The Walking Dead: My Day at the Montreal Zombie Walk

The Montreal Zombie Walk took place this year on October 19th. This annual event has been happening worldwide since 2005 from Toronto to Paris and even Buenos Aires! The whole point of the zombie walk is to meet up in the middle of the city in your best zombie costume and stay in character as you walk around and get your photo taken by hundreds of photographers.

The Montreal Zombie Walk this year was sponsored by Videotron and had its own make up booth for aspiring zombies. As an avid horror fan, I made my own flesh wounds using liquid latex and tissue paper that I slathered in fake blood for good measure. For the event, I dressed up as a zombie beauty pageant contestant and covered my shoulders with decaying, chewed up flesh and put a bullet wound on my chest. I then paraded myself around downtown Montreal for 40 minutes, getting blinded by the flash of the photographers as I posed for several pictures with mostly older men and hyperactive children!

My zombie walk costume

The most awkward part about the zombie walk is taking the metro to and from downtown. Most people in Montreal are unaware of the event and understandably tend to avoid sitting next to zombies on the metro. I managed to accidentally make a little boy on the metro cry and hide behind his mother. Most kids who went to the zombie walk loved it however, and were in full costume with their parents.

The Montreal Zombie Walk had several special events at the venue. There were zombie dance classes, where you could learn how to pop and lock it! There was also Le Musée du Rock 'n' Roll who brought their truck to the event and plenty of other cool organizations and people that barely noticed because of all of the cool zombie costumes. The thousands of people at the event made a giant rainbow of grey and red that distracted me from most things that day.

The zombie walk is really a showcase of zombie craftsmanship and creativity. Although the huge groups of people attending the event make it extremely overwhelming (to the point where it feels almost like a sort of claustrophobia simulator) the costumes and attitudes of the attendees are breathtaking! Costumes were very elaborate, to the point where some zombies had their own jaws ripped off, had saws embedded into their skulls or even had pieces of their own brains falling onto the side walk! Zombies would burst into the middle of crowds and scream hysterically to scare off photographers.

Apart from the wonderful costumes and entertainment, I was unfortunately disappointed with the Montreal Zombie Walk. I knew that the zombie walk consisted of walking, but the walking part itself was exceedingly long and overcrowded. Some zombies were in character, while others were talking on their cellphones. The crowd didn't seem to have any particular goal either. There weren't any humans for us to eat or chase after, and we didn't know what our destination was. We were essentially a group of costumed people walking around aimlessly for an hour!

The Montreal Zombie Walk is an event for people of all ages. People even dressed their dogs up as zombies to celebrate the event. In spite of the fact that walking is a bit of a dull way to spend your afternoon, the costumes at the event were fantastic and are making me look forward to next Halloween.

The pictures in this article were taken by the talented Yu Chen Hou.

--DJ Patricia hosts FunkShui! every Sunday from 2 to 3 pm.