I was 5 minutes into an article about “Information For First Time Home Owners” (for a few months now my boyfriend and I have been throwing around the idea of retiring the term “renter” and I figured I should start doing my homework), when I read the words escrow, personal principal and other things I didn’t understand and started to sweat. So my compassionate brain went into emergency shut-down and threw itself on autopilot to protect me. I then found some lighter reading and began to pour over the article about ‘How Everything Goes to Hell During a Zombie Apocalypse – The Oatmeal’, and it got me thinking how my family has painstakingly come up with an amazing zombie contingency plan, God forbid these things ever need to be put into motion. One can never be too prepared.
Before I reveal the details of my plan let me first impart upon you a few details about my relationship with zombies: (if you haven’t noticed a pattern here yet, I’m obsessed with lists)
1. My first zombie movie was Return of the Living Dead at a friend’s slumber party. This party was CLEARLY not chaperoned appropriately for such a choice was not wise in dealing with seven very young girls with active imaginations. Why I had to start my life long zombie affair with the crappy sequel of the cult classic, I will never know. (Later in life I would redeem myself over this minor error.) Going into this party as a blissfully ignorant 12 year old, I really had no idea what I was getting myself into. 91 minutes later I was altered completely and permanently scarred for life.
Not once had the thought of someone/thing coming at you to rip apart your skull and devour your brain, crossed my fragile mind. Until that night, the closest thing I knew of zombies was that they were an English rock band that desperately wanted to be like the Beatles. Now I had to worry about my very vulnerable and tasty brain on top of other daily stressors such as going to a new school come fall, a giant hole growing in our ozone that was going to burn up the earth with space gasses and green house effects and how to keep my sister out of my room. I was enough of an over taxed spaz to begin with. Way to add fuel to the fire, just because I insisted on going to the house of a girl my mom didn’t think was a good influence to begin with. Now I can say with 29 years of experience under my belt, my mother was almost always right.
2. I am a reoccurring participant in a local, Cleveland bi-annual charitable Zombie walk. My dear friend, and fellow Zombie aficionado, Sarah, was the one who introduced me to this lovely event. I of course called up my sisters and cousins to tag along since this was right up their alley. They of course were game. Being the go-to researcher and one to not half-ass things, I immediately went on-line to find zombie makeup application tips. And boy oh boy did I find some good ones! Some of the gruesome pictures were so gut churning that I had to read around the pictures by blocking the images with my hand.
They say if you are going to become a zombie, that first and foremost, you need to create a theme. You have to immerse yourself in the role by knowing what kind of zombie you are, i.e., how you were made. Were you the innocent street clothes wearing by-standard that was mauled and infected through the shoulder/face area? Perhaps you were a medical worker that had no choice but to obey the Hippocratic Oath and caught the bio-hazard monkey carrying infectious strand through blood transfusions and being mauled in the shoulder/face area. Could you possibly be the unfortunate person to be caught up in a period of post-apocalyptic nuclear fallout where mutants mauled you in the shoulder/face area? Or were you simply a rotting ticking time-bomb of a flesh eating corpse waiting for the Thriller cue so you could emerge from the ground and maul someone in the shoulder/face area? What zombie strand of zombieness are you working with? Does it slow you down? Do you just drip slowly in a black sludgy puddle of your own remnants? Are you a blood thirsty brain eating rocket with super non-human strength tearing after your prey? (Oh yeah. This is involved.) Regardless, I couldn’t live with myself after acquiring this knowledge if I were to go to the store to purchase a tube of $1 white face paint, slap it on my face and call it day.
Now, my family can be quite competitive, creating a playing field when there is no logical reason to have one. For instance, after sharing the details of professional zombie make up magic, we decided right away that we NEEDED to have the best zombie make up ever! We needed to annihilate all of the other zombies, fake, that would be limping around with us who were paying $5 to have their makeup down by professionals with airbrushes. Cheaters. We needed to win this! Win what? I haven’t a clue. But we had a mission and we are a determined lot. People were going to get beaten up with our amazing skills.
We went with a medical theme, seeing as we were broke and my boyfriend is conveniently a firefighter/paramedic at a local ER. After mixing our makeup, splattering our blood and donning his scrubs (which he wasn’t very pleased about), we were ready to go.
3. I HATE zombies! They scare the living shit out of me. I refuse to watch zombie movies ever since that 5th grade sleep over.
4. We did two other zombie walks. Creating different themes of zombie make upping techniques, we really out did ourselves. I had a near meltdown when I found out that the second zombie walk we were to partake in, also took place on my most beloved holiday of TLAP (Talk Like A Pirate day: September 19th!) I typically try to throw a party and was torn over what was more important, walking around like a limping dead person to raise money for the local food bank or tapping into my pirate ways to serve up meat and cheese boards as we sang sea shanties, called each other scurvy so and so’s and then eventually get bored and play Rock Band? Zombie walks are an ALL day event and I knew I wouldn’t be home in time to throw a TLAP celebration. Makeup prep and application time is involved and can take up to 5 hours (I told you, we don’t mess around). The event itself can last up to 4 hours. Clean up is a bitch and you will most definitely find makeup 3 days after the fact, even though you have scrubbed your body down with wire mesh and acid. So I knew I wouldn’t have enough time to dress up AND throw a piractically themed party. So I did what any smart person would do and combined the events!
On a side note, right after this particular zombie walk, we had to drive further into Lakewood to check out a new truck my cousin was looking to purchase. Imagine seeing "us" come up your driveway when you are some 20 something male expecting some hot country bumpkin. We meekly stood there feeling like idiots. But we were the best zombie/pirates ever so that helped.
5. I have extremely vivid dreams, both good and bad, mostly bad. This is an every night occurrence. Needless to say, when I have zombie related vivid nightmares, I do everything in my power to avoid going to bed for a week afterwards more so for my boyfriend’s sake, for he’s the one who has to listen to me recount the gory subconscious details of him being mauled in the shoulder/face area and then he can’t go back to sleep, but I’m already over it and snoring and drooling away when he has to be up in an hour. There is nothing I can do to prevent them from popping up on a random evening. I’ve been told by various people that I should write them down and sell them to movie makers, or however that works. I could make a killing. No pun intended. But until the day I actually try that, the subject matter that frightens me so will always come to haunt me. They always, come…
5. I have extremely vivid dreams, both good and bad, mostly bad. This is an every night occurrence. Needless to say, when I have zombie related vivid nightmares, I do everything in my power to avoid going to bed for a week afterwards more so for my boyfriend’s sake, for he’s the one who has to listen to me recount the gory subconscious details of him being mauled in the shoulder/face area and then he can’t go back to sleep, but I’m already over it and snoring and drooling away when he has to be up in an hour. There is nothing I can do to prevent them from popping up on a random evening. I’ve been told by various people that I should write them down and sell them to movie makers, or however that works. I could make a killing. No pun intended. But until the day I actually try that, the subject matter that frightens me so will always come to haunt me. They always, come…
6. 18 years later, I watch my 2nd, 3rd and 4th zombie movies, after extensive coaxing, betrayal and taunting.
2nd movie – Night of the Living Dead
I redeemed myself at our first zombie walk by making the acquaintance of S. William Hinzman, better known as Bill Hinzman, better known further as “Cemetery Zombie” from the original 1968 version of Night of the Living Dead. After having met him and seeing he was the sweetest old man, until he started hitting on my one cousin…gross, I knew that I would eventually have to wait until mid-day sun to sit down and watch the original zombie movie.
It wasn’t until several months later that my roommate Jason was home, bored and decided to watch Night of the Living Dead. It was already night time and my plan to watch it at an appropriate chicken shit time was passed us. So I finally succumbed to watching it after he ranted and raved that it was an all-time top 10 cult classic. Thinking that I had already seen this movie, and telling him that I had not, he looked at me with a curiosity like I was some inbred freak show even though I had participated in various zombie walks. I ended up faring well because I was mostly excited that I had met the man who tormented Barbara at the beginning of the movie. And instead of freaking out over the fact he was destroying a vehicle, I comically personalized the experience as if Bill Hinzman was hitting on my poor unsuspecting cousin. I of course had nightmares but the movie was amazing and definitely worth the lack of sleep.
3rd movie - Zombie Land
Jason again told me that I had to see this movie and I would laugh and not be scared, because it was so excellently created. I had to of course watch it, we after all had promoted it at our Piratical Zombie themed 2nd Zombie walk and won free tickets to go see it but I chickened out and didn’t go. Despite being in the comfort of my own home, I was definitely a ball of nerves during the entire viewing, knowing full well that my subconscious was going to have a field day with the images the movie was feeding my head. Woody Harrelson is the shit though, so that helped. Plus a cameo by Bill Murray?! SCORE. Totally worth the night terrors.
4th movie - Shaun of the Dead
I was becoming a zombie movie pro at this point and had planned on eventually viewing Shaun of the Dead on my very own to see if I could actually do it without crapping my pants. My youngest sister was in town and staying at my parents’ house and saved my ass that day! I made the 20 minute drive out to the country, along with my cousin, to have a Friday movie night, Shaun of the Dead being on the bill.
By the time my niece was put down to sleep, it was well past dark outside and I was losing my mind over a stupid fear on TOP of having a zombie movie at the ready. Let me just mention here that I have this ridiculous fear of looking out the windows at my parents’ house in the event that a very ominous black eyed alien was on the other side of the very thin pane of glass staring back at me (this is obviously going to have to be explained in another blog entry so just roll with me here.) So I was a little jazzed up since my apprehension of zombie movies still to this day hasn’t fully receded. But both my cousin and sister assured me that this particular movie was more ridiculous than it was scary. I still didn’t believe them and ended up sitting at the very edge of my Dad’s leather recliner, screaming and flailing my arms around at the TV that certain events were stupid and you shouldn’t just go outside like that, and when random people are standing in your back yard oozing from the mouth that maybe it’s a WONDERFUL idea to run as fast as possible AWAY from them!!! This went on for the duration of the movie and I think it was more entertaining for my sister and cousin to watch me lose my mind over a non-reality based cinematic experience.
By the end of the movie, the 3 of us were excitedly telling each other how events would unfold if we were to have replaced the characters. How we would do everything so much better and would be the ultimate survivors if the zombie army ever descended upon Earth.
Stay tuned for Brains: pt. 2 – The Passarello zombie survival guide
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