photo essay

The Zombies of Toronto

Bryce Peake
E
very 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 the
sidewalk. 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 for
the 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-fiction
became 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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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 producing and embodying
the 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 processes
of 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 aliens
and/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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