.”

---

This coverage was written by Dan Lineham, as posted online at Minnesota's "Mankato Free Press" website on July 25, 2009